Inglourious Basterds

No matter what Tarantino may say, I'm convinced that the bloody awkward (or even blahdy orkwerd) title of his movie is driven by two things; making damn sure that no-one buys Inglorious Bastards by mistake next year, depriving him of sweet, sweet royalties; and making sure that nerds in firewalled drone jobs can send emails about the movie without getting blocked by the profanity filter.

I've always taken the view that Tarantino was born out of his time; he'd make a great writer for radio. His determination to write for the movies is one of those weird overstretches, like thinking that hideously bad portrayals of weird men-children in films like Dusk til Dawn qualified him to take on Alan Arkin's role in Wait Until Dark. While no single performance on stage by any human being is ever likely to overtake Pia Zadora's turn in the Diary of Ann Frank, Quentin's in Wait Until Dark has always annoyed me far far more.

Much like the man himself, I like to open with the digressions, and then, if possible, continue with them. Self-referentially, if at all possible.

The movie; well let's get the headline items out of the way. It's not as bad as Death Proof. It's not as good as Pulp Fiction. It's not remotely as good as it thinks it is, and it isn't half as good as it could be. In fact, it isn't even as good as its best performance, because Tarantino couldn't resist completely buggering even that up.

It's hard to believe, watching the film, that the script was ten years in the making. Until you think about anything you've ever seen in a friend's house which took ten years to make. A big percentage of that ten years would have been spent on blind alleys, and on slowly internalising the fact that his talents weren't equal to his vision, and painfully coming first to accept, and then not even to notice, that the finished work looked more and more as though an assortment of hyperactive five year olds had thrown it together while their minds were on something else. Quentin doesn't seem to have heard that perfection comes in discarding the things which are less than perfect until only the perfect is left. He's more the guy who makes a really neat part for the project, realises that it doesn't fit and yet can't bear to throw it away. If Quentin modded cars, they'd have fins. And dams. And spoilers. And each would have notches cut into them to let the other parts fit around them, and - well, you'd have Inglourious Basterds is what you'd have.

The first thing which has to be said is that a lot less movie would have been a very good idea. I thought the same thing about Kill Bill; in fact I waited for a while hoping that Quentin would get the idea and release the film it ought to have been - Kill Bill, part the whole damn thing in one 100 minute movie with all the damn self indulgent flab taken off. But he didn't. So I wasn't very surprised when IB came in at 153 minutes. If anything, my only surprise was that it didn't come in as three 140 minute movies about nothing in particular, which I discovered on the internets last night was the original plan.

Usually, the criticism of QT is simply that he rambles on too long and that the movie should be edited down (I saw the long version of Death Proof, and thought at the time - as I fast forwarded through the interminable first half - that it must been less annoying when it was 40 minutes shorter and crammed into Grindhouse. I now think it would have been ever better at trailer length).

With IB, shortening the movie would have been simpler. Just leave out the eponymous basterds completely. Take out Brad Pitt, Donnie wotsit, Hugo Stiglitz, Mike Myers and whatever dick it was that Michael Fassbender was trying to make us like. All those guys. Bang, just like that, you'd get rid of an hour, and it would be the worst hour. And you could also give the movie a title that didn't annoy everyone. It would be like a more useful version of those editions of Phantom Menace that have Jar Jar Binks edited out (to which I say, it's a start, but it doesn't go anything LIKE far enough). Do that and you'd still keep Bridget Von Hammersmark, Colonel Landa, Shoshana Dreyfus and Frederick Zoller. Which is all you need, because it would help a LOT to get rid of the Nazi High Command as long as you've got the scissors handy. At the end of getting rid of all the crap bits, you'd be left with a tight little French/German resistance movie with some genuinely compelling performances and a real sense of hazard to characters you're invested in.

At the moment, the structure of the movie is this:

Chapter 1, which is more of a prologue, introduces Colonel Landa, hunting Jews in France. It's pure Tarantino, a long talky section in which Colonel Landa, without ever resorting to overt menace, slowly pressures an apparently decent French farmer to admit he's sheltering fugitive Jews beneath his floorboards. Christoph Waltz's performance as Landa has been rightly hailed as a star turn, not least because he's the first person in history ever to have delivered so many Tarantino monologues in so many different languages. He shifts seamlessly from French to German to English and back and at all times the florid digressions and Tarantino tics seem completely unforced. It's probably the best inhabitation of the weird backalleys of Tarantino's mind since Samuel L Jackson brought us Jules.

Chapter 2 introduces the basterds and their working practices, and you could drop the whole thing without doing any damage to anything which matters. You've got Brad Pitt's bombastic recruiting talk, which is funny, but not funny enough, and then you've got the basterds in France scalping people and beating them to death with baseball bats, and it's jarring and ugly and for a movie which is supposed to be about glorifying Jews taking the war to their tormentors, it's weirdly counterproductive because the German they beat to death acquits himself with more dignity and poise than his nemeses do.

Chapter 3 introduces us to Shoshana Dreyfus and Frederick Zoller, and sets the main plot into motion. It's pretty terrific. While Zoller, German war hero turned actor (he's set up as the German Audie Murphy, but no-one has heard of Audie Murphy yet in 1944, so they don't say that) is a bit of a pill, it's a good character; a shallow person trying to be deep. And Shoshana is very good indeed; the sole survivor of the Jew Hunt we saw at the beginning, she's holed up in Paris hiding in plain sight as the manager of a cinema. Mélanie Laurent brings just the right mix of toughness and vulnerability to the role. And when Zoller takes a shine to her and wants his new film to premiere in her cinema, it leads her right into last place she wants to be; collaborating with the Nazis and being scrutinised by none other than Col Landa. The scene where Landa amiably asks her about her background while eating strudel is masterful. When he takes his leave and Shoshana almost collapses from stress, I could feel the whole audience joining in. This whole bit is pretty well paced and acted, and you could keep all of that.

Chapter 4 takes us back to the basterds. The British have got wind through a double agent that Zoller's premiere is going to be packed with German brass and they've conceived a plan to blow up the cinema with the brass inside. Michael Fassbender's character, conveniently but largely irrelevantly, a film critic is sent off to liaise with the basterds and the double agent to make it happen. There's a completely unnecessary scene with Mike Myers setting that up which could just GO, and there's an incredibly long scene in a basement bar where the double agent tries to meet up with Fassbender which has divided the critics. Although I enjoyed the scene immensely, I can see why lots of critics hated it. It's incredibly long, and it doesn't really advance the plot. It's very well acted, and at times it's very very tense, but when it's all over, practically everyone is dead except the double agent, and really for nothing. So although I enjoyed it a lot, I think it could just as easily be dropped (taking with it my favourite Brad Pitt line of the whole movie, in which he explains that it's hard to fight in a basement, because, you're fighting in a basement.)

