There Will Be Blood

In "...Blood", Upton Sinclair's socialist agenda has been all but obliterated by Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis. While his 'Oil' was more about the plight of oilfield workers and him using that as a vehicle for pushing his views against capitalism much like the horror faced by the workers in meatpacking industry in Chicago was used in his more famous work 'The Jungle' greatly diluting the impact and seriousness of the work.

Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" is more a character sketch than a social commentary of any sort. There really isn't much in terms of a plot or even a theme. It is mostly about Daniel Dey Lewis's Daniel Plainview and a bit about his troubled relationship with his son H.W. Plainview. There is also Paul Dano (the troubled teen from Little Miss Sunshine) who is another powerful and strange character that tries to achieve some counter-balance to Daniel Plainview and often succeeds. There are some brilliant scenes between these two actors and Dano is certainly up to the task. (Do we have another Johnny Depp in the making?)

Plainview is a self-made oil-man who rises from the filth of the land slowly but surely to build a fortune for himself mostly built on hard work and a harder soul.

Daniel Day Lewis's over the top performance just won him his 2nd best actor nod. Many have called his performance 'brutal' and his character scary and weird. I somehow found the character quite realistic. This is is early 20th century American you are talking about. The civil war has just gotten over and more than half the population can still not vote. It is the birth of American capitalism and like any such natural birth it is messy, difficult and there is, for sure, blood.

No Country For Old Men

We've loved Coen brothers' films since the day we saw our first one (Fargo.) Since then we've seen every one of them and extracted and unusual amount of joy from them. It is hard to imagine a filmmaker that has made some of the most endearing, quirky, funny, macabre and above all brilliant, memorable films of recent times. Only Billy Wilder or Howard Hawks come to mind. I think where the Coen brothers outshine any other filmmaker is their creation of character mythologies. They are masters at creating characters that outlive the movies and really just start living in your head almost forever. H.I. McDunnough from Raising Arizona, Leo and Bernie from Miller's Crossing, Charlie Meadows from Barton Fink, Muncy girl Amy Archer (to name one) from Hudsucker Proxy, almost anyone from Fargo, the unforgettable Jesus, The Dude, Maude and Walter from The Big Lebowski and of course the entire cast of O' Brother Where Art Thou. The more you think about these characters the more you see the spectrum of awesome storytelling skills. You see a deep understanding of human ambition, folly and failure. You just don't see how the Coen brothers can top anything they've done in the past specially when they seem to be losing their grip.

And then comes along Anton Chigurh...
*

So, there was a tremendous anticipation for this film for us. Specially with their last two films (the populist Intolerable Cruelty and the dud The Ladykillers) being such disappointments. Also, this was turning out to be one of those movies that you can never get to. We were finding it hard to find the time, a babysitter and even tickets to watch this film. However, it did happen last weekend finally and man what a ride!

Moss (Josh Brolin), when confronted with a grisly crime scene, finds a lot of money and in what turns out to be rather poor moral and practical choice, decides to keep it for himself. Moss isn't dumb. "They will be coming like I would go after someone who took my 2 million dollars" he says to his wife Carla (Kelly Macdonald) although he is naive. He soon realizes that he may have bit more than he could chew when a gang of Mexicans following the money trail come hunting for him with dogs and guns. However, there is another danger. A complex, psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is also looking for the money and he has some very definite ideas about what needs to be done. He basically propels the film into an edge-of-your-seat thriller until about three-fourths of the film. The rest of the film is heavy on moral commentary that sort of works around the title and is clearly a personal statement by the author (Cormic McCarthy whose novel the film is based on) and the Coens stick very close to the basic narrative of the plot eliminating a few chapters for drama and suspense. Cormic's thoughts are voiced by an aging sheriff Ed (an especially crusty Tommy Lee Jones) who feels 'over-matched' by the younger criminals around him and more importantly what seems like a young crime around him.
*

The film really belongs to Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh. He is easily one of the most scary villains in the history of recent cinema. The Coen brothers are clearly committed to his mythology more than anything else in the film. Many characters (Woody Harrelson for one) seem merely to exist as a means to propagate the legend of Chigurh. Even the somewhat open and confusing ending is cleverly constructed to solidify the myth of Chigurh.

