jürgen fauth’s muckworld

There will be puns, there will be awards, there will be awesome. Based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson (whose movies I often failed to appreciate in the past) has made a magnificent epic about the price of the precious resources, liquid and otherwise, that we extract from the ground — and from other people. Daniel Day-Lewis is reliably fantastic as Daniel Plainview, a prospector turned wealthy oilman and all-around American monster, but the real stunner here is Paul Dano as his nemesis, the pimply-faced fire-and-brimstone preacher Eli Sunday.

This one’s got “movie of the year” written all over it, and I’m already itching to see it again as soon as possible. We’ll have much more on this before the December 26 release. I drink YOUR milkshake!

UPDATED: My gushing review is now up at About Worldfilm.

There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****

• Karina Longworth found two tacks from the terrific score, and here’s the latest trailer:

Angelina Jolie plays Mariane Pearl in Michael Winterbottom’s docudrama about the kidnapping and murder of her husband, the journalist Daniel Pearl. After United 93 and several other pointless exercises in dramatizing the “War on Terror,” you might ask: why bother? We all know what happened to Daniel Pearl–what’s the use in rehashing the story? Is the agony of a pregnant widow-to-be really worth sitting through, even if it’s portrayed by an A-list movie star?

Fortunately, Michael Winterbottom, the prolific and versatile talent behind The Road to Guantanomo, 9 Songs, and Tristram Shandy, supplies a convincing answer. As journalists, the Pearls believed that open dialogue would lead to better understanding. Unlike United 93, which was devoid of context and took liberties with known facts, A Mighty Heart, based on Mariane Pearl’s book, constantly refers to events before and after, to people’s motivations, to reasons, arguments, and possible explanations. The film is dedicated to the Pearl’s son Adam, and like the child that never met his father, we have much to gain from a better understanding of the complexities of what happened, and why.

In films like In This World and The Road to Guantanomo, Michael Winterbottom has perfected a semi-documentary style of filmmaking that relies on real locations, small crews, and serendipity to achieve an immediacy that’s rarely seen on the screen. A Mighty Heart was shot in Pakistan, and the presence of Angelina Jolie, in a wig and sans make-up, rarely distracts from the sense that we’re watching real events. From the teeming streets of Karachi, where Daniel (Dan Futterman) is last seen taking a cab to the guarded house where Mariane anxiously awaits his return, the texture of the film is full of impressionistic details that we couldn’t have gathered from the news. For some reason I can’t quite explain, I was especially touched by the way Daniel holds the microphone of his hands-free headset up to his mouth when he speaks to his wife.

The film narrates, from Mariane’s perspective, the days after Daniel’s disappearance on the way to a dicey interview on January 23, 2002 until his death is confirmed nearly a month later. The Pearl house quickly turns into the headquarters for the uneasy alliance of Pakistani and American agencies who are conducting a hectic search, along with journalists and editors from the Wall Street Journal. Emails and documents are searched for clues. A whiteboard fills with a tangled web of contacts, fixers, and mysterious sheiks. Pearl’s Indian colleague Asra (Archie Panjabi) is a accused of being an Indian spy. A chef is brought in to keep pregnant Mariane well-fed. Colin Powell announces that negotiating with terrorists is out of the question for the U.S. government. Suspects are taken into custody and interrogated. Mariane gives an interview on CNN but refuses to cry. A Pakistani toddler plays in the yard, his arms hennaed with curly patterns. The movie’s frantic bustle releases into an explosion of grief when Mariane finds out what we already know.

A Mighty Heart opens next Friday.

A Mighty Heart. Michael Winterbottom, 2007. ****

The trailer:

Forget dog-eared: my copy of Cat’s Cradle is a torn-up mess. Still, I took Verylin Klinkenborg’s advice (mentioned earlier) and revisited the book for the first time in decades. It turns out Klinkenborg’s spot on: Vonnegut’s work is so rich with wit and truth, it deserves to be read outside of a dorm room, by people who think they already know. Somehow, he managed to combine willful naiveté, insistence on kindness, and a freewheeling imagination with a no-illusions view of history and human stupidity, all without having the resulting paradox implode on contact. No wonder he is routinely compared to Mark Twain.

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 103, A Medical Opinion on the Effects of a Writers’ Strike:

Young Castle called me “Scoop.” “Good morning, Scoop. What’s new in the word game?”
“I might ask the same of you,” I replied.
“I’m thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until manking finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?”
“Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.”
“Or the college professors.”
“Or the college professors,” I agreed. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”
“I just can’t help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems…”
“And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?” I demanded.
“They’d die more like mad dogs, I think–snarling and snapping at each other and biting their own tails.”
I turned to Castle the elder. “Sir, how does a man die when he’s deprived of the consolations of literature?”
“In one of two ways,” he said, “petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system.”
“Neither one very pleasant, I expect,” I suggested.
“No,” said Castle the elder. “For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!”