Chapter 5 is just the biggest mess imaginable. On the one hand, you've got basterds trying to blow up the cinema and on the other hand you've got Shoshana and her projectionist trying to burn it down. Either would have been enough. Both is stupid. Conveniently, losing the basterds completely would have made for a thematically satisfying and much less annoying final act. You would lose Landa negotiating with Brad Pitt, but it would be a small price to pay, particularly as it would let you lose the one false note in Waltz's performance, when he goes nuts and strangles someone. Right up to that moment, and rather annoyingly, from right after that moment, he's been the soul of urbane menace, a clever talker who loves to achieve his effects by thought and word and leaves the hard work to real thugs. And then he chokes someone to death for no very good reason. It comes out of nowhere and it GOES nowhere. So we drop that too.

And there you have it; Inglourious Basterds, the non-directors cut. Now with 100% less basterds but all the good stuff you'd want to keep.

A few small quibbles; our peasant French farmer - remember him? - is introduced to us chopping wood. Except all he's chopping is the chopping block. It's stupid. Eli Roth'e entrance with the baseball bat; even if we weren't cutting him out completely, that needs to take a lot less time than it does. I don't know why Tarantino thinks credits look better when there are five different type faces involved, but honestly, they don't. Having a narrator, but only sometimes, is leotarded, even if QT DOES think it's metatextual. Zoller's movie, Pride of the Nation looks good. It looks far too good to be a war movie made in 1944 in Germany. They didn't have the techniques we see being used. I bet the DVD extras have the whole thing on them.

As the credits rolled, I already had most of these thoughts fully formed in my head. And one last one. I bet that as I type this, QT is thinking about doing the sequel, where the IBs, or something like them but even worse, go off to end the war in the Pacific. I can't help thinking that for Tarantino, the thought of having John Wayne behind the Japanese lines beheading people with Samurai swords is probably giving him dangerous palpitations in his castle made out of money right now.

Angels and Demons; a film to stay away from at all costs

I'm not sure why I never blogged on The Da Vinci Code, a movie so garishly awful that watching it became a perverse pleasure. I'll always cherish the utter bankrupt lameness of trying to make us buy Lincoln Cathedral as a stand in for Westminister Abbey by putting a fake sign in the exterior shot saying "Westminster Abbey" and I can never tire of the wonderful moment when Jean Reno drags away Ian McKellen in handcuffs - I always dub my own soundtrack on to that, with Jean saying "Come wiss me Sir Ian, ziss is no place for real actors like us." The movie actually gets a lot worse after Jean and Ian head off - I thought it was over at that stage, but instead it trudges on for a while more, with both Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou looking almost as desperate for the movie to end as I was.

Watching their numb and tortured expressions as The Da Vinci Code limps to a close is a pretty mean pleasure, but it was more pleasure than I got from the whole of Angels and Demons.

Angels and Demons was published in 2000, three years before the Da Vinci Code, and went pretty much as unremarked as all of Dan Brown's other books. I'm not being wilfully cruel here; Dan Brown got a paperback deal for his potboilers and that means he's better at getting published than I'll ever be, and that even before he started making stupid money out of the Da Vinci Code, he'd made more money from writing than I'll ever make from my day job. But Digital Fortress, Deception Point and Angels and Demons were no big deal; just part of the landscape of throwaway crap you could buy in airports to pass the time. The Da Vinci Code was something else; for a while there, if you were in a public place, there was someone in your field of vision reading that damn book. I read it. It's one of the worst written books I've ever read; I think that Jeffrey Archer's Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less is still the worst book I'll ever read from start to finish, but The Da Vinci Code is up there with the complete works of Matthew Reilly and anything by Stel Pavlou. It succeeds in being bad in so many ways. There just isn't any characterisation. The dialogue seems to have been thought up by someone who's made a point of never having a conversation. The research - well, on anything I knew anything about, it was just plain wrong. So I assume that the quality control was uniform throughout and none of the "facts" in the book were solid. Often, I was reminded of Niels Bohr's comment on a bad paper from a student "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."

From what I can gather, Angels and Demons was generally considered to be quite a lot worse than the Da Vinci Code. But a book which sells as many copies as Code has to be filmed - it's just a law. And if the film doesn't actually cause the studio to collapse, there has to be a sequel. So time to dig out Angels and Demons and make a movie out of it. And we'll make it a sequel, because a prequel would be harder for the audience to get their heads around.

Lord, I wish they hadn't. I'd have been spared so much. And as is so often the case, all you can do is blame the writers. The actors are doing their best, and the production look is very glossy. There probably aren't as many disused churches in the whole of Rome as the film would have us believe are in Vatican City (yeah, imagine that, disused churches in the Vatican; a real movie might have done something with the irony), but that niggle apart, it's pretty. It's just moronic.

Fiction always takes place to some extent in a parallel universe; if you use real life institutions you have to bend and warp them and you can't use the real life holders of big offices for all kinds of reasons. So Angels and Demons HAS to be in a parallel universe where the Pope is Celestine V, or rather was because he's all dead now. I accepted that as part of what you do in the world of fiction. It's also taking place in a parallel universe where it takes almost an hour to cross the Vatican in a fast car. In real life, you could walk across the Vatican in twenty minutes with a bag on your head. So in bizarro world, the Vatican's a lot bigger than it is in reality.

Let's get the acting out of the way. Tom Hanks is barely there, except when he's sneering. Robert Langdon is pretty much a dick. He spends the whole movie delivering mini-lectures and put downs to the Catholics littering the place. Before the movie opened people were worrying that it would make the church look bad. They can relax. The movie could have shown the college of cardinals beating Tom Hanks to death with live babies and they'd still have looked good compared to the supercilious sneering git they were putting down. Actually, that's a scene they can put in the director's cut. People would probably like it. Armin Mueller Stahl is wonderful, as always. Playing Cardinal Red Herring, he's perfect as the guy who seems to be too smooth to be anything other than the evil mastermind. Stahl can do warm monsters better than anyone alive, so he was a good casting choice, except for the fact that the target audience for this movie probably hasn't seen another movie with him in it. Same with Stellan Skarsgaard - the savvy casting directors were probably hoping that everyone would get an untrustworthy vibe off him from all of his assorted roles as smart but unscrupulous scoundrels (Gregor in Ronin is about the best known) Ewan McGregor can stop worrying that his Alex Guinness impersonation was the most horrible work he's ever done for money, because Father Patrick McKenna is (I can only hope) head and shoulders the worst performance he's ever likely to give. He has a long speech in the middle of the movie about the need for a kinder gentler church which is more or less the worst three minutes of acting I expect to see this decade. And there's a chick and there's a utility heavy, and any number of redshirted cardinals and cops and they more or less get their work done - they're all fine. Hanks and McGregor should hang their heads in shame, but everyone else did as well as can be expected. And I only single out Hanks and McGregor because either one of them could have pulled a strop and shot one of the writers. Part of what sinks McGregor is that his character is, perversely, set up as Irish, which strands McGregor trying to deliver jaw droppingly turgid dialogue in an accent he can't do properly. I thought that this was just something they were stuck with, but before I started writing this, I looked at a summary of the book, and it turns out that the character was originally written as Italian. Once they were changing, why not change to an accent that McGregor could do? Scottish is about the only which springs to mind, but hey....

