Once More, with Freezing

Warning: Indirect hints of possible spoilers (that's vague, but trust me on this).

In the first -- and best -- musical number of the slight yet significant online webseries Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (cue Ryan Seacrest: "Available on iTunes!"), Neil Patrick Harris's title character, a wannabe evildoer so low on the food chain that he takes his clothes to the local laundromat, reveals his diabolical plan in a melancholy soprano that undermines his aspiring villainy. Nearby is Penny (Felicia Day), an unconventionally attractive redhead whom Billy (the young doc's real name) has a secret crush on. "With my freeze ray/I will stop the world," he sings, and as he points his finger at Penny while she dumps her "underthings" into a washing machine, he imagines time standing still, her basket of clothes suspended in the air. This image, a tossed-off fillip, is a prime example of what the director, Joss Whedon, has always done best: conveying depth of emotion through striking visual clarity.

In our era of comic-book blockbusters budgeted in the $150-$200 million range, Dr. Horrible looks like it cost about fifty bucks, and that's a large part of its appeal. By now most everyone knows that Whedon conceived the idea for this story during last year's writers' strike and decided to release the finished product online (incidentally, to phenomenal success). While its making may have been unconventional, Dr. Horrible will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has followed Whedon's television and movie work. Seth Green once said during a DVD commentary track of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode that what he loved about the show was that you always were given to understand where every character was coming from -- even the bad guys' motives had underpinnings rooted in human nature. Whedon takes that sense of empathy even further here, turning our sympathies toward Billy and away from his archnemesis, the crime-fighting crusader Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion), who swoops in to save the day adorned in nothing more than a brown t-shirt and jeans, a tool whose name is all too fitting. Hammer has a history of foiling Horrible's convoluted plans, and unlike most superheroes he doesn't even try to maintain a secret identity. He wants all the glory; and after saving her life, he wants Penny too.

After the evident creative burnout in the final season of Buffy and the strain of the Firefly-spawned movie Serenity, it's heartening to see Whedon's jaunty confidence return. He and Harris are clearly on the same wavelength here, fashioning Billy/Dr. Horrible into an Internet nerd with delusions of grandeur -- comical, touching and dangerous by turns. Day, one of the supporting slayers-in-training on Buffy season 7, whose open face was eye-catching despite minimal dialogue, uses her sweetly sad countenance and lovely singing voice to heartbreaking effect as Penny, an advocate for the homeless who, unlike Billy, refuses to let the weight of the world get her down. Fillion plays Hammer as a fatuous gasbag who wants to do the right thing in order to get laid, who flirts with depth only to reject it. This is the best work of his career.

At less than forty minutes, Dr. Horrible is an entertaining doodle that should pave the way for more ambitious undertakings of its type. While brisk and enjoyable, it's tempting to imagine how the series could have developed its themes to their full potential over the arc of a complete season. As it stands, emotions are occasionally murky (such as Penny's mixed feelings for Captain Hammer), events happen abruptly, and key plot devices -- like Billy's videoblog, which should be the crux of the story -- are never completely developed. Moreover, the songs, while sufficient for advancing the plot as they were on the Buffy musical episode "Once More, with Feeling," are not nearly as resonant.

The climax does stick with you, if not for all the right reasons. It is there that Joss Whedon goes for the gut, as he is wont to do, and in so doing rather shamelessly exploits one of his leads. Come to think of it, I'm relieved that Dr. Horrible didn't last more than three swift acts; I don't think I could have handled a deeper emotional investment. This may be strictly my problem, or a matter of personal taste. Many continue to marvel at Whedon's ability to pull the rug out from under our expectations, but for others familiar with his work it may feel more like living along a faultline: you come to expect the tremors.

