All comparisons between Dick Cheney and Darth Vader were rendered moot recently when George Lucas told Maureen Dowd, of The New York Times, “George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the emperor.” In response to that clarification, David Edelstein wrote a piece in this week’s New York magazine in which he attempts to find another movie villain who Cheney resembles even more than any character in Star Wars. Ultimately, though, he settles on the former vice president being something of a villainous mutt: “Cheney is Palpatine with a soupçon of Sauron, a pinch of Voldemort, a dash of Mabuse, a jigger of Fu, with some Elmer Fudd and Richard Nixon folded in.”

That’s an interesting conclusion, but do we really need to soil our memories of these cinematic evildoers by likening Cheney to them, and worse, vice versa? It’s bad enough the guy has shown up in a lot of contemporary movies, both officially (W.) and unofficially. In Jim Jarmusch’s new film, The Limits of Control, which opens this week, a certain character is an obvious, albeit somewhat veiled, stand-in for Cheney. And at least seven other recent films similarly feature a character who is a dead-ringer for the old VP. We count them down, in order of most intentionally Cheney-like, below.
…Read more

Harrison Ford’s newest movie Crossing Over opens this weekend may never open ever (see comments below — Ed.) and it looks like a mashup of Babel and Crash. In the trailer, Ford seems to be going through the motions of a role we’ve become used to seeing him in: the gruff older man who gets angry about something and decides to take matters into his own hands. It’s most reminiscent of his Jack Ryan character in Clear and Present Danger, right down to shots that look pretty darn close to each other.

It’s more of a reminder that so many of Harrison Ford’s films in these past few years have fallen flat on their face both with audiences and at the box office. He tried to do comedy with Anne Heche in Six Days, Seven Nights, and again with Josh Hartnett in Hollywood Homicide. Neither one of them worked. He also missed with the romantic drama Random Hearts and the drama/actioner K19: The Widowmaker. There was brief respite from his lackluster roles with What Lies Beneath, but then he turned to mediocrity with Firewall. Then came the new Indy, which granted, wasn’t his fault. He was great it in, but the writing was just too bad to get past.

Crossing Over doesn’t look like it’ll bust Ford out of the boring movie mold he’s encased in, so here are some suggestions for him to turn things around. Despite the fact that this guy could retire tomorrow and live off of his earnings forever, he seems intent on continuing to act. Let’s hope he pays attention.

…Read more

The Playlist wonders why “almost no bloggers have chosen to write about” this Esquire story purporting to blow the lid off the secret early life of Paul Thomas Anderson. I can only speak for myself: I had no idea this story, which is dated September 22, existed. But I’ll write about it now!

Based on a skim (it’s long and I’ll go back and read it more carefully when I have time, but I wanted to pass it along regardless), it seems to be fundamentally flawed, in that it’s based on the complaints of Anderson’s high school friends and former teachers, who are all clearly bitter that their old pal no longer returns their calls, as if an acknowledged burden of success is that one must take time out of their busy modern masterpiece-making, Oscar nomination-collecting schedule to visit their old high school (does anybody actually visit their old high school?) There isn’t anything jaw-dropping here––He went to a lot of prep schools! He watched a lot of laserdisks!––but it’s an interesting read for P.T.A. completists.

Sometimes I really wish David Bordwell’s blog permitted comments. Mostly it’s better that it doesn’t, but the man’s last post has made me want to discuss the art of movie titles for a whole week now. And it didn’t help that coinciding in time with Bordwell’s post was another one of those sidebars in Entertainment Weekly pointing out some new movies with misleading titles. Yes, Lakeview Terrace does sound like a period romance, as do many other badly titled films (Elizabethtown and Wicker Park come to mind). This weekend also sees two new movies employing the method of borrowing song titles, which are typically not appropriate (Ghost Town seems more like a horror western hybrid, while My Best Friend’s Girl actually fits its plot).

Well, fortunately for me (and hopefully you), I can bring the discussion over to SpoutBlog, though not quite as in depth as Bordwell. I’ll be more than happy to have a conversation in the comments section regarding the more general topic of movie titling, but for now I’ll kick things off with a list of what I find to be the most interesting movie titles of the past decade. It’s been a time when studios and filmmakers have been very loose with ill-fitting and overlong titles, as well as some that are too plainly literal (Snakes on a Plane), but the following selections have the benefit of featuring clever, well-chosen and more meaningful monikers.