But the true horror lies in the writing. And now that I know they weren't really tied down by the original book, my hat's off to the writing team for making such a piss-poor job of the adaptation. The one thing that they did do was make the conspiracy less ramshackle; whereby hangs a tale.

Usually I care about spoilers, but this film comes pre spoiled, so I'm just going to rip in. Tom Hanks has been called in at short notice by the Vatican to use his huge knowledge of arcane bullshit to find the Illuminati plotters who have kidnapped the four most likely future popes and planted an anti-matter bomb in the Vatican someplace. "Thank Goodness," snarks Stellan Skarsgaard's chief of security "The symbologist has arrived". Hanks divides his screen time between delivering lectures on how sucky the Church is and having blinding insights into stuff which doesn't make any sense. So the Illuminati Conspiracy involves them seizing these four guys, killing them in symbolic ways and then destroying the Vatican in an explosion which will completely obliterate all traces of the symbolism and every witness who might conceivably have been impressed with the symbolism in the first place. Oh yeah, and the Illuminati were driven by the Church into swearing eternal enmity and adopting utter secrecy. Weirdly, they implemented this plan by meeting in Churches and festooning the city of Rome with symbols of their meeting places which can be doped out by, well, Tom Hanks. As clandestine conspiracies go, it's like infiltrating the Nazi party in a yarmulke.

The thing is, the plan is completely leotarded right out of the box. You just gape at the screen thinking, Scooby Doo would have been embarrassed by this. Hanks lurches from one landmark to another seizing on random sticky out bits of the scenery and declaring that these are the signs to the next step on the scavenger hunt. Why? Because he says so, that's why.

Which is not to say that he's an action hero. Anything but. There's one shoot out, which he survives by ducking for cover and falling into a cellar. His other moment of personal jeopardy comes when he gets locked into a chamber in the Vatican Archives which suddenly starts to run out of oxygen. He tries to smash his way out with a bookcase, and wonderfully it bounces off the glass wall without breaking it. So he shoots the glass wall, which cracks it a bit, but still doesn't break it. The wall finally collapses about three seconds before they switch the air back on anyway. The audience loved it. Robert Langdon is just pants at action. Somehow, that and the fact that he's a dick are the only believable facets of his character. The idea that he's a genius who just sees all these connections in the puzzle - well firstly the puzzle's dumb, and secondly he's never persuasive as someone who could think his way out of a problem.

So, the plan again. The Pope's dead (we discover halfway through that this was murder), the Illuminati have kidnapped the four cardinals most likely to succeed him, and they've planted an anti-matter bomb in the Vatican. Every hour on the hour, they're going to whack a cardinal, and as a grand finale, they're going to blow up the Vatican with anti-matter. Just so you know they mean it, they've put a "wireless" camera in with their bomb, so you can see that they've got one, and that its fuse is ticking down. But because it's a wireless camera, "It could be ANYwhere."

Fittingly, since the film is ostensibly about the tension between science and faith, Ewan McGregor's Deputy Pope (It's shorthand, I'm not going to bore myself with the crap they used to handwave him) suggests that the camera could be located by switching off the power to bits of the Vatican in turn; he's cunningly noticed that the bomb is lit by artificial light, so if they can switch that off, they'll know what sector of the Vatican powergrid the bomb is in. For the rest of the movie, lights go on and off at random in the Vatican, which has a poor grasp of search algorithms and doesn't seem to realise that first you switch off HALF the lights, then half of the lights in the zone that indicates, and so on. Take about five flips of the switch, ten minutes or so. Or, as John pointed out WIREless camera; triangulate the signal with radio detectors. But you can't expect men of faith to have good engineering skills, now can you?

Though they must have had, at some point - the Vatican Archive is like Google HQ with all the electronic doors and the Swiss Guard Offices make the Pentagon look like a Taliban guard shack. Of course, as already noted, this does seem to be a much bigger Vatican than the one we know about. Hmmm.

Anyhow, other than shedding convenient darkness on scenes better not lit up, the great flicking the light switches plan doesn't do much and Hanks rackets around the Vatican, always missing the chance to save the latest victim by a matter of moments. It's down to them driving, I think. It seems to take much longer to get round the Holy City by Lancia than I ever could on foot. Finally, in the very nick of time, they realise that the plot must centre on the Deputy Pope, and they run back to find him flat on his back with Stellan Skarsgaard looming over him. So Stellan gets plugged; he's been well dodgy all along and it's obvious that he's the villain of the piece, the sinister mind behind the plot (the sinister hands of the plot have just blown themselves up by falling for that old chestnut of getting into a car that's been wired to explode). Hanks and the Deputy Pope realise that the last piece of the puzzle has fallen into place and they race for the bomb, getting there just five minutes before it's due to blow up. How can they defuse it? The chick was supposed to do that, but she gets cold feet at the last minute and there's nothing for it but to try to get the bomb far enough away from the Vatican to detonate without damaging anything. How can our intrepid heroes do it? Especially as they've pretty much decimated the Vatican security forces in the course of the last hour. Luckily, there's a helicopter in St Peter's Square! Even more luckily, Deputy Pope Ewan McGregor can fly a helicopter!

Just pause here, we have to do a quick critique of the worst back-story foreshaow in the history of fiction; Deputy Pope McGregor used to be just a wee little boy in Northern Ireland, and then the UVF let off a bomb in protest at the visit to Belfast of an Archbishop, which orphaned the future deputy pope. So saddened was the archbishop that he adopted the Little Orphan Boy and brought him to Italy. Where, in defiance of all logic he a) developed a Southern Irish accent (albeit a terrible one) and b) got conscripted into the Italian army where he learned to fly helicopters, and rescued the wounded. Right, in all those wars Italy's been in lately, I know. Believe it or not, in the book, the backstory is even more insane. And, yeah, the UVF were bastards, but even if an Archbishop had ever visited Northern Ireland (archbishops not being actually in short supply there to be begin with) it's unlikely that the UVF would have let a bomb off, if only because they were, by and large, far too stupid to build a bomb which would actually go off. Anyhow the important thing is that the Deputy Pope knows how to fly a chopper.