Panic Attack

I stopped reading comic books when I was eleven -- a sound decision, based on the arrested development of some of the commenters that greet the slightest criticism toward any film adaptation. (Unless the consensus is the movie stinks, in which case lock 'n' load.) Perhaps that is because, with few exceptions (Superman 2, Spiderman 2), comic book movies have never done it for me. This summer, even the ones that received good reviews (Iron Man, Hellboy II), have left me underwhelmed. Not cold exactly, but simultaneously hyped-up and deadened, like a kid after devouring a bag of Smartees.

The Dark Knight has received similar descriptions in a few quarters, and I have to admit that my head was pounding after seeing it. Today, brooding on the movie, I think that's because it has an abundance of ideas rather than an absence. By far the most compelling and disturbing Hollywood blockbuster of the summer (the competition is not fierce), The Dark Knight is Christopher Nolan's sequel to his own Batman Begins (2005), a film I enjoyed tremendously despite its flaws. Nolan couldn't stage a decent action scene, the editing was choppy, there were too many characters, and the movie not infrequently stopped dead in its tracks to hamfistedly address its theme. (In a nutshell: "Fear.") But it forged the link between Bruce Wayne and Batman -- and developed the character's arc from one to the other -- in a way that was convincing and stirring. The Dark Knight has many of the same problems yet is superior in almost every way. The previous film merely spoke of fear; this one makes you feel it in your bones.

This is largely due, of course, to the Joker -- both in the conception of the character and Heath Ledger's performance in the part. In Tim Burton's still overrated original Batman (1989), Jack Nicholson's version charted the character's trajectory from petty thug to supervillain, but the Joker was still all Jack, an extension of the actor's persona. Part of the impact of this Joker may be the fact that he's already complete at the start of the film, fully formed yet frighteningly elusive -- he has no arc. (A more pretentious review might suggest that he's the product of our collective id, but I'll just paraphrase Bruce Wayne's own observation that he springs into Gotham like a demonic Jack-in-the-box.) Yet I suspect most of the character's effect comes from Ledger himself. For all the publicity surrounding his tragic death (at the grocery store last week, I overheard one teenage employee repeat to another the apocrypha that "Playing the Joker killed him") and his popularity in other movies, I'm willing to bet that most of the audience will find him virtually unrecognizable here: fluid; grotesque; over-the-top yet exactly right. From Brokeback Mountain to I'm Not There to now The Dark Knight, Ledger was an unpredictable young actor with astonishing range, and his Joker puts to shame the Tolkien-reject bad guys in Hellboy II: The Golden Army. He's a rarity: a villain who feels like a genuine threat.

Batman, in contrast, looks considerably less a hero this time around. In Chris Nolan's script (co-written by his brother Jonathan Nolan), the character's own trajectory is more internal, a serious questioning of how far he's willing to go -- how far he needs to go -- to stop a madman. My mother has often said that you can't rationalize an irrational person, and Batman/Bruce Wayne spends too much time in the early stages of the movie doing exactly that. Distinguishing this threat from Gotham's patented mobsters, Bruce's butler Alfred explains that "Some men just want to see the world burn." (For all the criticism of Michael Caine's dialogue, this line has been quoted with great frequency.) Indeed, the Joker appears to have no interest in money or vengeance or anything tangible. His primary objective is to cause panic in the streets, and in the strong middle section of the movie he does exactly that. Another reason that the Joker is such a terrific villain is because Batman, the police force (led by soon-to-be Commissioner Gordon), and the newly galvanized D.A.'s office (led by "Two-Face" Harvey Dent) have become highly formidable. In a refreshing change of pace in movies, they do their jobs well, and this ups the ante for the Gotham underworld to raise their game.

Unlike the bizarrely underpopulated Iron Man, The Dark Knight has a sprawling ensemble that features bit players having big moments even if a few of the major actors get short-shrifted. As the dashingly blond Harvey Dent, whose transformation is the film's most tragic element, Aaron Eckhart turns in what may be his strongest performance yet. (I've never been a fan.) Maggie Gyllenhaal adds maturity and mischief in replacing Katie Holmes's high-school talent-show shtick as Assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes. Monique Curnen conveys much emotion with little dialogue in the small but key role of Detective Ramirez, and Philip Bulcock has a startling scene as a square-jawed cop who gets his buttons pushed by the Joker in a police station interrogation room.

