There Will Be Blood

Daniel Day-Lewis is pure, foreboding menace in “There Will Be Blood.” Although, when he finally unleashes the full force of his menace, it is not entirely what is expected. Nor, likewise, is the blood alluded to in the title precisely what one would expect from the cleverly edited promotional trailers, although plenty of the red stuff flows.

Based upon the Upton Sinclair novel, “Oil!,” the film could easily have been mere anti-capitalist propaganda, but director Paul Thomas Anderson focuses more on themes of family, ambition and envy. Anderson doesn’t make short films and “Blood” is no exception, clocking in at nearly three hours. But whereas previous movies featured a large, Altman-esque cast of characters, Day-Lewis is the sole, scene-chewing focus of nearly every frame of “There Will Be Blood.” It’s one of those performances that shouts, give me my fucking Oscar or I’ll cut your fucking throat. Or bash your head in with a bowling pin 17 years from now. It’s a mesmerizing performance, and easily worth a six and a half dollars matinee ticket.

Nothing Is Revealed

Todd Haynes’ new anti-biopic, “I’m Not There,” lives up to its hype as the perfect film distillation of the life and legend of Bob Dylan. The stories of six Dylan-like characters (played, among others, by a 13-year-old black boy, a British actress, Richard Gere and Batman) intertwine, and, naturally, nothing is revealed.

The soundtrack is fantastic, including covers by a who’s who of middle-aged alt-rock and a terrific selection of Dylan classics and overlooked gems like “Blind Willie McTell” and the early version of “Idiot Wind” that wound up on the cutting room floor for “Blood On The Tracks.” The title is taken from a heretofore unreleased “basement tapes” recording, one of those haunting songs that Dylan recorded in one take and perversely never touched again, much to the chagrin of us cultists. It turns up here in a re-mastered mix and Sonic Youth cover.

Cultists, the only folks who could properly enjoy two and a half hours of abstract Dylanology, will have a field day with character names, set decoration and other sly references to songs both popular and rare. The rest of the squares, like the couple sitting behind me who would not shut up, will content themselves by pointing out that Cate Blanchett’s insufferable-prick-era “Dylan,” Jude Quinn, “probably means the Rolling Stones,” when introducing Brian Jones as a member of “that cute little cover band.”

For many, the scenes that stretch hardest for credibility are Richard Gere as Billy the Kid-in-hiding, after escaping Pat Garrett’s bullet. For me, this is the most enjoyable part of the film. It’s a tribute and celebration of Dylan’s weird and wonderful “basement tapes” period; a tangled up mix of Americana from the Civil Way to the Dust Bowl, with circus freaks and outlaws and ostriches, that somehow makes sense of non-sensical lyrics like “pack up the meat, sweet” and “open the door, Homer.” It’s a visual delight for any true Dylan freak.

John Turturro’s Queens Musical

It’s hard to imagine in this DVD age that John Turtuorro’s “Romance and Cigarettes” could languish in a studio vault, largely unseen by the public, for over two years. In many ways a valentine to Queens, particularly the areas down south by Kennedy airport, where things get weird, Turturro’s working class characters break into song and dance when feeling most dreary and desperate. It’s a familiar device to fans of Dennis Potter, but unlike “The Singing Detective” or “Pennies From Heaven,” “Romance and Cigarettes” neglect to weigh down its narrative with believable drama.

The family at the heart of the story are hard to take seriously, with Aida Turturro and Mary Louise Parker playing James Gandolfini’s daughters. The characters are probably supposed to be teenagers, or at least in their early twenties, if their living at home and playing in a backyard punk rock band is supposed to be believable rather than just weird. Steve Buscemi, as Gandolfini’s best friend, doesn’t so much participate in dialogue as throw out a lot of sexually graphic non-sequitors, while Kate Winslet is “a crude broad.” Don’t get me wrong. They’re all a hoot, but it doesn’t add up so much for a compelling drama as a series of hysterical vignettes.

A clear highlight is Christoper Walken, already verging on self-parody, breaking out into his “Weapon of Choice” dance for his rendition of Tom Jones’ “Delilah,” including a dance with the lover he has just knifed. Gandolfini’s theme song, Englerbert Humperdink’s “Man Without Love,” is presented as an adorable montage of the men (and boys) of Howard Beach lip-sinking its lovelorn lyrics while going about their daily routine.

“Romance and Cigarettes,” which is playing in a limited run at the Film Forum, will apparently be given a limited release in theaters shortly. It probably won’t come to a theater near you. But it would be worth a rental on DVD, if it ever gets released in such a format.