So Deputy Pope McGregor flies up into the sky with the bomb, and we think well, that's actually kind of manly, and not at all as crap as it could have been because it's a real self sacrifice. Then a parachute appears. It's the Deputy Pope. By some magic we can only guess at, he's figured out a way to a) lock the autopilot into continuous climb and b) find a parachute and c) get into it and d) jump out of the helicopter all within the less than five minutes between grabbing the bomb in the basement and running out into the piazza - well, anyhow, you can see that it's physically impossible even if helicopters had parachutes in them, which they pretty much don't. He's still descending on this impossible parachute when the bomb goes off, about three different times and four different ways (I imagine the CGI team said "well, we could do this, or this, or this" and Ron Howard (whose fault most of this is) said "Hell, do all of them." The pressure wave is intense, making holes in the dome of St Peters, but magically not turning everyone in St Peter's Square into jelly; I guess there are things about anti-matter which science can't explain.... Again, the book is actually dumber; in the book, Langdon goes up in the chopper but doesn't have a parachute, so he uses a HELICOPTER DOOR as an improvised paraglider to make a safe splashdown in the Tiber....

Turns out, though, that all the stupid, stupid holes in the Illumnati plan are there on purpose, because Ewan McGregor has made the whole thing up so as to orchestrate his own election as pope. I mean, there he is, heroically sacrificing himself and surviving only through a miracle. It must be God's will that he be Pope. Big spoiler, no, because in the nick of time Langdon dopes it all out and rats him out to the Cardinals, who shun him, so he goes off and for some completely crazy pants reason, sets fire to himself. Because that would be a fun way to go.

The sort of cool thing is that with that reveal, all the weaknesses in the Illuminati plot go away. The time wasting stupid plan to find the camera by switching the lights off (doubly doomed to failure - when we finally see the bomb, the light shining on it is running off a big truck battery) was Deputy Pope McGregor's own suggestion. And now it's easy to see how there'd be a parachute in the chopper. And the crazypants plot which if it had succeeded would have left no witnesses to its own brilliance - not a problem if it was only meant to showcase the Deputy Pope's awesomeness. And even Langdon's magical ability to figure out the clues; not so amazing if you figure that Deputy Pope crazypants McGregor has been manipulating him from the beginning, setting up a plot which would be obvious to the academic patsy he's brought in to uncover things at just the right speed to kill off all his rivals yet leave him untouched....

All in all, you start to think it could have been a pretty cool movie if they'd shown it from the right angles - imagine if it had been shown as Langdon deluding himself the whole time and then realising that he'd been played.

And it's tempting to think of what it might have been like with a better director (and better writers); JJ Abrams could have run with it much better. Or Mel Gibson's version. That would have been fun. Is it too soon for the remake?

Can I ask you a stupid question?

The only appropriate and safe answer is "Yes".

Here's why. No matter what the problem is, there's only going to be a couple of questions which will help you get closer to the solution. All the other ones are going to be stupid questions. And let's face it; no halfway sensible person asks questions they already know the answer to, or which they could figure out the answer to by sitting quietly for a second. So if you ask a question, it's because you don't know stuff, and the chances are that you don't even know enough about the subject to know what a good question would be. So the chances are that any question you ever get asked, on its merits, is going to sound pretty stupid. For that matter, the chances are that any question you ever ask is going to be stupid.

If you're unlucky enough to work in a job with easily defined parameters, most of the questions you're going to get asked will be non stupid ones, but they'll all be the same question, more or less; they'll be versions of "can you tell me when the next train leaves/whether this item is in stock/what price extra fries are?". If you're lucky enough to have a job that pays well, it's almost certainly paying you well because it requires you to think. And if you're paid money to think, it's invariably because there are lots of people coming by your shop who find it too much trouble to think about the things that you're being paid to think about. Those people are going to ask you stupid questions.

Rejoice. For two reasons. The first is that your job wouldn't exist if it weren't for stupidity. I've made a good living for twenty five years out of the fact that the world is full of people who don't know how to do things that I know how to do. It's frustrating dealing with the consequences of stupidity, but whenever I find myself wishing that for once people would just get a clue, I remind myself that if they ever did, the first sensible follow-up would be to put me on a farm somewhere. And the second reason to rejoice is that stupidity is neither general nor incurable. There are irretrievably stupid people out there, but the majority of stupid people are specialists. Just as no-one can know everything, no-one can be ignorant of everything. And people can, and sometimes even do, learn.

So when someone comes up and says "Can I ask you a stupid question?" fight the temptation to embroider your reply. It would be amusing to say "Apparently, you can." or "Only time will tell." Lord knows, I've said that often enough. It's tempting to say condescendingly "No such thing as a stupid question.", although I hope I've just talked you out of that fallacy. The simple and true answer is "Yes." With no baggage or condescension, and with the humble awareness that your own turn in the barrel is coming, say "Yes." It won't make you feel much better about the idiocy to come or the mental gymnastics needed to jump over it. But at least it won't make the person asking the question feel like any more of an idiot than they have to.

Because the last thing you want is for the Masons to be mad at you

I have to say that the abiding memory I take away from Wanted is actually the trailer for "Hellboy 2, the surpassingly dumb title". Hellboy will fight the Golden Army this time, because, as John pointed out, the trade name Golden Horde is already spoken for. Not more than a minute after that side of the mouth wisecrack, we were treated to a title card for Wanted, which explained to us that a thousand years ago a society of weavers had set up a fraternity of assassins. "Weavers", I said from the side of my own mouth, "because Masons would have been ridiculous".

The thing is that the next day when I was giving the obligatory rundown to my female colleague, I actually spent more time explaining the trailer for Hellboy than I did on Wanted, your feature presentation. And it was quite simply because although Hellboy 2 will probably be dumber than a bag full of very dumb things, it's brought to you by the man who made Pan's Labyrinth, and more usefully, the man who made the creature effects for Pan's Labyrinth. And the signs are that Guillermo rang up his creature guy and said "Hey, remember the Faun from Labyrinth? Well, this time I've got a TONNE of money." It might be that rare film which is worth watching just for the sake of going ooh ah at the creature effects.

