GaryDThere will be blood or almost
December 8th 2008 09:17
There will be Blood or almost...
I have seen this epidemic grip lot of Mumbai filmmakers who have worked in recent past with Amitabh Bachchan, Dilip Kumar, Naseer and Kamal Hasan to name a few.
In the west too, I have seen this happen with Robert de niro, Al pacino, Nicholas cage and the likes. Lets be honest, when is the last time we saw some real great cinema featuring any of the above. We still keep going back to classics that made them who they are but what happened to them later?
It's almost like a curse. It's not as if great films are not being made but for some strange reason they are just not being made with these guys.
This reminds me of those great club entertainers in the old times - the greedy manager would continue to put them up for the show, the entertainer still has the same talent and he is good at what he does but somehow everyone else around him has lost the plot. so the music sounds off, the stage is tacky and even the lights don’t work. The audiences, the few who choose to stay till the end, painfully and helplessly witness the death of a shinning diamond.
It's really sad because the film I am going to talk about here could have been so much more but it remained at best a half drawn rainbow.
In "There will be Blood" lays one of the best performances of Daniel Day Lewis but with a directionless story, the performance is towards no end. And there is no glory in that, is there?
If this was a showreel of Mr. Lewis's work, I would say Bravo but this is a film. A film needs to grip me on the whole and not just in parts - you have electrifying performance by couple of its actors, the dialogues are piercing, the music in part is haunting, the premise had promise....
So then I ask you - what stopped the makers to make a complete story of it? to create a real conflict? to resolve the conflict? to actually use these great parts that existed in isolation to convey a message, a story, as a whole? What stopped them from actually revealing the point of this story?
I guess we will never know or perhaps the makers stopped paying attention after Daniel day Lewis started doing his job. because he is truly great in his job but that’s not what I can say about the director.
You can't use the entire film to set up your character and run out of time to tell the story and if the story was the character then it is even worse because the story had no progression. Daniel Day Lewis's character, though a great character, is pretty much the same from the beginning to the end.
The premise of the innocent landowners being invaded by the greedy powerful oil bounty hunter is interesting but why didn’t we see the affects of it on people around - why didn’t we see people changing - why didn’t the camera leave Daniel day Lewis and explore the other facets of this premise that could have given us a window into the beginning of how oil affected the lives of a community and then we could have drawn parallels with our current lives. But non of this really happened.
We just kept seeing this brilliant actor perform almost by himself -as if he was left stranded by his co-workers except in parts supported by this young actor who played this priest.
In isolation some of the scenes and dialogues are memorable but I was disappointed by lack of a complete story and I only hope that never is a Gun ever loaded again if it will not be fired, because then, my friends, there will be blood!
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