As the titular character, Christian Bale is less effective than he was in Batman Begins, perhaps because, as at least one commenter elsewhere has noted, we don't see the full impact of the events on Bruce Wayne. Nevertheless, Bale, always a resourceful performer, doesn't get nudged completely offscreen the way Michael Keaton was in Burton's Batman and especially Batman Returns (where he was nearly a non-entity compared to Danny DeVito's Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman). The Joker may be in-your-face but Batman remains under-the-skin, even as the film unravels in the final act and gets a little relentless. I'm not sure how I feel about the final choices made by a few of the principal characters in The Dark Knight, a pair of lies -- one political, the other personal -- designed to give both the citizens of Gotham and Bruce a reason to keep living and keep fighting. Regardless, the climax keeps the movie real, yet fixed squarely in the realm of myth. The odd thing about Christopher Nolan is his uncanny knack to botch the execution of his message yet render it meaningful anyway, a talent perhaps similar to that of Batman himself.

Pre-Holiday Quickies

In theaters: WALL-E follows what is becoming a traditional pattern for Pixar releases: rapturous hosannas from critics, followed by gripes from moviegoers. The complaints leveled at this film have been more than the norm: it's too quiet; too dark; too anti-American, etc. I'm somewhere in the middle of the crossfire. It's more sweet, less manically exhausting than most of their movies. I'm with the conventional wisdom that the first half is the best, putting us deep in the lonely world of its robot protagonist and his budding romance with the trigger-happy EVE. The second half, when the two characters board the star cruiser populated with overweight humans, is more satirical but also flat. Both halves are incredibly derivative, ripping off paying homage to E.T., 2001, even The Triplets of Belleville. Despite the objections that it's not for kids, the tykes in my audience were surprisingly quiet and attentive, save for the Russell Brown-type in the row behind me who kept a Socratic dialogue going with his parents about everything that was happening. I enjoyed WALL-E more than most Pixar fare; it's an ambitious change of pace that goes disappointingly conventional only near the end. Any film that derivatively puts "Also Sprach Zarathustra" on its soundtrack has no claims of being a masterpiece. Hasn't postmodernism ended yet?


Catching up on DVD: Blades of Glory, the Will Ferrell/Jon Herder figure skating spoof, is intermittently funny and gleefully silly, less enjoyable than Walk Hard but Ferrell's hilarious machismo-on-ice shtick elevates it above just about every other comedy out there. Cloverfield, the hyped-up before it bottomed-out monster-on-the-rampage movie, is very clever and viscerally effective, darker than expected, but ultimately not very fun. The creature is a disappointing blank (as are its giant arachnid-like spawn). Better actors would have better conveyed the 9/11 emotionalism that the filmmakers were going for; as it stands, their anonymity would make them representatives for ourselves were they not all pretty pin-ups.

Maybe Cloverfield could have used the casting director of National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, who deserves a bonus for persuading Ed Harris, Helen Mirren and Bruce Greenwood (best of all, as a President one can only dream of) to join the likes of Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, and of course Nicolas Cage for another ridiculous sub-Indiana Jones/Mission Impossible romp through historically-themed puzzles and clues a notch or two more complicated than the Daily Jumble. Nevertheless, the director, Jon Turteltaub, livens the pace more than the original National Treasure, which I couldn't get through. This sequel held my attention all the way to the big finish, in an ancient subterranean dwelling beneath Mount Rushmore, where Turteltaub somehow persuaded his ensemble of esteemed actors to play in neck-deep water. Also now on DVD, National Treasure 2 is no big deal, but unlike The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it bothers to create characters and set up plot points with actual payoffs. You know, kooky stuff. Perhaps I have things backwards: maybe Spielberg and Lucas are now sub-Turteltaub.