…Read more

• For all the griping about how critics just don’t get the stuff that fanboys love, a show of the numbers suggests that reviews from Tomatometer and Metacritic ranked critics are more friendly to movies based on comic books than maybe any other single genre. Jim Emerson elaborates on his findings.
• Rumsey Taylor on the “brand ambience” of Mad Men: “When Draper is describing each of these products, you’re held rapt by his words, and how they pronounce, with consummate precision, their transcendent significance. It’s all bullshit, of course, but what wonderful, wonderful bullshit.”
• Last night at Largo in Los Angeles, “Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen performed a series of light and effortless vignettes co-written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.” According to Vulture’s Nick Confalone, the performance felt “like sneaking a peek at P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love notepad, exploring that movie’s notion that there’s someone for everyone, even though everyone is a little bit weird and fucked up. Whatever the future for this show, last night it made us grin like an idiot and tell our friends, ‘Love is awesome, right?’” Wonderful bullshit indeed.

Bright Lights After Dark’s Tom Sutpen on a lesser-known earlyish work from Paul Thomas Anderson, starring then-girlfriend Fiona Apple:

“Across the Universe” is a music video produced in connection with an immensely obvious and stupid movie of the late-nineties entitled Pleasantville (a film Anderson otherwise had nothing to do with); and if you have to call it something…you could say that you were seeing the one perfect expression of post-Christian martyrdom our culture has seen fit to cough up.

(Please excuse the reblogging––I’m weeding through an obscenely overstuffed post-vacation feed reader with one lobe and making Comic-Con plans with the other. In order to add a tiny bit of value to this post, here are some lazy links to a few other videos that PTA made for Apple: Fast as You Can; Paper Bag; Limp. Servicey!)

I thought it was interesting that BuzzFeed posted an unaltered clip from Magnolia as #2 on their list of the 16 Best Tom Cruise Parody Videos. The implication being that Paul Thomas Anderson managed to rope Cruise himself into a meta-parody, years before most of the culture would come around to seeing fervent Scientologist/couch jumper/actor as the easiest of targets.

Certainly, there’s a sort of masturbatory preening and Master of the Universe delusion to Cruise’s Magnolia character that seems to come up again in the famed Scientology video (which most of the other clips on the BuzzFeed page directly spoof), but that aspect of Cruise’s persona has only really blossomed in the past few years. Paul Thomas Anderson could very well be a genius, but if he were psychic, I don’t think he ever would have made Magnolia in the first place. The more interesting idea is not that Cruise was parodying himself in Magnolia, but that he’s become a parody of a character that he played nine years ago, which at the time was considered a huge departure from his All-American slickster hero.

In case you missed it, Paul, Kevin and I examined the evolution of Cruise’s career in this episode of FilmCouch.

Sometimes you leave a movie with questions, and maybe you think the source material will have answers. Or maybe you are simply interested in reading the novel that inspired or was adapted into that movie. But walking out of There Will Be Blood last night, I wasn’t so inclined to read Upton Sinclair’s Oil! Instead, I wanted to rush to the nearest Barnes and Noble and pick up a copy of the Bible.

I’ve taken enough film classes to know that it helps to have an understanding of the Bible in order to properly discuss a lot of cinema’s greatest works. However, I’ve managed to get by just fine in my film studies without having picked up the Good Book. Maybe I’ve depended too much on other scholars and experts to spell out the religious connections in specific films, but with There Will Be Blood I’m finally thinking its time to do the reading on my own. Most films studied in my classes had those obviously apparent shots evoking Biblical imagery — a man positioned in a crucifix pose, two distinct lines intersecting like a cross, etc. — and it was easy to think I knew enough to notice basic parallels. When it came to more specific Biblical allusions and imagery, I simply missed out on some deep textural appreciation, no different than missing out on allusions to other texts unread by or unknown to me.

…Read more

• This is the true hallmark of a word-of-mouth hit: when single lines of dialogue take on a life of their own. “’I drink your milkshake’ has such Dickensian grandeur that its miniaturization in the mouths of SportsCenter anchors, scab gag writers, bloggers, and their ilk is practically a national tragedy,” writes food blogger extraordinaire Josh Ozersky. “Nonetheless, if somebody is going to do it, it’s going to be us.”
• David Carr comments on the surprises at this morning’s Director’s Guild of America nominations; his commenters comment on everything from racism in America to whether or not the Coen Brothers are lazy, or if they want “the audience to just assume people are just born evil?”
• Marc Bernadin ponders how the strike will impact ComicCon, while his colleague Annie Barrett joins me in appreciation of Conan O’Brien’s strike beard.
• Speaking of my stupid crushes on stupid stars: Michael Cera’s iTunes celebrity playlist is just ehn. I’m much more impressed with Ellen Page’s shout-out to Erik Satie.

Above: an excerpt from Paul Thomas Anderson’s shooting script for There Will Be Blood, which you can download here (via Movie City Indie, highlight in excerpt added by me). Obviously, if you’re spoiler-sensitive and haven’t yet seen the film, it’s probably best to leave that link alone. That said, Paramount Vantage is hosting midnight sneak screenings in most major cities this Saturday night. Matt Dentler has the info.

