There Will Be Blood

There will be blood if this film does not win Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Editing and Best Original Music Score. Directed by the now grown-up wunderkind P.T. Anderson and starring the weatherworn Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood is hypnotic, riveting, violent, fascinating and at times painful to watch. It is boldly, unapologetically and immediately an American masterpiece in the company of Citizen Kane, Giant and Raging Bull. I can safely say that because there is little wiggle room here not to say it.

The cinematography is breathtaking. Shot on location in Marfa, Texas and central California by Robert Elswit, we can feel the scope and the grandeur of the wide-open spaces that the West was and in many cases still is. Editing by Dylan Tichenor is tight, slight and seamlessly out of sight.

Jonny Greenwood’s (Radiohead) score is haunting, scary and yes, at times annoying. It surrounds you with electronica and when necessary chokes you with anxiety until you can’t breathe. I mean that in a good way, of course.

While I have respected him as a filmmaker, I have never been a big fan of Paul Thomas Anderson. His films, although heralded as pop culture triumphs, have always left me feeling like he was usurping the styles of greater directors. Boogie Nights, the film that put him on the map in 1997, while entertaining, felt snobbish and filled with intentionally dumbed down characters. You got the sense that he was mimicking Scorsese while ridiculing these Goodfellas of the porno world. Magnolia seemed Robert Altman-lite. Punch-Drunk Love, well that starred Adam Sandler. No reason to pile on.

You could tell from all three of these films (four if you count Hard Eight) that Anderson knew what he was doing. He just seemed to lack the guts to do it.

That is until now.

Continue reading »

Well, no one wants to say it but you will be reading this shortly: The Golden Globes and the Academy Awards will be cancelled.

On Monday December 17th, the WGA turned down requests for waivers by the Oscars and the Golden Globes to put those telecasts on air without the Guild’s writers. With the rejection of the waivers for the Academy Awards (ABC), set for Sunday February 24th, and the much faster approaching Golden Globes (NBC), set for January 13th, the WGA has essentially cancelled both awards shows by its actions.

The SAG Awards did receive a waiver and are scheduled for Jan. 27th.

But the other two awards shows will be cancelled and no one or should I say everyone in the industry is avoiding the mention of this 600 pound LaMotta because a) they are holding out the now near impossible hope for a settlement and b) no one wants to interrupt the cash flow from the media promotions of the potential nominees.

That is unless they want to go the route of the People’s Choice Awards which announced it will air its show Jan 8th (CBS) in a 2 hour “magazine” format of prerecorded videos and no audience yet featuring Queen Latifah as the prerecorded "host."

The Oscars and the Golden Globes will not play that game.

Leslie Unger, spokeswoman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said, “It’s very difficult for me to envision that we would follow the model.”

Continue reading »

C&L's November Film of the Month Review:"20 To Life: The Life and Times of John Sinclair"
Documentary reviewed by Mark Groubert

“Apathy isn’t it. And we can do something. So flower power didn’t work. So what! We start again.”
John Lennon

John Sinclair Freedom Rally, Crisler Arena, Michigan - December 10, 1971.

If it was up to Richard Nixon, 20 To Life: The Life and Times of John Sinclair, a documentary by Steve Gebhardt, would never have seen the light of day. Hired as the private experimental filmmaker for John Lennon and Yoko Ono back in 1971, Gebhardt was working on a full-length music video to help promote Lennon’s upcoming album, Imagine when he and Lennon heard about the benefit concert to help free political activist John Sinclair from prison.
Sinclair, head of the White Panther Party, manager of the seminal rock band the MC5 and one of the leading radical elements of the Midwest had been targeted by Detroit undercover cops who arrested him for passing two joints. Facing 20 years to life and actually sentenced to 9 1/2 years for the crime, Sinclair became the focus of a huge benefit concert at the Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor, Michigan featuring John Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seeger, Phil Ochs, MC-5, Allen Ginsberg, Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels and others.
Over 20,000 people attended the show.
Having already spent nearly three years behind bars, John Sinclair was freed from prison just three days after the event.

