Currently #1 at the Box Office and deservedly so, it has been a long time since a movie carried this kind of hype, and even longer since a movie lived up to that hype like Cloverfield does. From start to finish, it is nearly impossible not to be into this movie. The first person perspective is a huge part of that, of course, and for that reason you'll find many a critic who will instantly want to compare this to The Blair Witch Project, which is partly unfair to both movies but also partly effective in that Cloverfield revitalizes the monster movie just as Blair Witch did for horror. Because so much of this movie is tied in with "the experience" of seeing through the protagonist's eyes, saying any more would ruin it. Suffice to say I highly recommend this 84-minute groundbreaker.
Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman strut their stuff to the tune of Charlie Wilson's War, Mike Nichols'(Closer, Primary Colors) semi-serious film based on a true story about a Congressman who defeated the Russians single-handedly in 1980's Afghanistan without raising any kind of noise outside of Washington. The story itself is highly generalized, but it doesn't matter with a cast this good performing together. Hanks is awesome, and Seymour Hoffman is hilarious as the foul-mouthed CIA spy. This is just a good 90 minutes at the movies, especially for fans of the actors involved.
Paul Thomas Anderson returns from a five year hiatus to give us There Will Be Blood, something completely different from his earlier work. In Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch Drunk Love, Anderson's fingerprints were easily noticed, whereas here it seems like the director has resided to let the cameras roll while Daniel Day-Lewis puts together one of the best acting performances since the turn of this century. Playing Oil Tycoon Daniel Plainview, Day-Lewis takes what was good about his Bill the Butcher (Gangs of New York) and lets it run wild here. Plainview is the character you love to hate. He is self-made man, a liar, a murderer, a thief, a manipulator, incapable of love, or at least admitting love, for anything but oil and himself. Lewis is winged by a solid performance from young Paul Dano, who plays a different kind of fraud from an equally powerful industry: religion. Watching the two frauds as they try to conquer the world with their different means to different ends makes this a fascinating and symbolic case study, but one that may fall just short of full realization. What makes this movie worth seeing is the performances of Dano and especially Day-Lewis. Their final scene together, and the final scene of the film, may go unnoticed right now by the mainstream, but mark my words: Thirty years from now it will be remembered as one of the landmark scenes in cinema history. Give Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the most talented directors of our time, full props for realizing what was happening and standing back to let it live itself out on the screen.
And all of this for nine bucks. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday!
