There Will Be Legend

So we popped down to the theatre last night and saw There Will Be Blood. The place was packed, probably because the kids are still home from school. Our popcorn was unbuttered, and this sad, dry disappointment proved to be a portent for things to come.

The film opens with a long dusty shot of a dude named Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), prospecting for oil. The director (Anderson?) took his sweet time establishing… everything, really. The pace of the movie is not exactly glacial, but it sort of meanders from point to point. This is odd because the movie coveres about thirty years of Plainview's life, and one gets the impression that we missed out on a lot of it in order to focus in on a few randomly chosen points.

I should mention that the movie is based on a book by Upton Sinclair called Oil!, which is a less flashy but more appropriate title for what's going on in most of the movie. It's the kind of book that everyone praises but no one reads. It's loosely based on a real life person, and the movie in turn is loosely based on the book. So you can see where this all is heading.

The plot follows Plainview as he finds, buys, then starts drilling at a particular oilfield in California. With so much money involved, it's inevitable that some other people want to get a cut. From the original land-owners, to Plainview's half-brother, to the strange preacher/prophet Eli, everyone becomes an antagonist to Plainview – at least in his eyes. The plotting and machinations to get at the oil and money take up at lot of the screen time.

Because that's not what this movie is really about. It is, in fact, about a sociopath's vision. Plainview is a certifiable sociopath who is obsessed with making incredible amounts of money (but who, for some reason, doesn't use it for anything but making more money). He is also a misanthropic asshole with a well-developed sense of paranoia. I won't put in spoilers, but I'll just say that things generally don't go well for anyone who gets in Plainview's way.

Apparently, There Will Be Blood is going to be an Oscar contender, so I imagine many of you will be seeing it. In fairness, the film is chock-full of great actors doing their damn best from start to finish. The actor portraying Eli Sunday is particularly weird and awesome – I would have enjoyed seeing more of him in the film. Also in fairness, I should note that the boy liked the movie.

I hated it. Not Spider-level hate, but pretty close. I found it slow, predictable, boring, and nasty to watch. If you enjoy watching a cruel, violent asshat make a lot of money while physically hurting as many innocent people as he can, then by all means hurry to the theater and git yer popcorn. If you're not into that kind of thing, perhaps you'd like to stay home and wash your hair instead.

A word also about the score. A movie score should not be obtrusive. Its job is to establish a mood. Ideally, the viewer should be so wrapped up in plot and dialogue that he doesn't even notice the almost-subliminal effect of the score. There Will be Blood did not follow this model. Right off the bat, the music resembles some kind of Symphony for Car Horn (both in gracelessness and volume), and the fact that the film was dialogue-free for the first twenty minutes only highlights the music. At one point, I actually covered my ears to block the car horn, despite the fact that the theater was full of sound-absorbing people. The Car Horn fugue resurfaced several times over the next 2.5 hours, like your drunken cousin at Christmas dinner. Each time, it accompanied a scene in which Day-Lewis amps up his misanthropy, just in case the audience needed help figuring out that our hero might have some mental issues. Why not just hit me over head? No, seriously, please hit me over the head. Anything to stop the pain.

On a much happier note, I got to see an '80's classic for the first time last week: Legend, starring Tom Cruise, Ferris Bueller's Girlfriend, and Tim Curry as (what else?) the bad guy.

It's a matter of some mystery how I could have missed this flick for so many years. Our Sullen Teenage Son (now living on his own, of course) couldn't believe it. Fortunately, he had just bought the Ultimate Director's Cut. How could I not have seen this? I mean, come on. It features a pretty, pretty princess whose job is to run about and pick flowers all day. Oh, and to screw the world over by doing the one thing she's told absolutely not to do. But, nooo. She just had to go and touch the unicorn, didn't she?

Legend is approximately half the length of There Will be Blood, and about one tenth of the budget (most of which was spent on glitter). So how is it that Legend manages to shoehorn in about twice the plot and infinitely more entertainment?

Granted, Legend doesn't aim high. The plot is stock, the characters are cardboard, and the acting… well, no one ever accused Tim Curry of inscrutability. Princess Flutterbunny (fine, Mia Sara) is actually a pretty bitchy character, and I probably wouldn't have saved her, but glitter-dusted Tom Cruise must have seen something I didn't. Interestingly, the plot (which by rights should be pretty damn simple) has more holes in it than a city made of swiss cheese. Why the solar ray? Why the need for unicorn touching if poison darts work just as well? Why did the one fairy keep her size-change thing a secret? Why do the demons occasionally talk in rhyming couplets? It doesn't really matter in the end. Good triumphs, Evil sucks it, the end. Anyhoo, I'm not going to spend a lot of time storyboarding a movie that everyone else on the planet has already seen.

Because I didn't see it before, I can't say if the Ultimate Director's Cut is better or worse than the original version. Perhaps it restores his vision of the world as a battleground for the hearts of the innocent. Perhaps it has 10% more glitter. I don't know. All I know is that I didn't want to claw my eyes out during most of it, and that I can't tell you a thing about the score, which is a good thing.

I'm probably going to catch a lot of flak for my anti-oscary attitude here. I realize that I'm in the minority, and many of you will enjoy Blood due to how deep or interesting it is. Similarly, you will scoff my enjoying (not liking, but enjoying) of Legend, because it's such a silly, '80's movie. So be it.

Movies do not need to be fun and glittery all the time. One of the better movies of last year, The Devil Came on Horseback, is neither. Like Blood, Horseback showed the audience a dusty desert world where misanthropy reigns supreme. Unlike Blood, it had a strong message that such behavior should, must be opposed. There Will Be Blood merely shrugs its shoulders, hiding behind the fiction(ish) label, absolving itself of responsibility.

Legend also takes no responsibility for all glitter harmed in its production, but that's another story.