A Word about My Sponsor: A Tribute to John Boylan

When I was twelve, I got baptized at a Catholic elementary school in Phoenix, Arizona. Why so late in life? As the son of a pair of non-Catholics, I attended a local public school through the fifth grade, where the habitat was oddly reminiscent to that of the Lincoln Park Zoo. The summer before sixth grade, my parents decided to send me to Ss. Simon and Jude. They wanted me to get a good education, I wanted to not get tarred and feathered on the playground every day -- our interests coalesced.

S&J was a good school, and I was treated well during my two years there. But the nuns who ran the joint also wanted to save my soul, so in the spring of sixth grade we had a baptism ceremony in my honor. In addition to my parents, friends and peers being there, I had to have two sponsors who were of the faith. One was Mrs. Kinney, a friend of the family who had been a neighbor in an apartment complex at one time. The other -- a man some may recognize in the blurry photo above -- was John Boylan.

Mr. Boylan was a dapper, charming man over the age of seventy who was in one of my mother's art classes. I didn't know much about him at the time, but now I know that he had lived most of his life in Canton, Ohio, working in a steel mill for forty years. In what must have been an odd combination, he also ran and performed in a local theater company. After retiring from the mill, Mr. Boylan devoted himself full-time to acting, art and other interests. He had been an extra on the Lee Majors television series The Fall Guy and gave me a piece of fake glass he had collected after one of that show's many, many action scenes that featured shattered glass. At an age where I was developing a growing interest in movies and TV shows, Mr. Boylan was the closest thing I knew to a celebrity. Late in life, his acting career was starting to bloom.

The last I saw of Mr. Boylan, in the mid-80s, he excitedly announced he had scored a minor role, his first with dialogue, in a movie called Kidco. A few years later I saw the film on videocassette. Based on a true story, Kidco is about a group of rural kids who go into the fertilizer business, where hijinks ensue. (Ah, shit jokes; where would be without you?) It was bad, but Mr. Boylan was funny in his bit part. As his character, a court clerk, reads the deposition in the climactic trial between the child entrepreneurs and an evil fertilizer corporation, Mr. Boylan paused and let out a big yawn, which reflected my own feelings about the film while simultaneously stealing the scene.

We lost touch with Mr. Boylan following several moves. In truth, I hadn't really thought of him for almost two decades until recently, when on an impulse I checked out his filmography and realized I had stared him in the face several times in the late-80s and early-90s and hadn't known it. He was the elevator operator who gives Meg Ryan a few crucial extra minutes atop the Empire State Building in the last scene of Sleepless in Seattle. He played a janitor in the first scene of American Heart, telling Jeff Bridges' ex-con that he's in the way of his restroom cleaning duties. Most significantly, he was Mayor Duane Milford in approximately eight episodes of Twin Peaks, most of them during the second season before the series got cancelled. I was never a fan of Twin Peaks, gave up on it like many viewers halfway into season two, right before Mr. Boylan's role expanded. Recently I reviewed a few episodes I had missed: in them, Mr. Boylan was light and droll playing an elderly man with a trophy girlfriend, embroiled in a bitter rivarly with his brother, the elected head of a town without the slightest idea of what was going on in it. No small feat in David Lynch-land, he was good at downplaying the oddities and keeping things real.

This obit, written after his death in 1994, covers much of the same ground I have here. On a personal note, I would add that it's a major irony, a fitting circularity of sorts to currently live so close to where he spent most of his own life. I also see John Boylan's life as an illustrative example for how the creative impulse can take hold of someone at any age. It's somewhat chagrining to pay tribute to somebody who passed away fourteen years ago; but then again, that's a testament to the beauty, the staying power of art. Thanks for being a part of my life, Mr. Boylan. I'm a fan.