Cat’s Cradle. Kurt Vonnegut, 1963. *****

• Cat’s Cradle free PDF ebook
• Cat’s Cradle at VonnegutWeb
• Cat’s Cradle on Wikipedia
• YouTube - A Tribute To Kurt Vonnegut on PBS’ NOW
• The Books of Bokonon

The second time around, Borat isn’t quite as hilariously shocking, but its knotty complexities only grow deeper. When you’re not busy rolling in the aisles, you’ll actually notice that some of Sacha Baron Cohen’s victims hold on to their dignity rather well. Certain jokes are such self-reflexive boomerangs that you have to hear them more than once to figure out exactly who the target is (like the one that goes “You telling me the man who try to put a rubber fist in my anus was a homosexual?“) Others have been quoted in outrage so much that the actual punchline went forgotten: the “Running of the Jews” bit doesn’t actually pay off until the last scene of the movie, where Borat says, “It’s cruel. We Christians now!” while a crucified townsperson gets poked with a pitchfork. Questions about what’s real persist–I’m not sure who said it first, but the line about all movies being documentaries applies.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Larry Charles, 2006. ****

• YouTube pulled it, but Yahoo Video still has Sacha Baron Cohen’s Golden Globe acceptance speech.

Monk double feature! At first glance, The Name of the Rose and Into Great Silence couldn’t be any more different — one is a plotless meditation on stillness and solitude, the other an overstuffed megaproduction that bursts at the seams with narrative twists and gleeful cliches. One movie is about the absence of language, the other one revels in linguistic jokes and a cornucopia of literary allusions high and low. But by approaching their common subject from very different points of view, the two films illuminate (ha!) each other.

All things considered, Jean-Jacques Annaud’s adaptation of Umberto Eco’s bestseller has held up well. Eco’s intellectual games are filtered through Annaud’s lurid lens, by the way of German producer Bernd Eichinger’s taste for the blockbuster: Eco dressed up semiotic theories with the trimmings of popular entertainment, and in Annaud/Eichinger’s hands, the erudition falls by the wayside in favor of freakish brothers (witness Ron Perlman ham it up as hunchback heretic) and forbidden sex.

It speaks for Eco’s talents as storyteller that even when you rid his book of the lengthy debates about medieval scholarship, it’s still a rip roaring good story, overloaded with literary references (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jorge Luis Borges are the most obvious ones), men who speak “all languages and no language” for him to better hide his polylingual puns, and a tightly plotted story that hinges on all the tropes of monkhood: secret libraries, blind fathers, flagellation, mad heretics, ancient secrets, repressed homosexuality, evil inquisitors, damsels burning at the stake. The Name of the Rose is bursting with signifiers, pointing everywhere at once, while Into Great Silence makes a strong effort not to point anywhere at all, to just be here now. Both movies are using the monastic life for their own ulterior motives; I’d argue that this one does it somewhat more successfully. (The interiors of The Name of the Rose were shot at Kloster Eberbach, a few minutes from where I grew up.)

Der Name der Rose. Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1986. ****

• Wikipedia: Middle Ages in Film

Philip Gröning lived in a monk’s cell in the French Alps for six months to make this — you guessed it — very quiet documentary about the hermits’ lives. According to the press notes, the Carthusians are among the world’s most ascetic orders. (They also make the sticky herb liqueur Chartreuse). But you wouldn’t know this from the movie, which barely contains a spoken word at all. There is chanting, there is praying, there are the monks’ daily chores, the chopping of wood, the mending of shoes, the preparation of food. The seasons pass: snow falls, ice melts, spring comes, and the fog lifts off the monastery that lies nestled between stunning peaks. The patient observation lasts for nearly three hours; Gröning’s aim is not to explain and analyze the monks, but to approximate their heightened awareness through contemplative filmmaking.

I’m of two minds about this. Into Great Silence is an exquisitely boring, poetic film that uses the carefully observed day-to-day textures of the monk’s austere existence to lull its audience into a meditative state. But there is something of the imitative fallacy to Gröning’s approach. The outward signs of the monk’s lives are just that — they don’t just wander the hallways and kneel: they read, write, think, and pray. Even if they never open their mouths, their heads are filled with words, words we are not privy to. No matter how long he holds his shots, Gröning can only ever show us the surface, never the insides, of what the monks are living for. The film aims to find some sort of vague “spirituality” in moments of mindfulness, but the Carthusian’s very specific religiosity eludes it.

More soon in a full-length review for About.com. Into Great Silence opens next week at Film Forum. Here’s the trailer and the official site.

Die Große Stille. Philip Gröning, 2005. ***

In this very scary documentary, Christian fundamentalists brainwash their children (”they’re so usable!“) to create God’s army and bring about the end of days. Pastors Becky Fischer and former Presidential advisor Ted Haggard come off as complete creeps; the children are victims of what amounts to abuse. This is well put together, and Air America Host Mike Papantonio adds some much needed perspective & commentary.

Jesus Camp. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006. ****

[tags]documentary, film, 4 stars, religion, creepy, jesus, christianity, fundamentalists, america, politics, heidi ewing, rachel grady, mike papantonio, ted haggard, becky fischer[/tags]

Gael Garcia Bernal and William Hurt in yet another spin on the whole Badlands setup; extremely compelling and twisted. Opening soon.

• Marcy’s review