Talk about All Power To The People.

Continue reading »

Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy By Charlie Savage

“Charlie Savage’s Takeover reads like a political thriller because it is one: the story of Dick Cheney and his hapless boss pushing the presidency off its constitutional foundation.”

John W. Dean, former Nixon White House Counsel

In Takeover, author Charlie Savage takes us through the steel doors of power to peer over the shoulders of the Bush-Cheney lawyers who secretly devised ways for American presidents to circumvent laws and treaties. He pulls back the iron curtains which hide the political motivations behind Bush's selections for the Supreme Court. He takes us along the road that leads to the current executive branch addiction to secrecy. On the trip, Savage's book gives us clear translations of the Bush-Cheney gang's bizarre radical theories.

For all this we must say thank you, sir.

This is an incredible master work from Charlie Savage, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from the Boston Globe who first brought to our attention the Bush Administration's abuse of so-called signing statements. For that he won himself the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Thank you, Charlie Savage. Thank you for showing us what intellectual heroism is all about. Thank you for helping us understand our own current political quagmire. Thank you, well, thank you for not giving up when so many of us are burdened with great despair regarding our nation's condition.

Now here are some additional "thank yous" for the upcoming Holiday Season from the folks at Crooks and Liars.

Continue reading »

Terror’s Advocate: "A documentary directed by Barbet Schroeder French w/ English subtitles
140 minutes."

When I saw The Last King of Scotland, Forest Whitaker seemed almost cartoonish to me. Not that it was a bad performance. It wasn’t. There were problems with the film for sure, but there was a different reason. Thirty years prior I had seen another film, General Idi Amin Dada, the groundbreaking documentary from French director Barbet Schroeder. It successfully captured the personification of evil on celluloid. For years I was haunted by its stark brutal revelations.

Barbet Schroeder can do that to the viewer. Born in Teheran, Iran in 1946 to a Swiss geologist father, he spent time in Central Africa and Columbia as a child but was raised in France where he has done the bulk of his work. American viewers probably know him for his feature films, Barfly (1987), Reversal of Fortune (1990), and Single White Female (1992), but these are just three small windows to his overall worldview.

Schroeder’s feature films have always had a documentary feel to them while his documentaries more often feel like fictional cinema. This is not accidental. His feature films often have their roots in non-fiction events while his documentaries are so fantastical in their narrative that they feel like works of dramatic fiction.

Terror’s Advocate, Schroeder’s latest adventure, has themes similar to those found in his Oscar nominated, Reversal of Fortune. In the latter, Claus von Bulow, a lawyer of European descent who comes from a family which had close ties to the Nazis finds himself embroiled in a sensational court case. The lawyer featured in Terror’s Advocate is of European descent, has close ties to a Nazi and finds himself embroiled in numerous sensational court cases.

Continue reading »

Click image to order book

Of all the insane Bush privatization efforts, none is more frightening than the corporatizing of military combat forces. Jeremy Scahill admirably exposes a devastating example of this sinister scheme.

Michael Moore

On March 31st, 2004, four Americans were set upon by an angry mob of Iraqis in the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah. They were riddled with bullets, burned beyond recognition and two were strung up like charred cattle from a bridge over the Euphrates River. This day marked the unofficial beginning of the Iraqi insurgence and the end of “Mission Accomplished.” These four Americans were not soldiers in the U.S. Army nor were they civilians, but rather highly trained mercenaries from a reclusive private army based in the wilderness of North Carolina.

An army now known to the American people as Blackwater USA.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Army tells the story of the creation of one of the most powerful and secretive forces yet to crawl out of the swamp known as the U.S. military-industrial complex. (Ironically, Blackwater started out as a private military training camp located near the black waters of the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina). Sounding like it came out of the mind of an over-caffeinated screenwriter, this B-grade Hollywood action film is all too real and its author, Jeremy Scahill shows us a movie that will chill you to the bone.