Watching the Detectives

I want to be Philip Marlowe. Or maybe Nick Charles. My favorite kinds of movies are film noir, particularly the hard-boiled detective genre. I love the interplay of shadows and light in black and white. I love the cynical worldview, the disdain for scruples, morals and basic decency. I love that the characters drink rye and gin, smoke Chesterfields, wear fedoras and ties, consult the phone directory for research and do any number of other terribly old-fashioned things. I love the women – tall, thin, legs for miles, usually dressed in black and up to no good.

But, mostly, I hero worship the gumshoe protagonists. The hard-boiled detective is the ultimate male fantasy. He is how we would all like to envision ourselves: suave, a sense of style, quick-witted and sarcastic, a healthy appetite for liquor that actually serves to sharpen his senses, seemingly irresistible to women, knows when he’s being played and always saves the day. Dashiell Hammett, the ultimate master of the genre, acknowledged this male fantasy aspect in the creation of one of his most famous characters, Sam Spade:

“Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not, or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague, want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”

The protagonist from Hammett’s early novels, the nameless Continental Op, was just such a Holmes-like solver of riddles. These – “The Dain Curse” and “Red Harvest” – are true mystery novels, emphasizing clues and plot twists over character, as the Continental Op has none. It was with Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” that the detective story developed true heroes. The detective hero in Hammett’s final novel, Nick Charles, has character in spades. Seen as a mash note to his lover Lillian Hellman, “The Thin Man” presents a male fantasy of a committed relationship: to a saucy heiress half his age, who mixes his drinks, massages his shoulders, countenances a fair amount of hanky panky with the novel’s femme fatales and helps him compile the clues to the mystery.

Raymond Chandler, the author who is credited as carrying Hammett’s hard-boiled mantle, did not improve upon his predecessor’s economy of words nor his gripping plots, as most of Chandler’s stories were obvious and perfunctory. But he did create the ultimate Hollywood detective: Philip Marlowe. With a back story that involves getting fired from the D.A.’s office for political reasons, Marlowe has charm of the renegade hero that Hollywood has been trying to imitate in action and adventure movies ever since. Always too quick to mouth off to cops and criminals, Marlowe frequently takes his punches and his nights in the clink. His bottle of whiskey is conveniently available to loosen up a suspect or an already loose woman. Usually hard up for cash, he nevertheless passes up opportunities to shake down his clients and often shields them from the wives, daughters and mistresses who are scandalizing them. Still, he’s no softie (“I don’t like your manner, Mr. Marlowe.” “That’s all right. I’m not selling it.”).

Playing Marlowe in the movies is a kind of drag. The early actors – Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell, George Montgomery and the best of the lot, Humphrey Bogart – played him as the traditional tough guy of noir stereotype. James Caan played an older, wearier Marlowe in “Poodle Springs.” Robert Mitchum brought his unique brand of cool to a British adaptation in the 1970’s, perhaps because the stiffness and properness of the 1940’s U.S.A. could only be recreated in the 1970’s by transporting the tale to England. Elliott Gould, also in the 70’s, played Marlowe as a man out of time in sunny L.A. That portrayal, in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” is perhaps most intriguing for the purposes of this article. Following his iconoclastic “M*A*S*H*,” it was hoped that Altman would do for noir genre what he did for the war movie and make a kind of a “Trapper John, PI.” While Gould maintains his roguish charm, Altman maintains a certain reverence for the Marlowe archetype. He tips his hat to the nudists next door and refuses to loosen his tie even on the beach. All the characters around him tease him for his old-fashioned ways.

The film was not a success, although a recent revival at the Film Forum landed Elliott Gould on the cover of the Village Voice decades after his curious period as a smart-ass Jewish matinee heartthrob. Instead of a revival of noir, the 1970’s saw the rise of Dirty Harry and other vigilante heroes, who in turn gave rise to that loathsome archetype, the action hero. In place of black suits and fedoras, we get ripped t-shirts and bulging muscles. In place of flirtatious banter and crossed legs, we get an inarticulate bodybuilder gnawing on some starlet’s tits at around the 50 minute mark in a well-choreographed bedroom romp. In place of investigation and deduction, we get explosions and lots of them.

Why has the action hero replaced the hard-boiled detective as the male fantasy? I would chalk it up to sort of generalized anxiety that men feel about their role in society these days, except that the hard-boiled fantasy is also about being in control (of the situation, of life, of women). Maybe the difference between the two stock types is too little to fret over, and I’m just guilty once again of being nostalgic for a time before I was born.