Not Film 2008... but a film review anyway:"There Will Be Blood"

The opening notes of the score set the tone for There Will Be Blood perfectly. As discordant, minor-key strings swell to an uncomfortable volume there can be little escaping the fact that this is a film about misery: the misery of the brutal and unforgiving life of turn-of-the-century oil prospectors; the misery of nascent communities that are promised much and delivered little; and the misery of a man who will not let himself be anything other than driven by black gold.

Daniel Day-Lewis gives a typically intense, method performance as Daniel Plainview, a struggling silver miner turned oil tycoon, in Paul Thomas Anderson's period piece. It's an over-used expression, but Day-Lewis really does inhabit the role, which is just as well since he's on-screen for nearly all of the film's 158 minutes. Robert Elswit's cinematography is equally accomplished in capturing both the grandeur of the untamed West and the claustrophobic intensity of those early mining exploits. And Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood's score is a revelation; taut, edgy, and harrowing in equal measure.

So the film features an award-winning central performance, is visually stunning, and engages the senses... so where does it all go wrong? Before you denounce this reviewer as a cinematic heathen for questioning a film that has garnered more five-star reviews than you can shake a Bafta at, hear me out; whilst Day-Lewis's performance is undeniably praiseworthy, this is a flawed film.

Let's deal with the minor issues first. The film is just too long for one whose themes are relentlessly, remorselessly grim: two and a half hours of badness, sadness and, let's be honest, more than a little madness was too much, even for the discerning art-house audience I sat amongst to watch this. Without doubt the editors could, and should, have wielded the knife a little more. Long doesn't necessarily mean epic, after all.

What of characterisation? Aside from Plainview, none of the characters are developed sufficiently to pique our interest, and I include Paul Dano's Eli Sunday in that. There are even gaping holes in Plainview's story: what, for example, happened in his early life to make him so loveless; why have there been no personal relationships in his life, other than that with his adopted son? If this is to emphasise how he is married to the zealous pursuit of oil riches, then it is rather a blunt instrument for doing so.

The biggest problem, though, is this; the lives of Plainview, his son, the evangelical preacher Sunday and, indeed, the surrounding town all begin to unravel when the pursuit of those oil resources starts to clash with the church. Just why Plainview so takes against Sunday is never adequately explained - it just happens, and leads to increasingly bizarre behaviour all around. Capitalism versus community is an oft-ploughed furrow but here, the plough struggles through stony ground.

There is much to admire in the craft of these film-makers but, beyond artistic appreciation, this is a difficult film to like, about a character with no redeeming features who could not even be described as an anti-hero. Plainview's last line in the film is "I'm finished," and sadly my immediate reaction to that was, "Thank goodness."

There Will Be Blood is out on DVD now so, if you don't buy into my review, scurry along to Amazon and make your own mind up.

David Gedge - a top man, clearly

I need to be careful that this doesn't turn into a music blog, but I saw The Wedding Present last night... and they were truly great. I arrived early at the comparatively small venue and secured a spot right by the stage and, pint of Summer Lightning in hand, settled in for a good night. I've seen the Weddoes many times before, in all sorts of venues, from Koko in Camden right down to the (now sadly defunct, as a live music venue at least) Penny Theatre in Canterbury, and they've always been good. But last night they were excellent, beyond even my fan-boy expectations.

After the well-received support act (the interesting Dawn Landes, a very sweet and musically diverse singer songwriter from New York) had done her thing, the atmosphere - a heady mix of anticipation and good humour - continued to build. At 9.30 the lights were dimmed, and The Wedding Present took to the stage. Frontman David Gedge, pictured left, the only ever-present member of the band's line-up, was in good form, bantering with the crowd, informing us that his surname came from the area (though he's from Leeds) and that he's probably the most famous Gedge ever - as such, didn't he deserve a statue here, he mused? On the basis of last night's show, few in the crowd would argue with that suggestion.

For a band that released a new album (El Rey) this very week, they didn't overdose the set with too much new, inherently unfamiliar, material but crossed the span of the band's 20+ year career fairly evenly. The set list, as chosen by bassist Terry de Castro (also pictured left) even contained You Should Always Keep In Touch With Your Friends, which Gedge described as "Eighties indie pop"... he then introduced the next song as "modern indie pop" and, with barely a trace of irony, offered the observation that the two songs sounded much the same.

