Maybe Not

Because we are both recovering from bouts of the flu, and because deep down in our hearts, we are both media whores entirely in love with glitz and glamor and gala, Tina and I watched the Oscars last Sunday. 

Although I am a huge film fan, this is not something I usually do, since I consider the Oscars to be largely a self-congratulatory backslap-o-rama which rewards mediocrity and "prestige" filmmaking, rather than innovation and anything that might actually rile the folks up...

But I'd seen and thorough dug both the major contenders for Best Picture and Best Director - No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood - and I was a little bit interested in how events would play out. 

I fully expected No Country to sweep. Which it did. 

But - I wondered - would they split the difference and maybe award Blood one or the other of the Big Two?

In my estimation, it is the better of the two pictures. No slight to No Country - a supremely well-crafted, tension-packed "thriller" based on primo Quality Lit credentials - but therein lies what you might call the ease of the thing.  The Coens (you get the feeling) could craft lean, mean thrillers - Blood Simple, Fargo - until the cows come home.

What PT Anderson did with Blood - on the other hand -  was to take an obscure book by a neglected past master (Sinclair "The Jungle" Lewis) and fashion a hypnotic, impeccably filmed and acted movie with one of the wonkiest endings in recent memory - a fable or allegory about American greed and fanaticism, in both the economic and religious registers.

I've always been an Anderson admirer, at best. I've never been counted among the legions of his rabid fan base. His previous films wore their influences (Altman and Scorsese chief among them) on their sleeves and - while I've always liked bits and pieces of them (more, perhaps, of Punch Drunk Love than any) - in total they left me somewhat cold. Frustrated by the glaring inconsistencies. The guy had talent, but needed to ripen.

Well, as they say, the ripeness is all.

Blood is unlike anything else in his body of work. Sure, it has precedents in film history - Giant first and foremost, I would say. But what doesn't? Nothing will come of nothing...

With Blood everything comes together - the writing, the acting, the cinematography, the score - in one of the most purely cinematic, visceral experiences of recent memory.

In other words - it's good. Really, really good. Worth seeing. I kid you not.

And - if you can abstract out and laughingly call something "pure cinema" - it's a better, purer cinema.

Not surprisingly, it didn't win.