journal features

movie review - There Will Be Blood

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Tokyo, 2008.02.23

This is a movie of the early days of the oil industry, depicting a ruthless and power-mad man who effectively loses his humanity in his effort to make a vast fortune and exert his control over everyone and everything around him. It's naked "capitalism" (exploitation) at its finest, and while flawlessly made and acted, I found it hard to take. There are few characters in this thing that you'd ever want to know and certainly the lead character (who consumes the run time to a large extent) is just a monster.

Recommended. For the craft, not the content.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)