As the final song, Dare, tailed off into a whine of guitar feedback, guitarist Chris McConville threw his set list into the crowd... which went straight into my hand! I didn't even have to move my arm to catch it - result! And better still, Gedge appeared at the merchandise stall after the show and, as you can see on the right, signed the list for me. Ever the fan, I was embarrassed to find myself informing Mr Gedge that he was a "top man" for doing so...

Links: Buy Weddoes stuff | Buy Dawn stuff | Wedding Present (official) | Wedding Present (fan site) | Dawn Landes (official)

"Love Heroin"

It's easy to knock Richard Curtis - he got a bit carried away with Love Actually, and was a little over the top with those last few Vicar of Dibley episodes. Plus, in recent years, he's been a little too preachy for my taste on the subject of Third World debt, and when I say that please bear in mind that I am in broad agreement with just about every point he raises on the subject. But preachy is preachy, however worthy the sermon. Aside from these later quality control issues though, he did give us Blackadder and Four Weddings and a Funeral so, on balance, you have to conclude he's a good guy.

And then, he also gave us Notting Hill. Quite aside from a few implausibilities (not least Hugh Grant's struggling bookstore owner being able to afford the house with the blue door) and the unashamedly tacked-on feelgood ending, this is the film in which Curtis wrote this line for Grant's character, William Thacker...

"It's as if I've taken love heroin, and now I can't ever have it again."

...which, as anyone who has lost or unrequited love will tell you, nails it perfectly.

Withdrawal is hell.

"And my girlfriend will be so, so angry..."

I had a shortlist of possible things to write about in this post. These are they, and why I haven't written about any of them:

• Unrequited love - what do you do when the woman you love just doesn't feel the same way about you? I won't be writing about this because it's just too depressing for words.
• Getting old - there comes a time when the child becomes the parent and the parents become the child. I don't like to think about parents getting old because the terminus of that train of thought is, literally, terminal. Again, too depressing for my current frame of mind.
• Prospects (lack thereof) - when the chance comes to advance in your career, and all you need is some encouragement from your manager for it to happen, how depressing is it when that manager won't give a straight answer when given the opportunity to provide that encouragement, and then calls you a "pushover" in front of a colleague? That's enough splenetic venting on that, so it doesn't need a whole post.
• Life as a succession of disappointments and failures - what do you do when you realise that, at the wrong end of your thirties, your career is going nowhere (except, maybe, backwards), the twin parental pillars of stability in your life are getting old and frail, you have no house, drive a seven year old car, have no family of your own and are in love with a woman who feels warmth for you but no desire - where do you go from there?

So I won't be writing about any of that, because I want to get to the end of this post without slitting my wrists.

Instead, I'll write about a vaguely stupid song, and about the power of music to transport you immediately back to a period in your life when that song was relevant. I was in Dublin over the weekend and heard "Where's Me Jumper?" by The Sultans of Ping FC in the Old Jameson Distillery souvenir shop and instantly, in my head at least, I was 21 again. Vaguely stupid, maybe, but also brilliant - I urge you to download the MP3 from Turquoise Days. Go on... do it now!

Musical b(l)og roll

I thought long and hard about what to write for my first post of May. On the shortlist was the terrible news of the cyclone in Burma, but that story is still unravelling and besides, what can I add? The BBC already tells you all you need to know about that. So I thought about writing something to raise awareness of the dangers of trans fats (they're slowly killing us all, so read more about them in this old but excellent Guardian article). And since it was my Mum's birthday yesterday, I thought about writing a piece on how great mums are. But, though true, how twee would that be?

Then, having spent most of today avoiding work by catching up on a few of my favourite music blogs, it suddenly occurred to me that I could share them with you... so here they are.

• Chromewaves - massive, Toronto-based music blog with especially good "MP3 of the week" page
• MP3 Hugger - not just a smart name - demonstrates good taste too
• Pop Will Eat My Blog - early days for my readership of this blog, but the signs are good
• Pops and Scratches - especially good for early 90s indie
• The Undertow - collates whole albums (and bootlegs too)
• To Die By Your Side - a Smiths-referencing name and a decent blog to boot
• Too Much Apple Pie - absolutely my favourite music blog, great tracks and amusingly written
• Who Killed the Mixtape? - who indeed?
• Your Moment of Zen - good songs, well written posts... you get the idea by now...

