There Will Be Blood

I saw this last Tuesday, which was kind of a weird day. A friend at work told me in no uncertain terms that as tenacious as I was in pursuing our mutual friend, it just wasn't going to happen. I hate when people diagnose themselves as bipolar, so I'll just say I go through fairly extreme mood swings, so the rest of the day and night was kind of rough. I was smart in going to this movie, though, because it's fantastic. I don't have anything against genre films, but I do have a special fondness for those films that are big and hard to categorize. Paul Thomas Anderson's first film, Hard Eight, was a genre exercise--a gambling film, sort of a cousin of the heist picture but more apt to end without the big score achieved. Since then he has defied genre with the large ensemble dramas Boogie Nights and Magnolia, followed by the underrated but admittedly very edgy romance, Punch-Drunk Love.

There Will Be Blood is inspired by Upton Sinclair's early 20th century novel, Oil!, and it's about a ruthless oilman, Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis. To get much more into the various plot twists would spoil too much, but in broad terms it's about greed and selfishness, and the importance of blood (as in hereditary legacy). Daniel battles the elements, battles for the loyalty of the townfolk, and battles his inner demons. Well, more like he embraces those demons and lets them out whenever he can get away with it, and sometimes when he can't. Day-Lewis gives a full-bodies performance that somehow dwarfs the one he gave in Gangs of New York, and he's matched with some excellent work by Paul Dano, whom I hadn't realized I'd seen before as the willfully mute teen in Little Miss Sunshine. Anderson adds another great entry to his body of work, and damn, we need more big, weird, intense movies like these, American or otherwise. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood does the score, on instruments of the period, and it's really stirring and strange. I don't buy a lot of scores, but this one is worth it. Go to the Warner Nonesuch site and you can buy the cd and cd-quality download for $13.99 with three exclusive bonus tracks not available anywhere else.

My son has started getting some of the Lego Indiana Jones sets, so I figured it was time to watch Raiders, even knowing the ending is pretty scary. I'm actually not that bothered by the thought of scaring the shit out of my kids--better it's from a movie. I hadn't seen it in probably 20 years, and it's still a lot of fun. Pretty lame dvd menu as far as execution, but they had the right idea at the time. I was almost falling asleep, but it was still pretty early, so I started Danger: Diabolik for them. My son turned away at the kissing scenes, and they're frequent--I forgot it's a pretty sexy film, though no nudity or language, not even double entendres. They both liked it, especially my daughter, who kept wanting to watch more when it was over, not believing there were no sequels or even bonus features. I would have loved this as a kid, too--it's really colorful and has the cool underground lair, fast cars, gadgets, etc.

I have been on a bit of a Cabaret Voltaire jag, just receiving a cd of their 1982 release 2 X 45 from England. The title comes from it originally being two 12" singles packaged together. It's nearly album length--songs range from 5:00 to 13:00 minutes. I liked it a lot better listening to it at the gym than I did 20 years ago. I think at the time I wanted it to be slicker, as I was getting into the band with "Sensoria," but now I love the distored vocals and plucked bass and dirty saxophone runs. It's a really funky, weird masterpiece, unlike anything else. Perhaps the best known song from it is "Yashar," with its repeated sample (or tape loop), "There's 70 billion people there--where are they hiding?"

My son went with his mom and her husband to the Buick Invitational today. He got Rory Sabatini's autograph. I already had signed both kids up for a free workshop at the Apple Store, so I took my daughter and she and another girl there made a song together that's pretty cool. I ended up buying one of the keyboards like they were using--it's just $99, and spent a good deal of the rest of today making two songs in GarageBand. I see now, though, that I need to buy at least one of the Jam Packs--add-on software with hundreds of loops and other instruments. It's really hard to make a drum loop yourself, stopping the recording at the precise moment you stop playing. So I ended up just playing for a couple minutes, keeping time as best as I could. I did okay, but I can tell I'm a little off. It's fun building up your song and altering the sounds you've chosen with different filters, echo, reverb, etc. I have to resist the urge to put effects on everything.

Oh, finally--got an email about a week ago from a woman I knew in high school. We were school friends but never really socialized, not that I was very social then in general. But I always thought she was really cool. I found her on Classmates.com and emailed her and a few others in October. I heard from my second girlfriend, who's nice, and now I finally heard from this friend, Amy, and she's great and looks and writes pretty much like I expected. Not only has it been really nice catching up with her, she mentioned she's kept in touch with Tim, one of my best friends from then, whom I'd also lost touch with around college. So now we've been emailing each other as well, and it's strange and fun the things I'm remembering now that I haven't though of in so long. I mean, with a gun to my head I probably couldn't come up with Footloose as my first date movie, and a double date at that, but now I remember it, and that that theater had a Robotron videogame in the corner.