I saw There Will Be Blood last night. If this doesn’t win Best Movie at the Oscars they are out of their minds. There Will Be Blood does everything right that No Country For Old Men does wrong, i.e., end the movie with adequate resolution. There Will Be Blood is a long, slow, densely mesmerizing movie. I’m a fan of silence. The first scene is Daniel Day Lewis mining in a California desert, hacking at the walls of his cavern as a single ray of sunlight drizzles through the shaft. The first time he makes a sound is when he regains consciousness after his ladder breaks a rung and he gasps loudly for breath. Daniel Day Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, an oil man at the turn of the century, and the first lines in the movie don’t come for fifteen minutes until Plainview tries to lease his drilling enterprise to a small town. Eventually Plainview finds his way to a small town called Little Boston where an ocean of oil rests underground. He buys the town, and all the greed you can ask for unfolds for the rest of the movie. It’s a disgusting life, what people will do to make money. To make a connection with what No Country For Old Men did right, Daniel Plainview is an Anton. He knows what he wants – money – and he will do whatever is necessary to get it. There Will Be Blood is based on an Upton Sinclair story called Oil!. Sinclair peeks through every crack. Oh, Upton Sinclair. You crazy communist.
There Will Be Blood reminds me of another long and densely mesmerizing movie called Dogville. It’s an all right movie, and I recommend everyone watch it. Nicole Kidman plays a mysterious woman who stumbles into a small Depression-era American town. She does small jobs for the townspeople and is at first beloved. As time goes on, the people abuse her, and things go from bad to worse to disastrous for poor Nicole Kidman. Two things piss me off about Dogville. First, I can’t sit and watch Nicole Kidman get raped for three hours. I want to go to the bathroom and maybe get something to eat. Second, I’ve heard that Dogville is a take on how the rest of the world views America. David Bowie’s “Young American” plays over the credits while we see black-and-white pictures of Great Depression Americans. Let me get radically American here and show my national pride for the first time ever. What right does anyone have telling me what it’s like to be an American? You’re telling me that Americans are the only people on the planet who abuse power? Abusing power is part of being a human being, pal. It’s what we do. We are a greedy species that wants to dominate everyone and everything. I don’t care of you’re from America, France, Germany, China, India, or Zimbabwe. Human beings are naturally sadistic. We are particularly sadistic to each other. Don’t give me this “holier than thou” shit just because it’s chic to bash Americans. You’re just as prone to greed and hatred and power abuse as I am. Do you want to know how I see the rest of the world? The rest of the world is a bunch of third-world cesspools where it’s perfectly reasonable to execute a Westerner because she offended God by naming a stuffed bunny rabbit Muhammad. The rest of the world has a rebellious chip on its shoulder because their version of Islam is slightly different from the other two forms of Islam in their homeland, and if a young girl from their Islamic sect is caught dating someone from another Islamic sect, it’s well within the law for dozens, hundreds of angry men to strip her naked in the street and stone her to death. The rest of the world is oil rich but bordering on barbarism, and they will rape women who are caught alone in cars with men who are not their husbands, and if the women complain they will be sentenced to jail terms for complaining. The rest of the world resorts to ethnic cleansing when an election doesn’t turn out the way they wanted. Yeah, the rest of the world is fucked. Take a good look in the mirror before you tell me what it’s like to be an American. That pisses me right off.
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