Getting Our Hate On: The Fun and Fury in Panning Movies

It began as a tingle, followed by a buzz, then a full-fledged endorphin rush. An abstract thought became a physical sensation that consumed me for the better part of the evening. All the roiling passions that normally I suppress, like a handwringer in a Jane Austen novel, were cathartically unleashed. I felt a giddiness, a moment of clarity, and then I had the horrifying realization that M. Night Shyamalan was to thank for it. I hate M. Night Shyamalan, you see. I hate all his movies, even the ones I kind of like, even the ones I haven't seen. That a filmmaker can inspire such feelings is not one to be taken lightly, no matter how overrated or incompetent he might otherwise be. Writing about The Happening, sight unseen, something happened to me.

Movies are for anybody and everybody, but sometimes I wonder if it takes a movie buff to truly despise one. To feel personally betrayed by a film, to form demarcation lines between your likes and dislikes, to get so emotionally invested that all rationality is tossed out the window. Pauline Kael got angry at movies she felt let her down or otherwise offended her in some way. (Of Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, she famously wrote: "He has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.") Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, either individually or in unison, were capable of obliterating a film that they loathed. Yet Siskel and Ebert could be savagely funny in their hatred, even made a gimmick of it early in their television career with a skunk mascot that would introduce the "Stinker of the Week." (Kael was sometimes hilarious too, though she could also come across as a killjoy.) But their pans weren't always fun and games. Readers of the current kid-gloves Ebert might be surprised to examine his disembowelment of Blue Velvet upon its initial 1986 release. Ebert and Lynch traded body blows for a good solid run through the 80s and early 90s; after they patched things up (somewhere around The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive), their dynamic became less interesting.

Grudge matches between critics and artists are rare these days. The former in the print media are generally too vulnerable and exposed to risk a major offensive, while the latter too hermetically sealed to touch. (When a stray brickbat does manage to reach the likes of Shyamalan or George Lucas, they tend to overreact violently, like Roman emperors scorching the earth in Germania.) Urbane types like Anthony Lane have it easier, as they produce what Matt Zoller Seitz has called a "cocktail party detachment" that is witty yet inoffensive. Despite his impersonality, I get a kick out of Lane. And I'm unduly fond of Joe Queenan, whose shticky misanthropy masks a deep and genuine affection for unloved "bad" movies. (Queenan's real ire is aimed at tony Hollywood gloss.) The same cannot be said for Charles Taylor, whose criticism, for all its keen insight, often feels like a nail driven into my skull, or for Armond White, whose Biblical sternness grows repetitive and wearisome. (The caption for White's take-down of The Happening -- "Shyamalan's a Ding-Dong" -- may be the only time I've ever laughed reading one of his reviews.) Even when you realize they have a point, you don't want to get anywhere near it.


I'm not sure if my hatred for All Things Shyamalan is amusing or off-putting; only that I, at least, have always enjoyed it. I couldn't believe the rain of roses that fell upon The Sixth Sense, and the movie's ardent fans couldn't believe that I couldn't believe it. I cringed at the film's melodramtic contrivances, starting with Donnie Wahlberg wailing in the bathroom and ending with the videotape of the mother-poisoner. I rolled my eyes at the mystical mumbo-jumbo that felt like the repertoire of a New Age huckster, particularly when juxtaposed with his facile shock tactics. I guessed the surprise ending fairly early on, and I'm normally terrible at that sort of thing; it was just obvious to me that Shyamalan had read An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and seen Jacob's Ladder and fortunately (or unfortunately) I had too. In the years that followed, I hated the comparisons of Shyamalan to Hitchcock and Spielberg, his raging ego, his uncredited plagiarisms, his evangelical followers. Feeling like a pariah can produce one of two responses -- either you drink the Kool-Aid or you embrace your solitude, and when it came to Shyamalan I was smug with certainty that I Was Right.

