There Will Be Blood

Ahh, summertime. For normal people, it's a season of giant Hollywood blockbusters. For those of us who see most of our movies at home, it's time for last Christmas's prestige pictures.

A short time ago, I wrote of the prestige picture, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," that it went on far too long; that it was too meditative; that it seemed the DP edited the thing. "There Will Be Blood" is roughly the same length as "Assassination," and it, too, loves the long shot, the meditative moment. But there's a difference. "There Will Be Blood" is absolutely riveting, with commanding performances by Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, as well as strong supporting work by Ciarán Hinds and the young Dillon Freaser.

I've been aware of Day-Lewis since "My Beautiful Laundrette," and I became an outright fan with "The Age of Innocence." This, I was a little wary of his Daniel Plainview here. Was I watching a genuinely great performance, or was I merely bringing my predisposition to respect Day-Lewis's work to a pedestrian portrayal. This is where Paul Dano comes in. Looking over his filmography, I realize I've seen Dano before. But I never really noticed him, never bothered to remember his name, until now. Dano gives a performance that brings to mind Edward Norton in "Primal Fear," a commanding evocation of a young man who is part prophet, part hustler, and all calculation. Compared to Dano, Day-Lewis does, indeed, give a great performance. It's broad at times, close at others, but always commanding, always fascinating. There's so much going on behind those eyes that I was more than happy to spend two and a half hours trying to figure it out.

Of course, a major film such as this is about more than actors on a stage. Paul Thomas Anderson, who matured with "Punch-Drunk Love," directs a film that makes the Southwest of the late 19th and early 20th Century come alive. I read somewhere that he shot in West Texas, and he makes that country look as rough and deadly as it ever has, even if there are no Apache about. He made an interesting choice in Johnny Greenwood, the Radiohead musician and composer, who eschews
the standard orchestral score for disturbing, postmodernist music that keeps us in the film without ostentatiously highlighting its beats.

"There Will Be Blood" reminds me that there are no short movies or long movies. There are only poor movies and good movies. This is a very, very good movie. I could easily view it again, and I'm sure the time would race right by.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

I didn't follow the Enron disaster too closely. It was a busy time in my life, and I was concentrating on keeping my family afloat. I did, however, have a general understanding of the magnitude of the crimes committed by the top echelon of Enron's leadership and a general feeling that they were getting off a lot lighter than the poor schlub who steals $20 from the local 7-11. I never really bothered to go back and look into the story until a trusted cousin of mine (an executive, himself)) strongly recommended that I give this movie a look.

Wow. What a shocking, well-made movie. As it turns out, the criminals at Enron weren't just the top three or four guys. There was widespread criminality throughout the company's trading floor, an entire corporate culture of "me first and screw the country" at work there. _Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room_ takes inside the company through interviews and archival footage, and it raises real questions about how to balance the freedoms necessary for capitalism to work while ensuring that those involved in the actual workings of capitalism stay on the straight and narrow.

Sure, the movie spends some unnecessary time on the salacious. Did I really need to know about one exec's stripper fetish, complete with gratuitous nudie footage? I mean, c'mon - I was watching this movie in an airport lounge! Nevertheless, _Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room_ entertains and compels. It is one fine documentary.

The Incredible Hulk

(Pictured: The Once and Future Hulk)

I liked the new Hulk well enough, but it seemed too precious to me. All the little nods and winks to previous incarnations of the character, while flatly ignoring the most recent outing, seemed rather mean, and that threw me off.

But _The Incredible Hull_ had a bigger problem, and that was the fact that David Banner, as portrayed here, just wasn't a very interesting guy. When he was human, he was a normal, unassuming fellow trying to make the best of a bad situation. When he was the Hulk, he wasn't particularly dangerous. Had the Hulk been a murderous brute, then we might have been playing for keeps. As things stood, Norton seemed primarily interested in protecting the world from excessive property damage.

That needn't have been the end of things, however. If a hero is only as good as his villain, Tim Roth does everything in his power to make Hulk one of the greatest heroes of them all. Roth plays Emil Blonsky, a commando who's out to get The Hulk.  To some extent, commandos are professional athletes. In the case of Roth's character, here was one athlete who was not going to make a graceful transition to higher leadership and the joys of paperwork. He was willing to take any steroid, go through any regimen, to keep playing with the big toys and, when his 'roid rage makes him an abomination, he welcomes it. Roth plays the transition well, and I found myself much more interested in his arc than that of the supposed hero of the story.

Though Roth does great work with his character, the filmmakers make two errors with him that broke my disbelief. First, they explain that he's "on loan" from the Royal Marines, then put him in U.S. Army working uniforms, with U.S. Army pins and ribbons. Second, they make the Hulk more than the match of his Abomination in the final battle. This film has established that Norton has spent, tops, one year in Brazil working on his martial arts skills, while Roth has been doing this stuff pretty much his entire adult life. I simply could not buy that a half-thinking, semi-trained Hulk could outfight a fully aware, fully trained Abomination. Granted, _Iron Man_ had a couple of illusion-snapping moments, as well, but that film was so much fun that I was willing to give it a pass. For whatever reason, _The Incredible Hulk_ never built up that goodwill with me, so those moments stuck.

All this is not to say that _The Incredible Hulk_ is a bad film. It's fine, for what it is, but I didn't hit my sweet spot. I may be in the minority here, but I liked Ang Lee's version a whole lot more.