Meantime, Wanted. Brought to you by the same lunatic who brought us DayWatch and Nightwatch. I'm not sure what kind of movies they had in Russia under Communism, but there was obviously something they needed to get out of their systems after communism. Timur Bekmambetov does two things in ways which no-one in the West does. He does grotesques and ordinary ugly people just getting by, and he does action sequences which have absolutely no point other than to be action sequences. When he made Nightwatch and Daywatch he was making films out of some of the most popular fiction in Russia since Tolstoy retired to the farm. The books don't really lend themselves to film - they're full of brooding and doublecross and reflections on Russian pop music and they're short on action. Timur Bekmambetov decided to plug the gap by making some action up. The films are great fun, but if the books had had the same kind of fanbase as Harry Potter, Bekmambetov would have been publicly murdered by a firing squad of demented children firing bazookas loaded with polonium before a baying crowd of fanboys on live syndicated satellite TV. Because, pretty much, he just took the core concepts of the books and threw in as much weird stunt action as he thought he could get away with.

Wanted is apparently based on a comic book, which means he had even more leeway to just throw cool crap at the screen and chuckle to himself.

It opens with a whole bunch of people getting shot in slow motion. We've got so numbed by violence in the movies that we don't really notice the results any more unless someone goes to immense trouble to hammer home the point that getting killed is something more than the punch line to choreography, and for people who find that kind of thing worrying, Wanted is going to be more disturbing evidence of where it's all going horribly wrong. One person get shot in the head in the first two minutes. In short order, four more get shot in the next four minutes. Then the guy who shot those four gets shot in the head from three miles out. Two points to note; although the whole shooty bit is thrilling and cleverly staged, the best bit is that the first person to get shot provides a tremendous sight gag which I kind of saw coming. She's a Hindu, with a small red caste mark on her head. And a few seconds after we first see her, the caste mark seems to light up slightly before we realise that it's not just a caste mark - it's a caste mark which has been lit up by a laser sight. And off we go.

Initial shooting out of the way, we turn to real tragedy; we're introduced to James McAvoy's character and his terrible, terrible, how very like our own, life. He's a cube rat with an overweight malevolent boss and a job which makes dead end seem like an aspiration. His best friend takes advantage of him - not only is he banging our hero's shallow shrill and self-absorbed girlfriend, he's getting him to pay for the condoms. Because no-one in the audience, not even me, has actually shot anyone in the head from three miles away, and everyone in the audience hates their job and thinks their friends stiff them on split restaurant tabs, the quarter of an hour or so in which we see Wesley Gibson's miserable life of non-adventure is considerably more upsetting than all the stuff which went before it, not to mention the hundreds of deaths still to come.

Then enter Angelina Jolie, who shoots up a pharmacy, trashes a sportscar and generally injects a preposterous level of action into extracting Wesley from his life of tedium and introducing him to his destiny. Duh, didn't I see this in Matrix? Never mind, it's sort of fun anyhow. Actually, it's huge fun. Jolie isn't my idea of a great actress, but she has a languid athleticism which is perfect for this role - for as long as she's on screen, she's effortlessly the most compelling thing there. It's a larger than life character, and Jolie is a larger than life actress. She moves quicker than everyone else, but somehow makes it seem as though she's taking her time, and she maintains through almost the entire movie an air of amused detachment. You'd think that in a movie with James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman in featured roles, the compelling acting would be coming from the serious actors - but this is a dumb movie, and in a dumb movie, the compelling performances are going to come from the people who look like they're in on the joke, not the guys who are trying to get into character.

The structure is simplicity itself; naif is inducted into organisation, faces gruelling training, becomes a stronger person, confronts the bad guy, comes to question what he's been told, winds up once more alone. It's been done a hundred times. What makes Wanted fun is that along the way it pulls off some giddy setpieces of pure amoral action. Wesley becomes an assassin, so he has to go killing people. But the killing is an afterthought - the energy has gone into contriving absurd methods of shooting the hapless victims. So the first one has to be shot from the roof of a moving train as it curves past the building in which the target is holding a meeting. The second is in a bulletproof limo, whose only vulnerability is its open sunroof. Wesley contrives to flip his car in a somersault over the limo so that he can shoot down through the roof while spinning through the air and into a perfect landing. It's so audaciously bananas that the cinema laughed out loud. The dead guy wasn't even a punch line.

Having set us up the bomb, it's time to move to the really BIG setpieces, the first of which involves a shoot out on a train. Which culminates in the complete destruction of the train (and I'm watching it thinking a) isn't this stolen from King Kong? Or Jurassic Park 2? b) if this crevasse is that insanely deep, how in the name of God did they build the bridge that's spanning it, not to mention WHY?). Hundreds of passengers get killed, but miraculously the name cast survives, and the film focuses on their problems rather than the worst train disaster in Western Europe since the end of the second world war.

The aftermath of the crash leads to portentous revelations and one big cathartic shoot out at the villain's lair. Which is choreographed as a bastard cross between the Lobby Demolition Scene in the Matrix and all of Shoot Em Up although the body count feels even higher than both put together. It's one long saga of people getting shot stabbed and bludgeoned, and it ends in a Mexican standoff which for some unaccountable reason forgot to have a shout out to the prince of the circular firing squad, John Landis. As shootouts go, it rates points just for having more New York reloads by a single character than I have ever seen before. In the LDS of Matrix, (which is one of my great guilty pleasures) Neo throws away gun after gun as they empty. Wesley doesn't just throw away his guns when they run dry; he finds ever more inventive ways to grab spare guns off other people and go right on shooting with them. The nagging problem is that the people getting whacked are people who we've already seen depicted as perfectly decent types. This is another one of those scenes that makes Wanted a guilty pleasure at best.

And we roll through the climax to the epilogue and closure, and a vague "Well, everyone being all dead and everything, Wanted 2 doesn't seem that likely now does it." But who knows?

John, as is so often the case, has the last word. Mid way through the film, Wesley quits his job and tells his appalling boss what he thinks of her before yanking out the cable of his ergonomic keyboard and stalking out of the office with it. And his ghastly best friend gets in the way with fake congratulations, whereupon Wesley smashes him in the face with the keyboard. And as loose keys and teeth fly through the air, they briefly spell out FUCK YOU. I mentioned this to John afterwards, and he said "Good thing it was one of those ergonomic keyboards. You know, with two U keys."

That's Wanted. It's flashy, and it's fun, but it doesn't really stand up to close inspection.

PS: Much later, I watched this again on DVD, and realised that the second U was one of Wesley's buddy's molars. So I was wrong. As usual.

