There Will Be Blood

dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

For the first 15 or so minutes of There Will Be Blood, the only dialogue heard is a whispered "there she is... there she is." The "she" in question is a hint of silver discovered at the bottom of a dubiously constructed well; the speaker is Daniel Plainview (a truly frightening Daniel Day-Lewis), a prospector whose ruthless drive and brutal disdain for humanity eventually take him from mining the land to leasing the oil rights for vast spreads of it. "There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking," he later hisses, and it's this bleak outlook that fuels his competitive streak. There may be an ocean of oil underneath Southern California, but to his mind, the only one worthy of touching it is Plainview himself.

Loosely based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson's masterful film charts Plainview's rise from meager wildcatter to obscenely wealthy recluse. It's a course littered with destroyed lives and abandoned families, all for the sake of Plainview's unwavering competitiveness—a competitiveness that keeps him alive even as it kills his very soul. Among those cast aside along the oilman's destructive path are his own adoptive son H. W. (Dillon Freasier) and a young preacher named Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), whose congregation has leased its barely habitable land to Plainview for the promise of a new, richer life. Eli sees Plainview as a source of funding for his arrogant needs; Plainview believes Eli to be a charlatan—both men are more similar than they'd like to admit.

Tempering his usual fireworks, Anderson has crafted a true American epic. No single shot seems inconsequential; even at 158 minutes, the film feels lean. It's a patient, beautifully acted film—cynical on its surface, yet a tragedy at its core. And though the film flirts with disaster during its final reel, the bravura on display during the final act of terror manages to seduce even as it risks repelling you. There Will Be Blood may not be an outright masterpiece, but it's as close as a film can get. BRADLEY STEINBACHER

Elliptic and Unbridled: The Early Films of Béla Tarr

Starts Tues Jan 8 at Northwest Film Forum

It's all about reality. From the beginning to the end, the real is what matters in Béla Tarr's early films: the realities of family life, the realities of a friendship, the realities of work, the realities of socialism. When we watch his early movies (made between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s), we are in the world as we know and experience it. God does not play a part in Tarr's Hungarian dramas, nor does a line exist between actual people and actors. There are no performances, no miracles, nor much of a director in this spare and raw cinema.

The family is the subject of his early films. The family that is crammed in a small room (Family Nest, Jan 8–9); the family that is falling apart (The Outsider, Jan 15–16); the family that is falling apart in a small room (The Prefab People—the best of this period—Jan 22–23). Tarr's families are never happy; his marriages are ground to a halt by the weight of irreconcilable contradictions. These contradictions are generated by biological and social factors. Biologically, Tarr's women are the complete opposite of his men. So far apart are female and male bodies that often sexual intercourse cannot be initiated or completed. The couple just gives up on it and turns to opposite sides of the bed, as in The Prefab People. One could argue that this failure to connect sexually has to do with a loss of love in the marriage, but one gets the sense that even when there was lots of love and desire, sex was still difficult to accomplish. One scene in The Outsider has four men in bed with one drunken woman who is willing: The men are naked, she is naked, but the scene ends up being empty rather than sexy.

As for social factors, the men want to do things that the women don't want them to do. Men want to drink with their mates, to watch football, to sing and play music. The state of the marriage is not a high priority. In fact, one chubby character in The Outsider admires Beethoven because the musical genius focused on his art and did not get married or mess with children. The women want more than their men can give; they want more time with them, more commitment to the marriage, more praise and worship. The women have these demands, the men refuse to meet them, and the consequence is grief and gloom.

