Oscar did itself proud by awarding No Country for Old Men the big awards Sunday night: Best Screenplay, Best Director(s), Best Picture and especially Best Supporting Actor to the preternaturally excellent Javier Bardem. Few could argue with the Academy’s Best Actor choice, either: Daniel Day-Lewis for his titanic performance in There Will Blood. Though far from a perfect film, There Will Be Blood is genuinely ambitious and serious, not to mention further evidence that the young and talented Paul Thomas Anderson will certainly make a masterpiece in his career, even if he hasn’t yet.
The wise Roger Ebert wrote, for my money, the most insightful review of There Will Be Blood out there, especially as it compares to the superior No Country. Here’s a snippet:
“There Will Be Blood” is the kind of film that is easily called great. I am not sure of its greatness. It was filmed in the same area of Texas used by “No Country for Old Men,” and that is a great film, and a perfect one. But “There Will Be Blood” is not perfect, and in its imperfections (its unbending characters, its lack of women or any reflection of ordinary society, its ending, its relentlessness) we may see its reach exceeding its grasp. Which is not a dishonorable thing.
Read the rest of the review here.
And here’s a Bardem pic for Rach. (El Capataz de cargadores, no?)
The little Spanish quote above the Bardem pic, by the way, refers to the main character in Joseph Conrad’s NOSTROMO—a part, Clan Murphy believes (Rach, smitten by the book, was the first to mention it), Javier Bardem was born to play, if some Hollywood director would just get his act together. David Lean was going to do it before he died—one of the great “might have beens” of Hollywood history.
We’d like to see the Coens tackle the project (with Bardem, of course) or Peter Weir. It could be somebody’s LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.
Left by Debra Murphy on February 26th, 2008