American Blood! and other musings [movies]
Hey, y’know back when it was just me and Y writing this lil thang, Y wrote a nice review of There Will Be Blood. You should read it (troll through our ancient archives and you’ll find some gems and some ….less-than-gems).
I had the privilege of seeing this movie tonight, and all things considered in the year that was 2007, I have to say it was an absolutely historic year for American filmmaking. I don’t just mean AMERICANS making films, I mean films that show off America in all its forms, including the mentality and spirit that went into the formation of this country and our culture. I talked a little about this before, but when you hold up Jesse James and There Will Be Blood to the light, they begin to show the kind of ambition it took to survive so long ago, when our lives weren’t chained to desks and bureaucracy and minutiae, when all our evil didn’t become so subverted. Fast forward to the future, that ambition is translated directly to murder and money, and we get movies like American Gangster and No Country For Old Men, mayhem unleashed in the seemingly regular world we sit in. And ironically, it’s supposed to be more shocking than watching old bandits kill innocent men and women, or watching old oil prospectors smash people’s heads in with bowling pins (uh, spoiler?). Whether it’s the barren landscape of Daniel Plainview’s oil wells, or the backdrop of New York, or the Southern backdrop of the Texas border, the balance of success and danger, of ambition and evil, has always existed and always will exist in this country in that semi-civilized, yet barely contained viciousness that we see on the daily news everyday.
When you add religion to the mix the way There Will Be Blood does, it creates a fascinating new texture to the whole damn thing that I’m sure resonated with Y as much as it did me. How? I’m not even exactly sure yet. Maybe because there’s something ambitious about religious success, and there’s something incredibly moral about exposing it even if religion brings good to the people that follow it, or even the world it exists in. And almost always, that exposure has to come from someone who is positively evil.
Like I said, I’m not totally sure about my thoughts yet. And from what I’ve heard, that’s about the most common reaction to this movie after seeing it. You’re not completely sure what you just saw, you’re kind of exhausted, but you’re positive you just saw brilliance.
Btw, total tangent: I credit PTA for his camera work here, so many times he let residue stay on the camera. Whereas this would probably bother me (or scream trying too hard) in other movies, for some reason, it just made sense here to have the lens coated with oil drops or water or blood, gritty, dirty, imperfect and chaotic.
And with that, I’m closing the books on 2007 in movies, maybe the best year I’ve lived through.