*

"No Country..." is an amazing film because it is singularly entertaining. It is a drama taut, wound tight that unwinds with the slow, frightening uncertainty of the Absurdist thought that the Coen brothers have maintain throughout their long, fantastic career.

3:10 to Yuma

Once in a while we still get to see a grown-up film, a man's movie. A tale that is well-crafted and steady. The plot is kept tense by brilliant performances, dialog and soundtrack. "3:10 to Yuma" starring Russel Crowe, Christian Bale and Ben Foster is a remake of a 1957 film of the same name with some changes and is based on a short story by Elmore Leonard. This is essentially a battle of wits played behind a gun battle; a battle of responsibility and post-war disillusionment with ethics.

Russel Crowe plays Ben Wade, a criminal, who is being escorted to the the train in the title eventually to the prison by Dan Evans played by Christian Bale. Getting Wade to the train is going to difficult because Wade is almost a mythical draw and his posse, led by an extraordinary performance by Ben Foster, wants to free him at any cost. However, Ben is an unusual criminal and he begins to like Dan which makes things even more difficult.

Seems like Russel Crowe often does his best when partnered with another formidable character/actor (Kevin Spacey & Guy Pearce in L.A. Confidential, Al Pacino in The Insider, Denzel Washington in The American Gangster) and this film is essentially a a vehicle that feeds the hostility, the conversation and eventual trust and understanding that develops between Dan and Ben. It is the kind of tale that Michael Mann would present. Criminals and cops are essentially the same people and on any given day it may be hard to tell them apart.

Both Crowe and Bale and brilliant as one would expect them to be.

It borrows the essential motor of the plot from the great High Noon (the race toward the clock) but is actually very different from that earlier film. High Noon is essentially a social film about social responsibility whereas this film is personal and about personal responsibility.

Ratatouille

Ratatouille is another delicious offering from the animation collaboration of Disney and Pixar (Cars, The Incredibles, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters. Inc, A Bug's Life, et al.) The story of a chef rat is presented with flair, care and an amazing attention to detail. Ratatouille has all the elements that have made the films before it enduring. However, it suffers some, but not all, of its flaws. The self-assured, smug rat chef Remy is very true to his pedigree. He is certainly more sophisticated than his ancestors (Nemo, Mambo, Lightening McQueen (cars), Mike(Monsters inc)) but shares a very carefully constructed behavioral pattern that can be described as clinical at best and utterly affected at best. Unfortunately, Hollywood and specially Pixar, seems to have set on a winning formula for these animated films and keeps repeating it with the next set of improbable characters (incredible, cars, monsters, penguins and now a rat chef.) All the characters in the film from the bumbling hero, capricious love interest to the villainous head-chef are so well formed that they really are nothing more than cardboard cutouts.

Everything they say has been refined over and over again until it is exactly as it should be and that predictability dwarfs these films in front of the more original, if quixotic, Japanese exercises such as 'Spirited Away', 'Howl's moving castle' or even European films such as 'Triplets of Bellville.' The last one is actually a stark contrast, brilliant one at that, to the Hollywood mainstream, as it barely has dialog and thrives on an amazing soundtrack and visual splendor that no amount of CGI can really bring to life. They are stories that a grandma would tell a young one to calm them down and put them to bed whereas the Hollywood films are not unlike a crass joke a teenager would tell his new girlfriend trying to make an amorous move.

But Ratatouille has Anton Ego, probably the first true mythical character that the Hollywood machine as ever created. Anton Ego, the food critic, is larger than life but true to it; he is scary but real and he is what really 'saves' Ratatouille from being lost amongst the many before it and surely the many to come after it.

However, given that the animation film making (as against cartoon film making) is really in its infancy as an art form, these films and particularly Ratatouille are a good first step toward maturity but alas it is only a first step. If Hollywood would try to tell a good story not just a beautiful one and not just a contemporary one we might one day actually love these films as much as we enjoy them.