Just about all of these blogs include copyright disclaimers to the effect that any tracks posted thereon are for trial purposes, and that if you like what you hear you should head straight out and buy the record. They also tend to offer to take any mp3s down should the band (or, more likely, record label) be offended by their redistribution. So what I'm saying is, try to be legal - though at the same time, how you use these blogs is up to you. And if anyone questions your downloading habits... you ain't seen me, right?

Bad, sad, mad ad's

"Blister in the Sun" by the Violent Femmes is a truly great song. I've loved it ever since I first heard it, not way back when it was first released but when it was included in the soundtrack for that excellent movie Grosse Point Blank. So imagine my delight when I heard it just the other day on TV... sad to say, that delight was short-lived. First of all, the song is being used to advertise Foster's lager. Bad enough, right? But listen closer - it's not even the Violent Femmes but some (admittedly eerily accurate) soundalike band, or assembly of session musos. Pretty sad, I'd say. And then listen closer still - the lyrics have been changed! "I'm high as a kite" has become "I'm flying a kite" and "strung out" has become "hung out". Despite it's perky, upbeat, Summer sound this is supposed to be a song about heroin! Guess the Foster's account exec's didn't want that association for their anaemic Aussie brew. Use the song if you must, but change the words? That makes me mad... cursed advertisements!

To discover the original VF version of this song, download it here. Now!

Play well

Okay, so if the computer I wrote about in my last post was the predominant plaything of my teenage years, then the equivalent rose-tinted nostalgia-inducing memory from the 70s was undoubtedly Lego. I was a Lego fiend, completing models in double quick time and then designing my own. I remember designing a pocket TV in Lego some years before Casio and Sinclair started making their commercial offerings - I think they pinched my design!

Not sure if I want to admit this in public, but I was a member of the Lego Builders' Club. I recall the membership badge being made of brass and reassuringly heavy. And my family took a trip to Denmark, predominantly so that we could go to Legoland - this was back in the day before there was one near Windsor. And being the 70s, shopping malls were few and far between, so any trip to the Westwood Co-op Hypermarket near Ramsgate was already exciting for a small boy from out in the sticks, but the prospect of coming home with a precious new box of Lego made it all the more so. I was particularly keen on the "space" range of models (my favourite being the 928, pictured). They were very obviously inspired by Star Wars, although the actual Star Wars franchise they have now didn't exist back then.

You might wonder what's triggered this sudden Lego-fest of a post - I read an article in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago that covered Lego-related blogs, some of which I'm happy to reproduce for you here...

• Brothers Brick - a good generalist Lego portal
• Spite Your Face - movie parodies in Lego form
• Vignette Bricks - lots of compact Lego dioramas
• The Brick Testament - the bible, in Lego form. No, really...
• From Bricks to Bothans - one of the best of many Lego/Star Wars sites
• Reasonably Clever - home to the 50 bricks or less contest
• Brickshelf - features Lego versions of movie posters

And there are loads more. For example, a quick search of YouTube reveals lots of short movies where Lego has been used in stop-motion special effects. Some people have a lot of time on their hands, I guess... said he, writing a pointless blog of mindless drivel that no-one reads...

Footnote: In case you're wondering, the Danish for "play well" is leg godt, hence....

Going back to my roots

I work in IT, I think I've mentioned that before. I've been working in IT for more years than I care to remember, and before that I studied it at Uni, back in the day when essays were still written on paper, with a pen. But before all that, my personal computing history began way back in the early 1980s with the wonderful Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Okay, so before that I'd used a Sinclair ZX81 for about an hour one day in my last year at primary school, but the first computer I owned, the first I really got into and, crucially, the first I properly programmed was the 99/4A.

Now when I got the 99/4A (Summer 1983, if memory serves), it was already on its way out. Other, more affordable and more powerful computers were muscling in. The VIC-20 and its big brother, the Commodore 64, were both popular, as was the Dragon 32 and the BBC Model B (which we had a few of at school). And of course the daddy of them all, the machine you had to have if you wanted to swap games, was the Sinclair Spectrum 48K.

