Channelblog

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

After a five year sabbatical, Paul Thomas Anderson returns minus any of his usual ensemble, his rapid editing, the Mamet-like dialogue and relocates to an epic birth of a nation story, intensely focused on a study of an oil prospector, played by Daniel Day Lewis.
In ever so loosely adapting Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! he has remained in California but not so you’d notice. To capture the turn of the century landscape of oil prospecting he went close to Marfa, south-west Texas, where at the very same time his main rivals at the Oscars, the Coens were shooting No Country For Old Men.  At times it feels like it could be adapted from the biblically hewn style of Cormac McCarthy. But this is absolutely a different beast from the Coen’s chase story from hell, and delves deep into a fallen soul and his relationship with his adoptive son.
There’s no edge of the seat tension here, more a stately, reflective visual sense and of course, bestriding it all a performance of such sheer elemental conviction by Daniel Day Lewis you could be almost forgiven for overlooking the complexity of the film overall.
Just as Punch-Drunk Love had a low-key virtuosity, after the full-on excess of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, There Will Be Blood formally at least, reprises its chamber intensity.
Its score by Radiohead guitarist, Johnny Greenwood,  and the cinematography by Robert Elswitt  (who took an Oscar for his efforts) cry out anything but small-scale but the film does its drilling most tellingly as a redefinition of story-telling through the close-up, and dissolves so slow they inhabit another time. Anderson eschews any of the wider socialist critique of Upton Sinclair for an allegorical portrayal where the issue, as in Scorcese’s Color of Money, becomes other than its obvious subject. Only Richard Kelly, and Todd Haynes in American cinema today display close to this ability for skilled dissimulation. It can feel like Adorno said: every time I go to the movies I feel a little bit less intelligent. Thankfully, there are correctives, even though they are sometimes wrongfully received – like Kelly’s Southland Tales. In the case of There Will Be Blood it’s slow, harsh beauty have so much obvious brilliance it seems for many , oddly I think, to have eclipsed his previous work.

There is restraint but ultimately Anderson is too playful a director to resist a joker card. It isn’t so wild as the raining frogs of Magnolia but it’s a curve ball which can’t help but unsettle the viewer – the use of Brahms’ Violin Concerto as the credits roll underlines this strangeness, to an extent folding the drama into itself. You don’t have to worry about a tricksy self-referential Charlie Kaufman-like gambit but it’s sure to stay with you as you leave the film, nagging away.
The grand theatricality of the finish if you look too literally, will leave you underwhelmed; why such a dramatic change of tone, bordering on the absurd?  The long final scene in the mansion of Daniel Planview takes place a good number of years after the story began with him prospecting for silver but finding oil instead and emerging, crawling with a broken leg as though a man come back from hell.  It sets up a menace which the ending refuses to honour, indeed questions its reality. Don't expect laughs but there is a comedy in the rivalry between Plainview and the preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano).  The theological seriousness of Cormac McCarthy (yet to be seen on film) falls under an irreverent gaze.  Part horror villiany, part literary adaptation, part Kubrick homage, part homage to John Huston, this truly maverick creation is more than anything a kind of south of eden story which aims to go past its literary inspiration to a highly nuanced cinema of tainted reflection.   

If this sounds like a disregard for story then I'd refer you back to everything else he's done.  This shouldn't come as any great surprise.  There Will Be Blood is an enigmatic experience - I read that many feel the need to see it again - it pays its debts to 70s film-making but it seeks to hone their influence into a quite original statement.  The realism is overshadowed by an absurd sense of literate horror, an odd blend but mostly compelling.  I found nothing in it like the pay-off of Samuel L. Jackson in Anderson's debut Hard 8, saying, "I know about Atlantic City", or in Boogie Nights, "I like sunsets too, but...sunrises are better" or Magnolia's "And the book says that we may be through with the past but the past ain't through with us."  Still, it's one of the outstanding films of the last ten years.

