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By Cole Smithey

‘There Will Be Blood’

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Paul Thomas Anderson has grown immensely as a writer/director since his last picture (“Punch Drunk Love”), so much so that in a single film he has become America’s most visionary and accomplished modern-day auteur. Anderson based “There Will Be Blood” on the first 150 pages of Upton Sinclair’s lesser known novel “Oil!” about a 1920s oil miner named Daniel Plainview (exquisitely played by Daniel Day-Lewis) who strikes it rich after being approached by the twin brother of a young preacher about purchasing his family’s oil-rich land in Southern California. Paul Dano (“Little Miss Sunshine”) plays evangelist Eli Sunday, a man with Plainview’s avaricious heart but not his iron stomach for exacting the pounds of flesh that come with such thickly veiled ambition. Embedded in Anderson’s profoundly epic literary adaptation is timeless themes of savage greed, blatant corruption and social oppression that reflect the corporate, economic and ecological injustices ravaging the world today.

At the heart of the story is a rivalry of showmanship between Plainview and Sunday as opposite sides of the same cast-iron coin. The young minister has a knack for the theater of the pulpit where he casts spells over the local citizens of a rugged desert town that wants desperately to be funded by a veritable Niagara of cash that Plainview’s oil-drilling promises. Both men are self-made inventions so invested in their presentational lies that there is no room for any inner voice of conscious to interrupt the tyranny of their intentions. But Sunday is a rank amateur compared to Plainview whose carefully guarded sense of personal responsibility lends the film its crucible of thematic essence.

After a mine accident kills the father of a young boy mysteriously named H.W., Plainview adopts the lad and treats him as an equal business partner. Dressed in a double-breasted suit and tie, H.W. (played with astonishing maturity by newcomer Dillon Freasier) serves as an ideal foil for Plainview to win over the sympathy of locals and business associates. Moreover H.W. represents a link to human warmth for Plainview, whose singular focus on oil and profit would otherwise neglect. Still, Plainview is not much of a father figure as he proves when H.W. is made deaf by an oil strike accident. The tragic circumstance gives the film its emotional spine that will be crushed into dust before Plainview’s self-loathing and deep-seeded anger brings the final curtain down.

“There Will Be Blood” is a historically rooted parable that traces a vital path of Western culture through the industrial revolution via a primitive man who sees a prevalent opportunity and selfishly sets about claiming all he can for himself. It is about an iconic archetype of a man who starts out with the barest trace of human decency, and by the end of his life has none. Aesthetically there is visual, musical, and linguistic poetry in every frame. Plainview’s mechanical nature does not allow the story a traditional life-affirming closure without looking empathetically toward H.W. as a strong individual who learns from the cruel lessons of his surrogate father and escapes his clutches. A more cynical perspective would favor the actual black oil that Plainview uses to build his fortunes as a welcome result to his barbarous methods. From this viewpoint, oil is the fountain of life that feeds generations of hungry people. Anderson embraces the inexplicable facts of reality for their intrinsic dramatic truths, and what we are left with is a complex multiple character study of an evangelical, corporate and political culture.

Composer Jonny Greenwood (of the band Radiohead) creates the film’s fiercely original musical score that expands the scope of the story with unusual sounds that tweak with emotion and strange experience. Anachronistic and phantasmagoric, America’s early race for oil is brought into personal terms that resonate with the withering decay of greed. CV

‘One Missed Call’

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Ed Burns (“Sidewalks of New York,” “15 Minutes”) entrenches himself as Hollywood’s go-to-B-movie actor with an excruciatingly dull remake of a Japanese horror movie that, like every other American attempt at translating the genre, fails from the start. Burns plays Jack Andrews, a hunky detective in a nondescript college town where psychology student Beth (Shannyn Sossamon) witnesses her circle of friends dying in freak accidents after receiving cell phones calls foreshadowing their last words and screams before each violent event actually occurs.

In keeping with the predictable demands of modern Japanese horror, a troubled little girl is responsible for the deadly phenomenon that gives the picture its numerous body count. Director Eric Valette’s fumbling with atmosphere, suspense and surprise further detracts from an already nonsensical script that redoubles the axiom about cell phones being an off-limits movie subjects. If the first wide release movie of 2008 is any indicator of the kind of year a writers’ strike Hollywood has in store, we may all be watching DVDs.

The best scene comes early on when a young woman puts down her cell phone and enjoys the backyard view from her Japanese styled patio overlooking a murky pond where her exotic cat studies the goldfish swimming below. A moldy hand reaches out and snatches the kitty before grabbing the girl with a fast twitch speed that induces a gulp for its striking efficiency. We’re perfectly set up to spend the next hour discovering the identity of a water-breathing swamp killer, but instead the story slips around like a fawn trying to stand up on an oil slick floor.

Unexplained hallucinations of ghoulish characters, both life sized and miniature, with bone white skin and mouths-for-eyes creep into view like puppet rejects from a disused Tim Burton movie. There’s some satisfaction to be had in the death of one of Beth’s obnoxious male friends as we wait for him to repeat his last words before being impaled. Sad then that his is the most developed character the script offers before devolving into a third act tension-free chase scene and late death surprise that oddly comes as a relief rather than with any dread the filmmakers might have intended.

“One Missed Call” is not a movie that the studio heads at Warner Brothers care if audiences see. It’s a throwaway picture meant to fill theater screen space for a week or two with the intention of breaking even as a place-marker to clog up space at a local multiplex that might otherwise play something worth seeing, like “There Will Be Blood.” For audiences who have dutifully worked their way through the litany of great pre-Oscar movies like “Atonement,” “Juno,” “Lars and the Real Girl,” and “No Country For Old Men,” January doesn’t promise much. Diane Lane’s upcoming thriller “Untraceable” looks like a solid horror/suspense bet and Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes winner “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” is required viewing as an insightful character and culture study set in Communist Romania that is pure cinema.   

In the meantime, shabby movies like “One Missed Call” serve to make even mediocre achievements like Woody Allen’s January release “Cassandra’s Dream” seem competent. Perhaps “One Missed Call” won’t break even and Hollywood will learn its lesson about remaking Japanese horror movies. In any event, Burns can still claim to have a career. CV

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