The Week in Cinema: 01.07 -- 07.07

-- a selection of short-form reviews of films watched this week --

There Will Be Blood (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

✭✭✭✭✭

One of the titans of 21st-century American cinema, There Will Be Blood is a modern exemplum of conflicting ideals, of a world that is at once tipping into a new century, with fresh horizons and new money, and one that dawns on collapse. Such frictions are embodied in the biblical duel of Daniel Plainview (a Kubrick-esque oil miner, played by Daniel Day Lewis) and the sanctimonious wizard Eli Sunday (played with fervour by Paul Dano), men whose realms intersect with the opening of a new drilling site in Southern California, intent as much on wounding the earth as drawing from it every morsel of opportunity. Oil flows throughout Anderson’s film as the imagined, ambrosial currency of future wealth – monetary or spiritual, or both – making monsters of men amidst the roots of capitalism. Plainview’s weakness is an adopted child, H.W., deafened by an erupted oil mine, whose childhood, abandonment and adulthood are witnessed against the polluting of his father’s soul, the paternal frontier otherwise an unconquerable realm. There Will Be Bloodis the triumph of Anderson’s career, a film against which other directors, other writers, will seek to compare themselves in future time. It is terrifying, bone-shuddering cinema.

Yesterday (dir. Danny Boyle, 2019)

✭✭✭✩✩

A world without the Beatles? Otherwise the “what if?” premise to Danny Boyle’s latest picture, penned by king-of-schmaltz Richard Curtis. Joyous characters and storytelling sustain a hokey, starry-eyed plot that just about manages to get away with its loose threads and naïve logic. After a twelve-second power cut leaves singer-songwriter Jack Malick hospitalised, he soon achieves fame and success after discovering that he is the only person in the world (or so he thinks …) that remembers the Beatles and their music. Uniquely, not every song is remembered, or at least some only partially – songs remembered in odd moments, often leaping between albums or lyrics. It is kinetic and highly entertaining filmmaking – I found myself laughing out loud more than once – even if the core idea is never probed beyond surface value. Why, I found myself asking, do ‘Coca-Cola’, ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Cigarettes’ also not exist in this world? Such mysterious are not answered, only fed into the global amnesia of the entire setup – we can only assume that if one is forgotten, then logically many other staples of modern culture must also be. Yesterday is a love story, and an infuriatingly conventional one at that. Impossible not to smile though, it is a perfect response to the recent surge of mediocre musical biopics.