Charles Maclean

Honeydripper

Honeydripper directed by John Sayles, set in 1950 is the story of a few days in and around the eponymous and fictional blues joint in Harmony, Alabama. The proprietor, veteran bluesman turned club owner Tyrone “Pine Top” Purvis played by Danny Glover is in a whole mess of money trouble. He has Saturday night to make good his litany of debts or lose his club. Fortunately, the cotton harvest is at its height, and the just paid pickers are gonna be thirsty and in need of cutting loose this Saturday night and the soldiers from the local army base will be on leave too.

Tyrone's hopes are pinned on renowned and pioneering electric guitar player Guitar Sam whom Pine Top has booked for Saturday night only and provided he turns up, may just be able to bring in enough money to keep Pine Top in business which is also being lost to the Juke Joint across the way. Aided by his wife Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton) who makes the best fried chicken in town; plain or spicy, his trusty lieutenant, Maceo (Charles S. Dutton) and delightful and very credible newcomer Yaya Dacosta as China Doll, his daughter, he might just make it. Throw in guitar toting drifter Sonny (Gary Clark Jr.) and there’s a hope of glory.

Although his film has great merits: sumptuous cinematography and great visual composition, some fine acting talent including the formidable Stacy Keach as the bigoted and morally corrupt sheriff, there are some problems from which the film cannot extricate itself, namely its inability to make up its mind what it is. At times it addresses most eloquently the grinding cruelty of institutional racism, making its case implicitly and so much more potently than if it had tried to lock horns narratively with such a juggernaut of social evil. At other times there was dialogue so stilted and unnatural that it truly detracted from the experience. There were though, some great one-liners: on the Korean war ”black folks killing yellow folks to keep white folks happy.” and of his wife’s cooking one character says it would “gag a maggot.”. Nice touches to be sure.

Some very fine character acting in the generous and comely shape of Devenia McFadden as the not to be scorned Nadine and Dr. Mable John as the dignified local grand dame of song Bertha Mae lends much to a film that struggles at times to seem truthful or real perhaps. There is an established blues mythos which devotees of the music recognise and use to navigate songs and in times of need, life itself. But there are times when the characters in Honeydripper are just cyphers in an internal folklore peculiar to the movie which can make it seem impenetrable and needlessly confusing most notably with the character of Possum (Keb' Mo') the blind guitar player. Also nagging at me is that in trying to conform to such a mythology Sayles gets caught up in some clichéd characterisation, for instance Stacy Keach's sheriff whose character is rarely permitted to be anything more than a hackneyed and one-dimensional ogre.

However the film has some great great music. Check out Delta Guitar Sam: Bo Diddly meets Chuck Berry and Bertha Mae, a kind of fictionalised Bessie Smith. This seductive melodrama is as potent as any kids' sport movie so allow yourself to be transported back the birth of Rhythm and Blues. Crossroads for grown-ups. Great fun.

BL

Location shoots

Our Maida Vale branch being closed for a couple of days this week, we thought we'd explain why... another film shoot and although very secretive, it's apparently a pilot for a new comedy drama for the BBC, set of course in a Video shop!
One of the leads happens to be, purley coincidentally, a past employee of ours at that shop! Forget Clerks, you saw it here first!
We've had numerous film shoots in our shops over the years, including many pop vids... even a number 1 (David Gray) which happens to feature in the soundtrack to In The Land Of Women starring Adam Brody coming out towards the end of the month!
A segment of the current series of Primeval was filmed in our Camden store a few months ago where another all British rom com was filmed a few years back... imagine me and you, directed by Ol Parker which was really quite good. With Valentine's Day approaching perhaps it deserves a look! 

CES

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has recently happened again and is now becoming THE place for launching new techie intiatives, although Steve Jobs would have you think otherwise with Macworld in the shadows. So whether your a gadget junkie or a serious developer you can see all the demos and news here. Or watch Bill Gates keynote speech.
OK, here's Steve Jobs as well... telling you three stories from his life!