So I was using obsolete technology from the off, but it didn't matter because my 99/4A felt like a proper computer. Okay, so it only had 16K, paltry when compared to the Speccy or C64, and it was a bit slow (its programming language was interpreted, not compiled, you see). But it had build quality, a brushed aluminium finish and a proper, decent keyboard. It had an expansion slot, kind of like the USB port of its day, that you could plug all kinds of things into, including more RAM or a speech synthesizer (incredible for its day), but mainly games. Great games. I remember one game of Parsec lasting over five hours, as I racked up more than nine million points. And Munchman (guess what? A clone of Pacman) was another classic. Happy days...

The other great thing about the 99/4A is that it came with a detailed reference guide for its programming language, TI-Basic. This was one way of learning how to program, but I supplemented that by buying Home Computing Weekly because this printed the code for whole programs that people like me (the script kiddies of our day, perhaps) could steadfastly type into our machines, save them to cassette tape (yes, really), and so create our own game libraries. I still remember the very distinctive sound of those ASCII characters being written to tape. And because these programs were usually only two or three hundred lines at most, you could reverse-engineer them to work out what commands were doing, why, and in what order. And that's how I really learnt to program. Before very long, I was writing my own games, starting with text-based "adventure" games, as they were optimistically known ("In Search of El-Doradon Gold" was my best effort in this genre, which one kid at school asked if I could translate for his Spectrum - ha!), before moving to simple, catch-the-falling-object style graphical games. Programming became more fun than playing the end-product - it became the game itself.

And that's how I was hooked. Texas Instruments stopped making the 99/4A the same year I got one, and as the months rolled on the programs in Home Computing Weekly that were in TI-Basic, and could be run with only 16K, became fewer and fewer. In the end, I became very reliant on one particular company, Parco Electrics in Honiton, Devon. In fact, I cherished them as they continued to support the 99/4A - they even started publishing their own magazine for enthusiasts like me, with programs, tips, game high-score charts, and more. I saved the money from my paper-round to buy things from Parco, often games of varying quality. There was a last hurrah, when Parker Brothers licensed some Nintendo games for distribution as plug-in 99/4A cartridges - Popeye was the best of these and, like Parsec, it ate up the hours. As obsolescence really kicked in though, and the flow of new games dried up, what was left behind was an interest in computing and an aptitude for programming. And the rest, like my 99/4A (now gathering dust in a cupboard at my parents' house, along with untold cartridges, oxidised tapes and a killer joystick), is history.

Minghella and Clarke

The deaths of film director Anthony Minghella and science-fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke were reported yesterday. Both make me sad, in different ways.

Minghella will inevitably always be best known for directing the Oscar-winning The English Patient but for me his best work was the film adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley, which he wrote the screenplay for as well as directed. Beyond loving Ripley, I am sad for Minghella's death because he was only 54, and dying from a haemorrhage following surgery for cancer of the neck and tonsils sounds a horrible way to go, all in all.

Clarke's death saddens me in a different way. He was 90, and so had had a good innings, and the last few years of his life he was wheelchair-bound - I suspect he himself wasn't scared of dying any more. And what an accomplished life - on top of the books, films and television work for which he was so well known, he worked on the development of radar during the Second World War (then a top secret) and soon after correctly foresaw the advent of satellite communications, even specifying the height such satellites would have to reach to maintain geostationary orbit. In fact, his 1945 article in Wireless World was so accurate that when the first commercial satellites were launched twenty years later they could not be patented! And then, of course, a short story of his became the kernel of 2001: A Space Odyssey, not just one of the great sci-fi films of all time but one of the great films of any genre. So a life full of achievement and a ripe old age - what's to be sad about then? Just this: as a teenage boy in the Eighties, I devoured Clarke's books. That time, and those books, are over now. Sadness all round then.

Hypocrisy

I am obsessive about recycling. I have energy-efficient lightbulbs. I refuse unwanted carrier bags, and re-use the ones I cannot avoid until they are only fit for the bin, and then I use them as bin-liners. I have a thing in my cistern that reduces water consumption with every flush, and I wash my clothes at 30°C. Speaking of which, all my cleaning products are from the Ecover range. I even compost. At work, I am sometimes jokingly referred to as the company's token eco-warrior, and not just because I introduced green computing initiatives throughout the organisation, but also because I have been known to fish plastic cups out of the ordinary bin in the canteen and transfer them to the recycle bin.

But then I spoil it all by getting in my 225bhp, 0 to 60 in oh-my-god sports car to drive the one and a half miles from house to office. A hypocrite? Maybe. A lippy hippy? Perhaps. Or just flawed, like everyone else? Almost certainly.