The most important thing that Tarr's early movies have contributed to cinema is the art of the long conversation. These exchanges between two people are the closest we get to a miracle: the amazing shape of the lips, the words, the ears; the eyes that look into the other's eyes for more words and revelations. Because his characters are addicted to nicotine, the words travel through a thick fog of smoke. But the words never get lost, and they often have a lot to carry on the trip between lips and ears, between speaking persons. The words are loaded because the things of the heart are often heavy. Where is my life going? What do I do now that I don't have a job? Can I continue to live with this person sleeping next to me? Do I still love him? Is socialism the end of the road? The conversations in Tarr's movies are long because there are many things in the heart and on the mind. The conversations are also long because reality has no limit. Reality is endless. CHARLES MUDEDE

The Orphanage

dir. Juan Antonio Bayona

I really don't get the whole concept of ghosts. I mean, why are ghosts supposedly so mad all the time? Isn't a ghost just somebody's grandpa? My grandpa was a Norwegian carpenter named Ole who smoked a pipe and ate licorice all day. Why would he go haunt somebody? Isn't there enough licorice in heaven? I don't know a single person who's been killed—or even inconvenienced—by a ghost, and that's why being afraid of a ghost is a waste of time. You know what I'm afraid of? A HUNGRY LION! A guy with a knife! A see-through grandpa who just hangs around your house all day and rearranges the furniture (and sometimes makes a noise!) is NOT SCARY.

Anyway. The Orphanage is a movie about Spanish ghosts—specifically baby ghosts, which are even less scary than grown-up ghosts (if that's possible). A woman named Laura (Belen Rueda) moves back to the orphanage where she spent her childhood. She has a handsome-ish husband (Fernando Cayo) and the world's cutest baby son (with AIDS!) and her orphanage is a magic Spanish castle by the sea. Unfortunately for Laura, she also has... ghooooooosts!!!

The ghosts are lonely and bored, so they start kickin' it with Laura's baby son, and that's when the problems arise. The head ghost, Tomás, wears a dirty sack mask with rotten eyeholes and a janky face painted on it—a horror-movie cheap shot if I've ever seen one. Granted, it's fucking creepy looking, but again: What exactly is a baby ghost going to DO to me after it crawls into my bed at night and I think it's my handsome-ish husband? Cuddle me TO DEATH?

The Orphanage is medium-scary, as long as you don't think about how dumb ghosts are. In fact, the worst shit in the movie is done to humans by humans—not ghosts. Because ghosts just want to be pals, you know? LINDY WEST

He Was a Quiet Man

dir. Frank Cappello

An ungainly movie about an unsympathetic office drone named Bob (Christian Slater), He Was a Quiet Man expends considerable energy illustrating Bob's grimy, hateful, misogynist world and absolutely none critiquing it. Unless a comb-over counts as a critique.

Bob, always with the creepy-guy metal glasses, the creepy-guy gray windbreaker, and that symbolically weighty comb-over, spends his days at a defense contractor crossing out numbers with a red felt pen and lust-hating on the pretty, powerful ladies in his office. We know—nay, we pray—he's an unreliable narrator, because of a patently stupid (not to mention ungrammatical) introductory voiceover: "Women demanded equality and she got it. Not by getting everything the man had but by the man being castrated into the form of a woman. I don't care what you say. It's not progress; it's not evolution. It's a disease." Boo fucking hoo. Bob fantasizes about blowing up his building with the touch of a button (the film owes more than a little to Fight Club), but lacking the technological prowess (he's castrated, remember?), he settles for a gun.

Just when he's about to riddle his coworkers with bullets, however, some other disgruntled guy lets loose. Bob admires the carnage, then chats up the killer about his motives. Suddenly, the two homicidal maniacs realize one victim, the pretty Venessa (Elisha Cuthbert), is still alive. Sensing an opportunity, Bob kills the shooter and saves Venessa's life.

He Was a Quiet Man is efficiently directed, and the low-budget CGI—mostly devoted to animating Bob's chatty pet fish—is admirably unobtrusive. But the script is a travesty. Why would we find the fulfillment of Bob's sadistic fantasies pleasurable? Why is it fun to watch him throw up in some bitchy girl's cleavage? How is it remotely interesting to see the now-paralyzed Venessa consent to have Bob fondle her insensate breasts? Writer-director-producer Frank Cappello caps the action with a sort-of-revisionist ending, but it only works if you were totally psyched about the events of the previous hour. Chances are, you won't be. ANNIE WAGNER