BOND 22 GIRL

OK, so where has new Bond girl Olga Kurylenko appeared from, for those who really want to know? Apparently Bond shows his mushy side in the new movie and falls for her... largely an extension of Casino Royale. As luck would have it, the Ukranian model happens to be in a couple of current offerings like French thriller Le Serpent, recently out on DVD. And she also appears briefly in a segment of Paris Je T'aime (Montmartre). She also stars as abused prostitute in game spinoff The Hitman with Timothy Olyphant and Dougray Scott which should be making it's way to DVD anytime soon...

         

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

No Country for Old Men is the much-anticipated return to form of the Cohen Brothers. Back on familiar ground, the unforgiving yet poetic landscape of North America and her inhabitants as they run around in their silly, vain and frenetic way. But there is love and there is loyalty and there is compassion. There is fear, there is pursuit and there is unflinching wickedness.

The story is adapted by the Cohens and Cormac McCarthy from his novel of the same name. Set in the eighties in rural Texas, it is the story of Llewelyn Moss played with understatement, subtlety and elegance by Josh Brolin. Last seen as a rotten cop in the Ridley Scott feature American Gangster he plays a trailer living drifter, very much in love with his equally enamoured wife Carla Jean played by a note perfect Kelly MacDonald. Out hunting antelope, where the deer and the antelope play, he stumbles on a drug deal gone badly wrong and walks away with a couple of million dollars in cash. Well wouldn’t you at least be tempted? This in itself is not his mistake. His act of hubris comes in the form of an act of compassion: his humanity is his undoing.

Nemesis comes in the form of Anton Chigurh, a paradigm shattering screen baddie played apparently effortlessly by a masterful Javier Bardem. Harry Powell, Max Cady, Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, Keyser Soze and now Anton Chigurh. If this is not an Oscar for supporting actor, I don’t know what is. His apparent ease with killing people, literally, you will see, like cattle is sobering, and yet the brooding menace of his performance is intoxicating. I saw this picture a month ago and still I think of him several times a day.

It would be wrong for me not to mention Tommy Lee Jones who plays the world weary Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. Really, it’s his story and charts the changes between the old world of community and general good will which he feels declining into the casual cruelty and unsentimentality of a wanton and ruthless criminality. The illusion we often seem to share in our dotage of a golden age perhaps. Truthfully I thought him a bit old for this role: cops tend to get pretty early retirement. But his beautiful craggy face, his charm and his being a native Texan make him a natural and excellent choice.

I must also bring to your attention the utterly breathtaking cinematography of Roger Deakins, who has long had an association with the Cohen Brothers. Fargo, O Brother, where Art Thou? also feature his work. His ability to consign the majestic and sweeping beauty of landscape and also its relentless harshness is lyrical and is most definitely one of the main characters in this beautifully made film.

At times I felt myself wondering whether this film really was as good as I thought it was. Was I just being bamboozled by technique? Anyway, how can such a response detract? Small matter. The Cohens are such adept and sophisticated exponents of their medium that they can take apart and reconstruct the genre making it pregnant with primal and everyday themes raising the bar several notches.

Hats off to the Cohens, this is film making at is best. See it at all costs.

Ben Lee

It's Christmas!

Merry Christmas to everyone! We have been having some technical issues of late with our DRM server so apologies to anyone caught up in it... it will be resolved soon. We've also recently agreed several new distributors for our download platform, so lots more content in the new year!
Here's a little something to get you in the Christmas spirit...

DEATHPROOF

We’re back in late night territory. After Tarantino’s idiosyncratic tour into genre move-making with the two instalments of Kill Bill he’s deferred the big war film for more pulp pleasure. Will this be a test too far on multiplex patience, will his status as the populist king of auteur finally go? That Tarantino, he fell off into self-indulgence….

Well, the overwhelming opinion of critics on DeathProof make it sound like an anal regression into 70s B-movie slashers. The kind of homage Tarantino himself is pleased as punch with, him and a few others who spend a bit too much time watching obscure films that frankly weren’t much good when they were made and haven’t got any better with the passing of the years. 