Still, it was more fun to hate him in his heyday. Despite a sense of vindication from the gradually diminishing returns of Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, The Lady in the Water, and now The Happening, I'm now feeling a perverse impulse to defend him. I even laughed at Bob Balaban's deconstruction of his own demise in Lady in the Water (which I recently saw for the first time), a character and scene that became the bane of film critics everywhere. Do some of us soften with pity toward a reviled filmmaker when it seems that everyone else is dogpiling on top of him? Is our hatred intensified when we feel in the minority?


This certainly seems to be the case with There Will Be Blood, the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson which, as everyone knows, received near unanimous raves when released earlier this year. I've often called Anderson the greatest director who pisses me off. Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love all tried my patience to inexorable degrees, yet I stuck with them and, in retrospect, feel more affection toward them than to other movies I've enjoyed a whole lot more. Anderson is a polarizing figure, one whose fans are inadvertently cineastes and who lacks the populist base Shyamalan has (or perhaps had). His detractors, however, are equally fierce (one recently called Magnolia "quite simply the worst movie of all time") and like to use unflattering comparisons to Altman to buttress their arguments. (That Altman himself was one of Anderson's biggest admirers is conveniently overlooked.) Personally, I was surprised by how much I loved There Will Be Blood. Certain difficulties aside, I think it's his most accessible film, the cinematic equivalent of late-19th early-20th century "naturalist" novels, a lumbering epic with an intimate scale. It felt like a rarity, a movie for me; but I also could understand that it's not for everybody.

Even so, I was taken aback by the hostility of some toward the film and its director. I'm not referring to Charles Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek, former admirers of Anderson, whose disdain is more understandable within its proper Paulette context. (Both, I'm willing to bet, were perturbed by the film's homages to Kubrick -- a favorite target of Kael's -- more than anything else.) Among the movie's most impassioned haters have been Odie Henderson, N.P. Thompson and Russell Brown. Odie, at least, knows how to craft a sharp, funny rant. (Responding to Ed Copeland's review, he wrote: "His fanboys call him 'P.T. Anderson' because it evokes another P.T.: P.T. Barnum. [Barnum] said 'There's a sucker born every minute.' I think Anderson's counting on it with this film, his most empty film ever.") Thompson, in contrast, hates so many different films in the same relentlessly unvaried manner that it's hard to take him seriously. (His infamous attack on Slate's film critics had more energy and wit.) Ditto Brown, with whom Thompson feels a deep kinship over There Will Be Blood. Brown's manifesto, written back in January, reiterates Odie's belief that Anderson's movie is a con-job and takes issue with what the author sees as numerous plot holes:

"So many character beats arrive and depart without explanation. Why does Plainview not bless the well? Why does Sunday never confront Plainview about not blessing the well? Why does Sunday's brother arrive and provide Plainview with the location of the oil? Why does Anderson imply that Sunday and his brother are the same person? How does Sunday get the money to build the new Church, if Plainview never gave him the $5,000? Why did Plainview never take his son to be healed, and then get angry at Sunday for not being able to heal him? Why did Plainview adopt the baby? Why does the grown up son suddenly hate his father so much? Why does the street-smart Plainview so easily accept a stranger as his brother? And then why does he suddenly turn and kill him, one scene after he discovers the truth? Why does Plainview's son try to burn down the house? Why does the son read the diary upside down? Why does Sunday tell us that the Bandy's son is handsome and wants to be an actor in Hollywood (is Sunday now gay?) If Sunday is such a successful radio preacher, is it really plausible that he would turn to Plainview after the stock market crash? Why does Sunday not age a single year over the entire run of the film?"