Mortal Engines

Another genre is fantasy and science fiction. For some reason, the intelligentsia aren't terribly interested in this genre, and you don't see critics weighing in to sanctify some practitioner. This can lead to some pretty weird results at times.

Take Booker prize type novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It's "daring" and "experimental" inasmuch as it has six or seven narratives nested in it, starting with a character all at sea in the 1800s and going all the way to the distant future where ignorant savages eke out a miserable existence in Hawaii before realising that they're being studied by a remnant of modernity that somehow survived the cataclysm which brought civilisation to an end. Each narrative gets a chunk, then breaks to be replaced by a later narrative, and then after the middle of the book the cycle reverses, so that it begins and ends with the ship.

David Mitchell doesn't need my approval, what with being successful and published and critically feted, and that's probably just as well. Because what he's written in Cloud Atlas is insanely derivative. The worst bit is the second last narrative, which is all about a fast food worker in a terrible dystopian future Korea. Who discovers that the utopian life promised for retired fast food workers is all a lie, and that instead of being carried away in a ship to happy island, they wind up being killed and minced and turned into happy meals for the fast food chain. Somehow, nobody reviewing this book noticed that this is pretty much the big reveal in a Harry Harrison short story (Make Room, Make Room) and a Charlton Heston movie (Soylent Green). That's probably the biggest steal in the book, but most of the rest of the SF elements are wearisomely familiar to anyone who reads decent SF. Of which there is such a thing. Anyhow, I always felt kind of let down that someone could do that and not get called on it anywhere, but there you go.

While critics have pretty much ignored fantasy and SF except to make passing swipes at the kind of people who read it instead of immersing themselves in accounts of the career and marital disasters of university lecturers, there are two great recent exceptions. The first is Harry Potter, which gets noticed because the cultural arbiters pretty much can't ignore books which make their writer as rich as the Queen of England no matter how bad they are in practice. The second is Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy actually made critics sit up and take notice of a fantasy/SF hybrid series of kids' books because, well, he takes on God with malice aforethought. His Dark Materials is actually a very good piece of work, right up to the point where the author loses the plot in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the phrase in the final act of the last book. It's all been very good up to there; there's a relentless heartlessness to the plot which makes a welcome change from the mawkishness of the children's books of my youth. Sadly, there's something about attacking God that turns you into a hectoring humourless jerk (yes, I'm looking at you Dawkins and Hitchens) no matter how good your underlying work is.

Still, Pullman kicked down some doors, and let interesting people walk through them in his wake. One is Philip Reeve. Now it's perfectly plain from the presentation of Reeve's books that his publishers hoped he'd be the next Pullman - the type faces and presentation echo the early printings of Pullman (from before he got famous) far more than is strictly necessary. And Reeve can't be unaware of the parallel; there's a little shout-out to "Philip Bellman with his series of atheistic pop-up books for the underfives" which I can't make my mind up about; is it a sly reference to someone he actually likes, or a bitchy comment about someone who got a better film deal? I'd be able to decide if I knew how Irish he was.

Reeve is no Pullman. Pullman's a stronger stylist by far, and his principal work - despite my crabbing about the final act - holds together as a single vision in a way that Mortal Engines doesn't. Mortal Engines reads like one book which spawned three good sequels; His Dark Materials reads like one big book which got published in three volumes.

Reeve is still a damn fine writer. Mortal Engines is set in a future where thousands of years of squabbling over the ruins of a war shattered earth has culminated in a stand off between mobile cities and stationary communities. Now the physics and logistics of such a vision don't bear serious examination for a second, but Reeve is able to write fast enough that a reader doesn't quibble. He's also able to write characters with enough appeal that you're far busier wondering what's going to happen to them than you are picking away at the sustainability of "Municipal Darwinism", the bonkers post-thatcherite philosophy which drives the traction cities in their quest to scavenge smaller cities and fight with bigger ones. A few weeks after I've finished reading the books, I'm coming around to the notion that once you dig into the logic of his books, he's essentially marketing the same dumb notion of sustainable pastoral nirvana as Tolkien did, but that doesn't stop me from admiring the books he's written while smoking that weed.

The engagingly mad and carefully maintained vision of the future is one of Reeve's key strengths in the books - he has his future mapped out and he doesn't cheat. The second, and far more important, strength in the work is that his characters are as fallible, conflicted and vulnerable as anyone you can meet in real literature. We're introduced to one of the central characters, Tom Natsworthy early on, and he's a classic children's story hero, well-meaning, lacking in self confidence, lacking in any self-awareness. In most books, he'd meet a kindly mentor and discover himself before saving the world. In Reeve's books, Tom never really gets his act together, never really develops any self confidence and most importantly of all, never gets himself a kindly mentor. There's very little kindness in Tom's world, and most of it he's having to provide himself. Reeve pairs him off with Hester, a murderous orphan with a hideously scarred face.

In conventional fiction, Hester would die early, delivering a plot lesson along the way and be replaced by someone cute. In Reeve's world, Hester lasts all the way through four books, and gets meaner and unhappier the further she goes. Her one saving grace is her love for Tom. Meanwhile the cute girl who he's been lined up with in conventional narrative terms gets shot to bits in the first book. Reeve is cavalier with characters. If they get in harm's way, they get killed. If Reeve has spent huge energy bringing them to life, that's just too bad. The third book begins with a perfect case in point. A character who's been painstakingly nursed through the second book returns in the third as a key mover and shaker. Just when you've decided that he's going to be the villain of the piece, he takes a bullet through the head in the course of a theft turned hostage taking which is so elegantly set up as a plausible bungle that I was rapt with admiration as a focal character is dragged off in a submarine with nothing to be done about it. Snatching her was the last thing anyone wanted to do, and by a simple set of bad calls (the most important of which was Hester's entirely in-character decision to kill everyone in sight) becomes the only possible outcome. Marvellous stuff.

This anyone can die at any time dynamic is at its most intense in the first book, which sees all kinds of sympathetic secondary characters and villains polished off at unexpected moments. Reeve eases off on the body count in the later books, but he's established his rules and will still happily whack people from time to time to keep the readers on their toes. Amazingly he also gets away with bringing back two characters from the dead without in any way derailing your sense of fair play. He's carefully set up a mechanism of bringing back the dead long before there's any prospect of it being used, and so when it happens there's no sense of "hang on, you can't do that."

