Daniel Day Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a guy who loves oil, back in the old days when oil was a big deal. Paul Dano is a guy who may or may not be a great preacher. Sunday lives above "an ocean of oil". Plainview wants the land. Eli wants some money for his church.
That's all you really need to know about the plot. I love Anderson's "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights" which both used large casts of gifted actors. This one just needs Daniel Day-Lewis. He is amazing, scary, crazy and hilarious and reason enough to go see this movie. Paul Dano is an excellent counterpart and any scene with the two of them together is gold, especially when Plainview is coerced into getting baptized.
At first I didn't know how I felt about the ending. Maybe because I was expecting something to top a frog storm or a botched drug deal set to "Jessie's Girl". Not a bad ending just somewhat anticlimactic for a 158 minute movie. Maybe I'll change my mind when I see it again.
My pick for this years Oscar.
8.5/10
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
Ok. A photojournalist and his girlfriend and their two kids who move into a house where a door appears that wasn't there when they moved in, and behind that door is a seemingly endless hallway. When the photojournalist and his buds investigate this, all hell breaks loose. It was all documented and made into a film called "The Navidson Record".
"The Navidson Record" I like. Unfortunately it's just a part of "House of Leaves". It goes like this:
-- Story of "The Navidson Record"
--Endless theories, articles, footnotes, and interviews about "The Navidson Record" compiled by a blind guy who just died named Zampano.
-- and endless added footnotes and life stories by Johnny Truant, a tatoo parlor intern who goes crazy for some reason after going through everything Zampano left behind.
It's kind of like a DVD of a movie with audio commentary, a documentary and deleted scenes. Only those things are all cut together into one really long movie and you can't watch just the movie. And the documentary is more about the guy making the documentary then the movie.
"House of Leaves" is well written, and definitely unique, but after awhile I just started to wish it was about 200 pages shorter. If it was just the part about the house and the hallway, no footnotes or theories (there are hundreds of fake magazine article references) then I would say
7.5/10
but....
6/10.
Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch
A short book about Lynch's thought process and creativity.
I'm not necessarily a big fan of Lynch's work, but I still think he's interesting. All the chapters are between one sentence and three pages about everything from his movies, his idols, and broad topics like drugs, beauty and cinema.
He spends a great deal of the book talking about the benefits of transcendental meditation, without really going into much detail about what it actually involves. After looking it up online it turns out it involves a $2500 course fee. The book already seems like a TM brochure, this just made it worse.
5/10.
4/150 movies
2/15 books
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