The kind of outright dismissal Tarantino has provoked shows up how apparently intelligent and experienced viewers can so badly miss the mark.. As much as it makes sense to look at the content, he has a mastery over form which most other film-makers would immediately realise. In the space of one scene Tarantino surveys the new tone of brutalism in horror from the standpoint of its origins in 70s exploitation flicks with a poetic beauty quite absent from anything in Hostel, from his protégé, Eli Roth. This is mindful of the need to entertain but it is a masterclass! Not to say its flawless in the course of its 90 minutes. When it first opened as Grindhouse partnered with Robert Rodriguez’ Planet Terror, bemusement ensued when the end credits rolled and the audience walked out unaware that Death-Proof was the next film. Harvey Weinstein steps in (again) and the result was the end of the Grindhouse double-bill and the separate release of two films which meant Quentin had to tinker with Death-Proof and increase its running time. Death-Proof gets padded out with dialogue which somewhere around the one hour mark seems quite content to keep things on a lay-by as a build-up to the cathartic blow out of the ending. 

It will be telling to see how Tarantino originally meant to play his hand with the 60 minute version but there are moments here which are simply in a class of their own. It wants to say this is the definition of cinema. It opens on a Dodge Charger driving along the banked mid-Californian rockscape to Jack Nietzshe, as distinctive a retort to your average Hollywood film as I’ve seen this year, lovingly recreating the warp and grain of an overlooked Jess Franco film circa 1977. As for the plot, forget permutations or the kind of design he displayed in Pulp Fiction. It’s two groups of four girls who have the misfortune to bump into Stuntman Mike and his converted Dodge Charger – Death-Proof. Since Tango and Cash things have been a bit barren for Kurt Russell and he’s clearly relishing the role Stuntman Mike. Indeed, the character he plays is a wandering Stuntman who’s best days were a while ago, just like Kurt. As much as we know that this is going to turn nasty there are a number of explicit pointers from Tarantino to just kick back and relax and not worry too much that the blood and gore will get in the way of a good ride. The cinematography is by Tarantino and it makes much of Kill Bill (1 and 2) seem pedestrian. There is a sense of musical intimacy which delights in suggestion rather than actually going into a flesh show. 

In the second part the kiwi stunt girl Wendy Ide is ideal as the feminist riposte. The dialogue begins to chase it’s own tail and you wonder when exactly the showdown chase will start. When it starts, it comes through brilliantly. As Stuntman Mike’s Charger is bearing down on the girls’ Dodge Challenger it connects like a knock-out punch. The motorcycle into the advertising board alone is cinematic history. As yet another take on a fascination for the 70s in these more lifeless and artless times, it is near enough a triumph!

Charles Maclean

Get Involved!

Following the 'Power To The Pixel'  presentation, one pioneering young filmmaker is utilizing parts of the discussed concepts in film distribution. Tim Clague is proposing to make his film aided by carefully placed ads and sponsorship, thereby offering the film for free across the net! We're already seeing a lot more of this and the concept deserves support! Take a look... the movie's called Circumference and is a romantic drama set on the south coast of England. More interestingly for filmmakers, it offers an alternative in the way you create and market directly to your audience while keeping them involved in the process and the journey.            

I'm Not There

Where to begin with Todd Haynes’ biopic of Bob Dylan? It looked like it was going to be the kind of variation on a theme he’d made when he revived Douglas Sirk in Far From Heaven, only this time with D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back as the blueprint. While the black and white Cate Blanchett segment is at the core of this curious six part journey it never falls simply into stylistic imitation. I can’t recall any other film so bent on a tour of narrative styles with the exception of the haunting 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. Indeed, it moves with such a restless invention it isn’t that much concerned with fidelity to the actual life of Dylan. No bad thing if we survey the erratic and mostly under-performing history of movie biopics.