The thing which struck me as most notable about the series, however, was the character of Hester. By the beginning of the third book, she's settled down, but tellingly, she's not really liked. She's the dirty harry of the whole series, an implacable enemy and bad tempered friend. Usually, by the time any writer has had a character like that around for a few hundred pages, the character has softened a little, and the spear carriers like the character despite all the flaws we've been shown as readers (read any long running detective series, starting with the Morse novels, to see what I mean). Reeve doesn't bother. Hester's a killer, and the people in her community are deeply uncomfortable around her. They put up with her, but they don't even have that only-in-fiction thing of "Yeah, she's a killer, but the community needs someone dangerous just in case." They flat out don't trust her, and she's uncomfortably aware of it without knowing what to do. That's tellingly perceptive and completely out of the run of conventional narrative in children's - or anyone's - books.

The overall narrative arc unfolds over twenty years or so, and so many people die that it would have been almost a perversion of the narrative for the main characters to make it out in one piece. But I have to confess that when Tom and Hester reach the end of their track it broke my heart more than a little. I've never fought free of my bad habit of looking at the last few pages of a book before I get there the honest way, and so I started into A Darkling Plain, the last - and longest - volume, knowing the worst that was coming. It was still very affecting, perhaps the more so because Reeve is not given to over-writing things. There is a short epilog which unlike most epilogs really does work; I could have lived without the wrap-ups for the other characters, but the bookend for Mr Shrike is ingenious, telling and allows the book to taper to a close on just the right note of loss and redemption.

The Stark Stark Truth

There are annoying rules to being hip. Which is why I usually don't devote much of my time to hipness.

For example, people with pretensions to culture don't read books unless they're literature. From what I can figure out, literature is books about people who are either a) exactly like book critics or b) having a really crap time in an impoverished setting. I'm not basing this on a lot of exposure to literature, because every time I try reading literature I get fed up. So I could be missing something. If so, good, because as nearly as I can tell, the real driving force in literature and culture in general is that it should be the mental equivalent of cod liver oil or cross country running - something which is defined as being good for you precisely because it's no damn fun, and therefore must be improving.

I've said it countless times, and maybe even in this blog; if you want to get an improving perspective on the suffering of the world, all you have to do is pay attention to the world around you. You don't need to buy a novel; in fact, if the world's problems are that interesting to you, you should be spending the money on charities and putting the reading time into running a soup kitchen. If, on the other hand, you're reading a book to get away from all that crap for a couple of hours, why on earth would you want to read a story about middle class angst or third world misery? You've got enough angst as it is. Which is why Harry Potter outsells Booker prize novels, and proper order. I hate both, but at least Harry Potter is openly aimed at taking your mind off things. Booker Prize winning books let you think you're doing something to make the world a better place while in reality you're just taking up space and trying not to move your lips while you do it.

Having established that I'd rather be stuck in a firefight than a reading group, I am now going to pour further scorn on educated people and their weird engagement with popular culture. Most books (and all TV and all movies) are crap. Which is fine. Most crap falls into a genre; detective stories, science fiction, horror, historical romance and so on. There are two special genres which are gender specific crap; thrillers (crap for men) and chick-lit (crap for women). Even as a escapism, thrillers and chick-lit are kind of hard to root for. Thrillers are pointless violence and chick-lit is pointless emotion. Whenever I read thrillers, I do it guiltily and in the clear knowledge that they're going in the recycle bucket as soon as I finish with them.

In genre proper, you opt into a ghetto. In the minds of the intelligentsia, a certain kind of person reads any given genre and they don't read anything else. And within each genre, the intelligentsia bless certain authors as being somehow above their genre, and thus OK, as long as they're read in a suitably detached, ironic and superior way.

This infuriating crap is nowhere more apparent than in crime fiction, where the intelligentsia are forever buffing up their guilty pleasures by anointing some writer as the exemplar of all that is cool in the slum they inhabit.

I've been colliding with this crap on and off since I was old enough to realise that Biggles wasn't a very realistic depiction of anything. So a few years ago I found myself reading Jim Thompson, because the pulpmeister of the 50s was consecrated a while back as a pioneer of noir. The intelligentsia like noir, which it turns out is anything where the good guys don't win. Here we are back at the miserablist tendencies of our cultural superiors. I suspect it comes down to the fact that these opinion setters have rather pleasant lives and value anything which contrasts with that. Anyhow, Jim Thompson is depressing. Really depressing. He's so incredibly good at being depressing that I expect I'm never going to forget the end of The Getaway. For those of you who've only seen either of the movies, the book continues on past our antiheroes getting clear of the posse and devotes its last third to describing the utter hell they consign themselves to instead. Jail would have been a MUCH better plan. And that's one of Jim Thompson's more upbeat books. No wonder he died cruelly young. It probably came as a relief. This was not a man who appeared to think the best of people.

Anyhow, that steered me away from noir for a while. Then last week I thought I'd give it another try and I bought four Richard Stark books. Now, full disclosure is required here. Richard Stark is also known as Donald Westlake, and I really enjoy Westlake's Dortmunder books, which are wry explorations of how a life of crime can go wrong. Dortmunder is a much put upon criminal mastermind, who in book after book has assembled his crew, put the master plan into action (increasingly against victims so unsympathetic that robbing them is less a crime and more a form of public service), and then watched it fall apart for simple yet completely unforeseeable reasons. Each book ends with Dortmunder and his cohorts no better off than they were at the beginning. Like much crime fiction they can be read in any order - Dortmunder never learns, ages or develops, and because he never makes more out of crime than he would out of working in Walmart, he never retires either. Written down like this, it sounds awful. Actually it's great fun. While none of the characterisation in these books is going to keep Tolstoy awake at nights, the cast are deftly sketched in as comic types. They're given the little quirks and foibles that echo the way you'd describe the people you work with to your in-laws; there's no depth to it, but oddly they've got just as much personality as the average acquaintance you don't really know. So it matters to you that they're at hazard, but it doesn't break your heart that they never get out of trouble. In short, they're just lifelike enough to root for and not so life-like as to make it horrible when they sleepwalk into disaster. In a very minor way, this is artistry.

Richard Stark is like Westlake's evil twin. His principal character, Parker, is a man so austere that an actual first name would give him too much personality. He moves from one heist to another, killing his confederates when they let him down, which they pretty much always do. He's the anti-Dortmunder. Dortmunder always uses the same bunch of affable schlubs and goes out of his way not to hurt people. Parker never runs with the same crew twice (not least because it's a rare crew that gets out of a book alive) and holds back from killing people only because the cops pay too much attention when civilians get killed. Mind you, like Dortmunder, Parker has a way of leaving the book no better off than he went in, so he's got that same hamster on a treadmill character.

I bought four books because the critics have been pouring praise on them from a height and because they were slightly discounted. I carefully sorted them out in copyright order, which turned out to be a complete waste of time, because there's no continuity or progression from one book to another.