Brown's piling on specious inquiries reminds me of creationist rebukes against evolution. (Why do human beings have eyes? Why are there stars in the sky? Why do you want to make Baby Jesus cry?) It's hard to know where to start responding, given the sheer wrongheadedness of the context. I would suggest that it's blatantly obvious why Plainview doesn't bless the well: to piss off his rival Eli and undercut his power grab. Plainview accepts a stranger as his brother (actually half-brother) because that stranger produces a letter written by his mother as evidence, and also because it's clear Plainview feels isolated following H.W.'s loss of hearing. As for the confusion generated by Paul Dano's dual roles, at what point does Anderson "imply" that Eli and Paul Sunday are the same person? That they are brothers is mentioned on multiple occasions; frankly, I found it refreshing that the filmmaker didn't shoehorn in a slog of tedious exposition:

ELI: Hi, I'm Eli Sunday. Paul Sunday's brother. We're twins!
DANIEL PLAINVIEW: You're twins, you say?
ELI: Yes, we are twins. We were born at the same time. That is why we look the same.
H.W.: So the two of you are twins?
ELI: Yes, we are played by the same actor! Please, stay and have dinner with my family. Everybody will be there, except of course for my brother Paul, whom you met earlier in the movie. Did I mention we're twins?

Real con artists, like Shyamalan, treat their marks as children. He spells things out slowly, in big block letters. Anderson, in contrast, provides just enough hints to his characters' motives while retaining an aura of mystery. He has enough confidence in his audience that they'll figure things out for themselves.

Big mistake. Indeed, I cannot recall the last time I read so many near-willful misreadings of a movie -- even among its admirers, who have not helped their cause. (There Will Be Blood is a "horror-comedy" the way Schindler's List is a musical.) Brown echoes the claims by Zacharek and others that Day-Lewis's performance repeats the same beats over and over again (if you think the scene where Plainview spoons with H.W. following his accident is the same as everything that comes before it, you're too busy scribbling bogus questions in your notebook) and goes on to claim that the film doesn't tell us anything new about greed or religion. But is it really about those things? I think a commenter at Dennis Cozzalio's hit upon it when he speculated that what's throwing people about There Will Be Blood is actually that the characters are all too specific, that they don't represent anything but themselves. Like all of Anderson's films, There Will Be Blood is foremost about family. Plainview, for all his fortune, ends up imprisoned within his mansion; whereas his adopted son, despite a debilitating injury, finds love, makes connections with others and seizes a chance at freedom. The relationship between these two characters is the heart of the movie, and I found it interesting, complicated, tragic, unexpected and moving.

On the surface, there are reasons why I should love Shyalaman (striking visuals, appreciation of silence, aspirations for classical storytelling) and why I should hate Anderson (strenuousness, high decibel level, rampant emotionalism). That it's the opposite may be because Shyamalan is always claiming to have the answers, whereas Anderson is interested in the questions. A typical theme in a Shyamalan film is "believe in God or he'll kill your kids." A recurring theme in an Anderson film is the unpredictable nature of human beings. I'm not sure why H.W. starts the fire in There Will Be Blood, though I suspect it has to do with his feelings of estrangement due to his injury and the arrival of Plainview's alleged half-brother. In any case, the image forges a poetic link with the fiery engulfment of the oil derrick that preceeds it; it's an entry into the boy's unexpressed state of mind.

Emotions are equally unpredictable creatures. It's possible, perhaps even probable, that I'll hate one of P. T. Anderson's movies someday. And who knows, maybe M. Night Shyamalan will make a film that I love. But will I hate loving him as much as I love hating him? There truly is a thin line.

Music to My Ears

A good piece on two of the best, most unsung composers in the bizness. Not long ago I had hailed Michael Giacchino's music for Lost as the best on TV since Christophe Beck's work for Joss Whedon, but I also have to give props to Bear McCreary, whose score on Battlestar Galactica is always eccentric and unexpected. Neither Giacchino nor McCreary have yet had a Whedon for a director, somebody with whose overriding vision their music can fuse, but for now their work is pretty spectacular on its own.

Daddy-O

It's your day. And when it comes to dads, there's really no comparison.

I'll take you over this guy any day:



And definitely this guy:



This one's a no-brainer:



This distinguished gentleman may seem tempting; but nah, you're still on top:



Happy Father's Day!