Bastard from a Basket!

Saw There Will Be Blood last night. It's the closest thing I think I've ever seen to a novel. It really sits inside me like a book. And like an old book. Like something from Nathaniel West or Flannery O'Connor. There's a huge gulf of loneliness layered over a kind of silent scream of horror.

Not my favorite film - though I guess the world had led me to believe that I might assess it so. There was greatness all through it and it was artful, but it wasn't important to me. It's themes and movements were all incredible - but I just don't particularly care at this moment about Things Awful.

There was an impressive amassing of verbal silence. Just not a lot of talking. And the talking that was there was peculiar and dream-like, though pedestrian.

There was silence and there was absence. John Fowles wrote something about admiring certain novelists talent for "absence". For not including certain fragments or tie-togethers. For leaving things out. For letting the reader fill things in. PTA has this talent for absence.

Like Magnolia I sensed some lurking cartoon quality throughout. I have no idea where this comes from - maybe just my own strangeness.

And I keep wondering how much Daniel Day Lewis Made the movie. Without him, what would it have been? I can't imagine. He's more than the movie. The movie was like the skin of the story that falls off us at the end when we go into the dark. And it's seen that the story wasn't important at all. Just the person moment by moment.

Anyway - beautiful film made of flint and weeds.