We begin with an 11 year old black boy riding in a boxcar, he has a guitar, on its case is written, This Machine Kills Fascists. As much as we’re going into a very peculiar fantasy – the boy’s name is Woody Guthrie – with quite specific allegorical aims and debts to the lore of Dylan, the intimacy is never forced. By the time he plunges into a lake and falls deep into a beguiling dream-like sequence which suddenly takes us back to a kind of American South magical realism we have already been introduced to another Bob Dylan. Throughout the film literalism is denied. So, there is Dylan as played by Ben Whishaw, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger and Richard Gere. It sounds very tricksy having another 5 actors play essentially the same figure, and it sounds a waste of time if you don’t much care for Bob Dylan but I’m Not There is something very rare, a film with a unique ambition which leaves you completely elated. Memorable films get made and sometimes a film comes along which push that bit further into the uncharted, and “makes it new”. There are a great many directors who helm interesting and highly crafted films but utterly lack the spark of magic which sends you out from the picture-show into the nearly total negative of the outside world with a confirmed faith in man.

The main contrast is with No Direction Home. Worthy enough but lacking in inspiration. Here the incendiary arrival of the electric Dylan at Newport is announced as Bob and The Band turning on the audience with machine guns. Weaving a reflexive spell through the “music and many lives of Bob Dylan” it’s like watching a how-to on bringing together quite disparate influences from Fellini, Godard, and crystalline moments of texture from others like Truffaut, Peckinpah, Richard Lester, Sirk and so on. Always in this prismatic work is a critical sense of what makes identity and the difficulty in tying it down alongside a vigourous questioning of how much Dylan’s art resides in ruse rather than conviction.

Broadly speaking it follows a chronology of Dylan as child of the blues to protest singer to electric pop star to the retreating movie star and a reclusive Billy the Kid and to born-again Christian. Dominating the film is Cate Blanchett as Jude, the clearest impersonation of the singer. At times it works almost as a paraphrase of the Pennbaker documentary till embracing the dreamier side it starts to trip out on the drug excesses of the 60s. The Beatles, Ginsberg, disgruntled folkies, a knife wielding fan, and Swinging London hipsters pass by and notably, Bruce Greenwood as Mr Jones, a pedantic interrogative journalist with whom we enter a mysterious world of connection, as Stephen Malkmus sings Ballad of a Thin Man.

The surrealist flights of imagery in the songs can get a little wearing for me, such an immature abundance - the fish truck that loads while his conscience explodes - here its mediated by a formal understanding of film as a musical expression – like Scorsese or Tarantino – so everything is instilled with a sense of its timeliness. It unfolds like a song which is taking you back to something that seemed lost. There is an exquisite care for detail, for the passing of the 60s into a more remote 70s. From a traditional black meal-time in the South to an increasing distance, mirrored in luxurious furnishing to the fantasy of a Wild West alter-ego, it speaks the allure of art as interpretation.

For some this is too much of a hike, a highly indulgent foray into auteurism without a centre. The problem lies in how anything like a conventional portrayal would have got even faintly close to the enigma of Dylan. When Heath Ledger plays a movie star version of the protest singer Dylan (Bale) it captures exactly how the style of apparent imitation falls short. Frankly, the level of style in this film is so nuanced it’s full effect is for only a very few, but this is hardly reason to condemn it. How dull had this been content to be a typical studio movie. Instead, it works as much as a Todd Haynes’ creation as it does a well researched account of Bob Dylan. It would have been easy enough to rattle off a Dylan Greatest Hits on the soundtrack but thankfully, it mostly steers clear of the obvious featuring many cover versions from the likes of Tom Verlaine, Sonic Youth and others. Like the title, I’m Not There much of the soundtrack has sought inspiration from The Basement Sessions and goes for the overlooked.

The last part with Richard Gere as Billy the Kid is regarded as the weakest. Having survived Pat Garrett he now lives quietly in Riddle with a dog, at least until his nemesis Garrett returns to flatten the town for a railroad (or was it a highway?). This addresses the recluse, the Dylan of the 70s and, to some extent the Western he appeared in, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It does play with a more traditional form but also its use of space has been completely missed, particularly, how it contrasts with the alienated life-style Heath Ledger part. It ends aphoristically, Gere’s voice-over drawing together the fragments, like a line from Pynchon more than Dylan, as Billy jumps on a train and finds a guitar, and written on its dusty case: This Machine Kills Fascists. The film coalesces all of its previous versions into a series of cuts quite movingly and then finally there’s Dylan himself.

Charles Maclean