Snow - Orhan Pamuk

I have always been curious about Turkey. Several articles in the New Yorker about the role played by the military that is surprisingly secular and has been since the 1st world war have ignited my curiosity. The military has, on more than one occasion established a secular rule by overthrowing elected governments that seem to relent to the Islamists. The idea of a military doing the "right" thing, as would seem to an outsider, has always been quite fascinating to me. Turkey, in this strangely, sometimes of often forced, secular way has always stuck out in the otherwise oppressing world of mullahs and shieks. Unlike other Islamic countries, Turkey has insisted on modernism, based on the guidelines laid down by the father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It has applied modernism by any means at the state's disposal. The women in Turkey are forbidden by law to wear head-scarves or burqas in public places and universities. (Incidentally, however, the trend seems to have given way, disappointingly for some, to an openly religious society following the general rightist shift in world socio-politics.)

Orhan Pamuk's (who recently won the Nobel prize for literature) "Snow" is the tale of Ka (the protagonist) who has spent several years in Frankfurt, in the season of Kar (aka Snow) goes to the city of Kars (in north-eastern Turkey bordering Russia) to report on the several suicides committed by the "head-scarf girls" and to meet his old lover Ipek in the hope of reviving the old romantic flame.

Snow is not an easy book to read or like. Contrary to its name, it is heavy, not because it is overly philosophical but because it is too less so. It is fluffy and yet leaden: which might also describe some of what Ka sees in Kars. A society torn between fanatical secularism proposed by the State and Islamic radicalism proposed by cultural roots. This is essentially what Mr. Pamuk has been trying to explore all his life. He is the classic immigrant who can see the provincialism of his original homeland and sneer at it but cannot help but reject the modernism of his new home either. It is the classic dilemma that defines immigration in general and brings about the middle-path that ends up changing societies: more to which people migrate than from where they migrate.

Unfortunately for us, Snow is pretentious and repetitive. It's overuse of 'Snow' as a metaphor for pretty much everything (love, distance, beauty, cover-up, joy, sadness, commonness, difference, you name it) is cloying and makes it impossible to plow ahead. It's overuse of the word 'Snow' not just as a metaphor but for itself every other sentence is also jarring. It starts to hurt.

Snow's style is literary with heavy influence from others before who explored the east or mid-east from Western eyes. Dostoevsky and Conrad come to mind immediately (but they do almost all the time) and one could see hints of Prince Mishkin and even glimpses of Raskonikov in Ka. However, as an outside but not necessarily a wild thought, Ka (following the the inclusive pattern of naming his prime characters: Kars - city, Kar -snow, Ka - the hero) might actually be at heart closer to Kafka's K than anyone else. His utter dislocation, albeit fueled by differing cultural views rather than just a general sense of being lost amidst the oppressing social structure, is basically an emotion personified by Joseph K (The Trial, The Castle). While K does not understand the world around him and generally doesn't make an attempt, Ka seems to make too much effort and then seems to give up to easily. He is essentially a coward once-to-often guised as a skeptic.

Snow is full of characters, alas only some of them interesting. Ka's love Ipek is a rather boring character though the final propulsion to the novel and its fulcrum is essentially provided by her indiscretion. In contrast, Kadife, Ipek's younger sister is feisty and far more elegant. However, the real force of the novel is two contrasting philosophies presented by the all-powerful stage actor Sunay Zaim (a shadow of Atatürk's) and the equally charming but enigmatic Blue, a fundamentalist who really is the only force that keeps the pages together. Pamuk never allows them to be face to face and he uses Ka as a sort of interpreter between the two presenting and digesting their ideas without being really touched by any. While Blue is the motor of the book, it is the young Islamist Najib who provides its soul and Pamuk clearly wanting to make a statement kills him early on (this is not a spoiler -- Pamuk tells you this upfront sort of laying down the foundation of his covert pessimism.)

I struggled through the almost 500 page book. I really did. There were many times, specially about half-way through, I saw no reason to move on because I thought I knew what was going to happen. However, Pamuk has some tricks up his sleeves, he pulls the right kind of gargoyle out at the right time and kept me going.

I wasn't utterly disappointed at the end. Books to me are a mirror into another life that I could never have or know about. The fantasy of Snow is the type where the fact that it is is often more important than the fact that it isn't fantastic.