Monday, March 17, 2008

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould


This experimentally-structured dissection of the life of reclusive Canadian pianist Glenn Gould is far more watchable than it has any right to be. The short films referred to in the title are spread across a range of styles and genres - from talking heads through dramatic reconstructions and including abstract pieces set to Gould's performances and compositions.

Gould himself, a child prodigy and concert pianist star at a young age, retired from performing in the 1960s at the tender age of 32 to concentrate on recorded performance (a trick the Beatles would pull two years later). In the majority of the films here he is played by Colm Feore, who captures the essence of an idiosyncratic - arguably obsessive-compulsive - personality.

Director Francois Girard follows a loose chronology though Gould's life, breaking the biographical sections up with a range of excellent - occasionally inspired - shorts centred around the man's music. These include snippets of cinematic expression similar to those found in Fantasia, enacted or genuine response to the music, abstract animation, and perhaps most memorably one astonishing sequence of X-ray video footage.

This is not a film for entertaining the family on a weekday afternoon, but - for those so inclined to watch - is is gripping, fascinating and beautiful. As an artistic exploration of one man's life and work, and a study of the music that engulfed it, the film is a triumph.
4/5

Sunday, March 16, 2008

There Will Be Blood



This breathtaking masterpiece from director Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the best American films in decades. Uniquely innovative from start to finish - both in Anderson's excellent script and his unorthodox direction - it also contains a career-best performance from the finest actor of his generation.

Daniel Day Lewis has had a career notable for its consistent level of excellence, no doubt due in part to his highly selective choice of roles. Here, he portrays an entrepreneur and self-proclaimed "oil-man" on his rise to wealth and power in the first decades of the twentieth century. On screen for virtually the entirety of the near-three hours of There Will Be Blood, his complete, full-blooded, human and ultimately demonic portrayal of a man's spiralling collapse within his own soul deservedly won him a second Best Actor gong at this year's Oscars.

The rest of the cast is also excellent, especially the young Paul Dano (best known as the one who doesn't speak in Little Miss Sunshine) who excels in a difficult role as a proto-evangelist preacher. Religion is a core aspect of the areas examined by the film, but Anderson does not presume to pass comment for or against it. Instead, religion and the economics of oil exploration are fused into a complex exploration of a number of issues underlying the surface fabric of the film.

Many reviews have praised the depiction of the period setting, but it isn't hard to see through this to a modern America, being chewed up by oil and religion. Both are seen as blood, coursing respectively through earth and society, a blood which boils up in the veins and arteries of the central character and is unleashed as cholic hatred on all within range.

The power and brilliance of There Will Be Blood is almost overwhelming on a first viewing - due in no small part to Johnny Greenwood's astonishing experimental score - and the film demands a second viewing. Watching it is like having your guts pulled out through your stomach, and yet somehow you leave the cinema walking on air. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
5/5