I confess: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood has pretty much slain me. In three weeks of trying to nail down what makes this film tick, I haven’t been able to mold my thoughts into anything resembling a traditional movie review. I feel like the first step to defining what this film is, and why it’s had such an impact on me, is to figure out what it isn’t. So, I’ll now proceed to blatantly rip off Filmbrain, and review TWBB in more-or-less list form. What follows is my analysis of five common misconceptions about this film. We’ll have more on There Will Be Blood on next week’s podcast.

Misconception 1: “There Will Be Blood is a Monster Movie, and Daniel Plainview is the Monster.”
Espoused by: Peter Martin at Twitch, Richard Schickel at TIME, Fred Schurers at PORTFOLIO, among others.

We’ll begin with a misconception that I can sort of understand–in fact, I think it’s less a misconception than a missing of the point. Daniel Day Lewis’ presence in TWBB is terrifying, not least because of the booming sing-song in which he speaks. But if this voice calls to mind any sort of known movie villain at all, it’s the type of villains seen mainly in cartoons–he’s essentially a Snidely Whiplash that could kill you with his bare hands. But PTA never lets the characterization have the final word on the character. One of the most intriguing things about this film is its unwillingness to completely vilify anyone: both protagonists (Plainview as well as Paul Dano’s young preacher, Eli Sunday) are equally good and evil, antagonistic and sympathetic. Both are wrong and both are right. Plainview may behave monstrously, but with the final scene excepted, the victim of his terror is mostly himself.

It’s easy to see Plainview as the “bad” guy, if for no other reason because he spends so much time apparently antagonizing the “good” guys. But to do so is to misread. Plainview comes to Little Boston (the nothing Western town that serves as the site of the film’s main action; it might as well be called Manifest Destiny-ville) promising that the oil he excavates will pay the way towards The Future: schools, roads, freedom from hunger and virtually any other brand of want. He’s offering this promise to God-fearing people who may still be grappling with the present and the past, but it’s more than just a struggle between old and new, or even religion and blasphemy. Plainview’s real “gift” to the community is his introduction of cynicism, mistrust, and doubt. His presence represents the literal loss of faith. Scary, sure, but the horror movie dynamics are reductive, and they’ve been way overblown.

…Read more

• Your Christmas weekend time suck is here, in the form of indieWIRE’s massive 2007 Critics Poll. There Will Be Blood takes top honors, but as usual, the real fun lies in investigating the individual ballots and spotting the idiosyncrasies. Behold Andrew Bujalski’s single vote for Best Supporting Actor! Marvel at the critic who gave almost equal love to Ken Jacobs and Blades of Glory! But before you do, decide whether you’re thrilled or infuriated to see Southland Tales land ten full places ahead of Atonement (I’m the former. I think.)
• Speaking of There Will Be Blood, critics poll participant Filmbrain has posted some “sketches, fragments, and other half-baked ideas” about what he declares is “easily the best film of the year.” His key contention: it’s a love letter to Stanley Kubrick.
• Tomorrow is Burbanked’s second blogoversy, and he’s celebrating with a ten day party.
• Finally, here’s another time suck, if you need a break from all that critic pollery: Marisa Tomei joins Natalie Portman in the ranks of unwitting screencap porn stars. NSFW, via The WoW Report.

Honestly, I didn’t want to write anything about the ending of There Will Be Blood until the film is in theaters. The holidays are tough enough–I really, really don’t need the spoiler brigade on my ass to add to it. But this post by Craig Kennedy reminded me of a conversation I had earlier today with Paul and Kevin, and I have to get the thought out before it goes away. Noting that P.T. Anderson’s film currently carries a 100% Fresh rating amongst Cream of the Crop critics on Rotten Tomatoes, Craig writes:

I’m only skimming reviews until I finish my own, but one theme keeps popping up in review after review: On the surface, There Will Be Blood is unlike anything Anderson has done before…It’s like watching a runner sprinting at the limit of his ability when, just before the finish line, he kicks into another gear you didn’t even know he had and he surges ahead of the pack. It’s exhilarating.

It’s true that Anderson’s previous films were essentially ensemble pieces, which There Will Be Blood is not. And as a director, Anderson seems to have matured, in that he seems less interested than ever in showing off. But “unlike anything Anderson has done before”? I don’t think that’s true at all.

…Read more

Good thing Veruca Salt (the girl, not the band) doesn’t have a movie up for Best Picture this year. She’d probably shout at her daddy, “Hey, Denzel’s got two! I want another one!” And hopefully Grandpa Joe (Here that would be Joe Wright, whose Atonement received seven nominations) would turn around and mumble that she needs a good kick in the pants.

But really, looking at the Golden Globe nominees this morning, I’m wondering why the Hollywood Foreign Press Association couldn’t just pick one of Denzel Washington’s films, so that one category wouldn’t make the rest of the list seem so lopsided. Surely there were two more comedy/musical contenders that could have been added on, too. Heck, let’s just nominate everybody and call it a year, shall we?

…Read more