Continue reading »

  Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets &Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild By Greg Palast

Book Review by Mark Groubert

At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

Charles Bukowski

Greg Palast clearly hates George Bush and his mafia-like crime family. But he’s also not too fond of Al Gore, Hilary Clinton or John Kerry either. Nor does he particularly like New Mexico governor Bill Richardson for that matter. The former so-called “forensic economist” a kind of socialist Sam Spade who specialized in corporate fraud, is now on the trail of political shenanigans as a TV journalist for the BBC.

Armed Madhouse, which came out in 2006, has been re-released in paperback with a new bonus chapter/afterward entitled Busted …and How to Steal Back Your Vote. It is mandatory reading for anyone interested in how the Republicans are going to steal the next election in 2008. The Chicago Tribune said it is composed of, “stories so relevant they threaten to alter history.” Powerful stuff.

Continue reading »

C&L July Film of the Month: A CRUDE AWAKENING The Oil Crash

Documentary by Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack

“Oil is our God. I don’t care if someone says they worship Jesus, Buddha, Allah, whoever – they actually worship petroleum.”

Mathew David Savinar, Lawyer and Founder of Lifeaftertheoilcrash.net

If An Inconvenient Truth could be considered The Wizard of Oz of environmental documentaries, then A Crude Awakening would have be considered the Rosemary’s Baby of that same genre.

Global warming. So what? Melting polar icecaps? Call me later. A Crude Awakening paints a picture so much grimmer than anything Americans have seen in their lifetimes. Or in the movies this summer, for that matter. It is dark. It is primordial. It is terrifying. It is - The end of oil, as we know it.

While technically speaking, oil is running out, for it to go bone dry will take a few lifetimes. But do not dare exhale a sigh of relief. That fact is not relevant to this splendid documentary. It seems there is a bigger problem. One that is arriving faster than Netflix. That problem is global peak oil. Say it over and over, folks. Say it until your tongue gets used to saying it. Write it down. Tell your children. Open the windows of your Ford Explorer and scream it out into the dark abyss. You will be seeing and hearing about it for the rest of your lives – possibly beginning today.

Continue reading »

All-Star Salute to Mort Sahl

Albert Brooks was furious last Thursday night "and angry. And I'm confused. I don't know the people that produced this show at all. But I would strongly suggest that when they do an event like this again, they spend a little extra money and hire a real publicity firm to disseminate the information correctly. I was told that Mort Sahl passed away. So you can imagine my shock, my dismay, and quite frankly my disappointment, when I arrived here this evening and saw him standing there."

Despite having learned otherwise Brooks decided to read the "eulogy" he had written for Mort Sahl, who was at that moment looking up at him with a smirk from the second row of the Wadsworth Theatre near the campus of UCLA in Brentwood, CA.

This was same Mort Sahl who could always pull a politically pithy quote seemingly out of nowhere (or possibly out of the prop newspaper he kept under his arm as he performed). Here's and old favorite:

"Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen."

Continue reading »

 The Impeachment of George W. Bush: "A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens

                                          By Elizabeth Holtzman with Cynthia L. Cooper."

Let’s impeach the President for lyin’

And misleading our country into war

Abusing all the power that we gave him

And shipping all our money out the door

Let’s impeach the President for spyin’

On citizens inside their homes

Breaking every law in the country

Tapping our computers and telephones

Let’s Impeach the President

Neil Young

Top Ten Reasons to Impeach President Bush

10. Prevent pilfering of office supplies during last day in office

9. Give Rush Limbaugh a heart attack.

8. Give the Iraqi people an early celebration.

7. Expose Cheney as the real power behind the throne.

6. Screw up Karl Rove’s job search.

5. Wipe that silly smirk off his face.

4. Put a damper on fund raising for the Bush presidential library.

3. To stop all the whining.

2. Chip away at American Idol ratings

1. TO STOP THE MADNESS!

But seriously folks, isn’t it enough already?

Continue reading »