There's a lot that's good about the books. Stark starts his narrative as late as he can; no time is wasted on set up, and even less on epilogue and resolution. The writing's clean and crisp and no more clever than it needs to be. I read all four in a matter of days. The plotting's clever, and there's an offhandedness to the way things go wrong which rings true. Because the books are all plot, you start to appreciate how much cleverness is needed to keep coming up with plausible incidents enough to fill a couple of hundred pages. Breakout is particularly good - Parker gets caught robbing a warehouse, gets thrown into jail, breaks out, finds himself walked into breaking INTO a jewelry wholesaler as part of the price for the assistance he needed to break out of jail, and then rather beautifully finds himself having to break out out of the wholesaler's when the robbery goes wrong and the getaway is compromised. All of these things unfold with a deceptive inevitability which is completely unforced. It's a fun read, as is Ask the Parrot, when Parker's once more running away from a robbery gone wrong only to walk into something much odder.

The thing is, having read them once I can't see myself reading them again, or buying any more. The cleverness isn't enough. Parker's so austere and shut in that you don't really feel any connection to him. You don't want to know what's going to happen to him next. The supporting cast in any given book either die or wind up in jail or disappear on their own errands. So there's nothing going on there that invites you to come back. It's the reading equivalent of eating crisps. Tasty, but kind of empty.

What's bananas is that the critics praise these books to the skies and they're regularly reissued in the UK in editions plainly aimed at people who don't think of themselves as genre readers, but literature readers. Meanwhile the more genial and enjoyable and involving Dortmunder books are pretty much ignored - the only ones I've got are American printings. They're better books, but the cold and uninvolving Parker is the one which the critics prefer. And I think this comes down to the notion that misery is somehow more improving than fun. Parker's world is horrible and bleak and deadly - and in the minds of critics that somehow makes it more authentic and worthy. But Parker's world is no more realistic than Dortmunder's. In a lot of ways it's less realistic; the likeable schlubs of Dortmunder's gang are ineffectual and loyal to each other out of a sort of confused sentimentality. They're guys who break the law. They're not made out of evil, and they're not particularly good at the evil they do. Their unremarkable greyness rings much more true to me than the bleach-bypass black and white of Parker's world, where everyone is on the verge of selling out everyone else at any moment. The realism and darkness of the Parker books is fatally undercut by the fact that all the characters - and particularly the protagonist - are so empty that it's hard to understand why they bother getting out of bed in the morning let alone plotting their lives of crime.

So that's me off the noir for a while. It's all right as far as it goes, but I'm as baffled as ever about why people think it's an incisive commentary on the real world.

Where was the blood?

I'm still trying to figure out why There Will Be Blood was called There Will Be Blood. Of course, I don't really know why Magnolia was called Magnolia, the difference being that I liked Magnolia and and I only wanted to like There Will Be Blood. In principle, it was a great idea. It had Daniel Day Lewis in it, being an obsessional lunatic. It had burning oil rigs. I was realistic enough not to expect it to have car chases, one of the things without which I believe no film is complete. I was even happy enough to accept this and move on to looking forward to Daniel Day Lewis.

Hmmm. Dan is special. He can get away with stuff no-on else could try. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is one of the best examples; I actually bought the idea that Dan was attractive enough to get women to get into bed with him just by asking. Not because he was that pretty, though in those pre-The-Boxer days when his nose was still straight, he was one of the best looking men in showbiz. He simply had whatever spark it is that lets an actor get away with anything, including dialogue that ought to make you burst out laughing. Years later he strides through The Last of the Mohicans and makes the film work not just by being the most athletic action man you ever saw, but by being the only person in the movie who can make the dialogue sound remotely like something people might actually say. So, pretty much, my attitude is, if you've got a body of water and you need someone to walk across it, Dan's your man.

And Dan doesn't let me down. Everything else is too weird for words, but Dan owns the film. Actually it's no exaggeration to say he's the only thing in most of it. He's in almost every scene, and when he's not on screen it's only so that he can make an entrance at any moment. He doesn't just have all the best lines - most of the time he's the only person with any lines. There are only four or five other featured characters, and only two manage to get any real screen time. Daniel Plainview's adopted son HW is on screen for much of the movie, but he's almost wordless until an hour into the film and he's struck deaf and dumb only a little later. So he doesn't get much dialogue in. Daniel Plainvview's opponent in the film, Eli Sunday, is the only other character who gets to say more than a few sentences. He actually gets quite long monologues, all of which underline that he's a self-deluding religious lunatic and a deeply creepy person to have around. Between them, Eli and Daniel do pretty much all the talking in the nearly three hours of the movie.

Around about now I ought to be saying that the film is actually a face-off between the greedy, oil-obsessed, manipulative and unscrupulous Plainview and the creepy religiously obsessed Eli Sunday. But the movie doesn't actually stick to its theme. The characters don't interact enough on screen to get a sense of any conflict unfolding between them.

Well, it's a Paul Thomas Anderson film. It's expected to be all over the place. The unspoken deal is that at the end, all the things which were apparently scattered will be brought into congruence again. Doesn't happen this time. The final act unfolds as a two hander between Plainview and Sunday, Plainview on the edge of senility and collapse and Sunday utterly compromised and bankrupt in every way. It's an astonishing piece of work, steeped in hatred and strong emotion and climaxing in death, but it just doesn't seem to connect to the rest of the film. I still don't know what the plan was. I did find myself thinking that it was playing out in a bowling alley because it was no longer safe to let Daniel Day Lewis work in an area with carpeting. Or that it hadn't originally been a bowling alley, but after Dan ate all the carpet, there was no other thing to dress the set as.

Weird movie. It's not that it has an astonishing - and sometimes hammy - performance from Dan at the centre, it's that it's genuinely hard to see what else it's got. No-one else is working at the same level, and it's not through lack of talent - it because they're not given anything else to do. There's just Daniel. Full stop. The first fifteen minutes of the movie unfold in complete silence as Daniel digs his first hole in the ground and makes his first strike, completely alone and with a ton of trouble. He falls down a shaft, breaks his leg, hauls himself back out of the hole and drags himself into town to cash in. And digs another shaft and another. Other people arrive on the scene, and still no voices are heard. The first human voice in the film is at least twenty minutes in, as Plainview introduces himself to a town meeting he's going to try to hustle into selling him an oil lease. And that voice, almost always quiet and yet utterly dominant, is pretty much the only real voice the film allows itself. It ought to be enough, but for me it was not. There Will Be Blood is an extraordinary paradox; an astonishing performance without a movie around it.