Man, I could stare at Daniel Day Lewis’s crazy face for hours. Not in a "What would it be like to kiss him" way, more in a wallpaper-on-acid kind of way. All his expressions and facial tics have this weird manneristic thing where it’s like he’s pushing his features just past the point where they should be physically able to go. Actually it’s a lot like when you’re tripping and people smile too hard, just he does it with every emotion. Then there’s his accent which peaks through a couple times in the movie, like in how he inflects things like "Well then" and "Let’s go," and makes him seem even more creepy and disjointed. I read in an interview with someone who’s buddies with him that all that deep-method-acting business has left him more or less a permanent composite of all the characters he’s ever played. Not sure exactly how true it is, but with all respect to his family and the folks who have to put up with him on a daily basis, that’s pretty awesome.

As for the rest of the movie, I saw it at a press screening almost a month ago and am still trying to fully digest it, but I’d say it was pretty good. I certainly wouldn’t stick my tongue as far up its ass as the rest of the press. Best movie of the year? Did you all forget about a little summer sleeper called fucking Pathfinder? Apology accepted.

I think what’s been sticking in my craw about There Will Be Blood is how little anything in the film gets explained. You get that crazy font at the beginning with the title and the date, then you’re in the middle of some brush-desert, Lewis is hammering at a vein of coal, and everything just goes straight on from there. Maybe this would be clear to somebody from California, but I spent the entire movie assuming it was set somewhere in Texas (which made the scene where they ride on horseback to the Pacific really odd). Obviously it’s not Paul Thomas Anderson’s fault that I couldn’t be bothered to read a single blurb about the film or the book it was based on, and I’m not saying it’s bad that everything isn’t spelled out in black and white. More movies should leave shit unexplained. Nothing kills a joke quite like having to break it down for some dunce, and I think the same is equally true for "serious art." Folks just don’t like to admit it with the latter because they think it’s being mean to stupid people or that all interpretations of art are somehow valid, no matter how shitty and unfounded they may be.

Leaving big gaps in the story and its background for the audience to fill in also makes you really flex your brain and also go out and learn about crap. For instance, in the case of this movie I started out one of those dunces furrowing my brow in the theater and now I know everything about the history of the oil rush in turn-of-the-century California and Signal Hill. Or at least everything that’s on wikipedia. Or at least everything that I skimmed on wikipedia before I got bored and decided to check out the page they’ve got for 45 Grave (pretty decent).

Anyhow, that’s it. Good film, little challenging or whatever. You should see it sometime.

GUNTY McMURFREES

PS: I never saw Little Miss Sunshine so the fact that that dude is playing the preacher didn’t seem weird to me.