What’s At Steak? There Will Be Blood

July 1, 2008 – 7:07 pm

Posted by Sir Jeffers

 

Look at me, I’m cooking up a huge slab of beef!

Nothing seems more cliché-manly than charring massive chunks of cow carcass… And doing the honors in football pajamas is even more butch, doncha think?

There’s something seriously old-school for me about an occasional gorging on bloodied steak.

Our parents or grandparents may have noshed meat and potatoes for every meal, but that kind of steady carnage is definitely a thing of the past.

For me it’s a medium-rare occasion of overindulgence, a trip back in time to before anyone knew good from bad…cholesterol.

So I’m kickin’ it at Casa Jeffers with a couple of movie rentals, both of which feature manly men who probably eat a lot of meat, when I quickly discover I’ve got a BEEF with the people who made the bad ad/trailer for There Will Be Blood.

 

Remember that ad campaign? It made me expect a movie full of method-acting overkill and hammy scenery-chomping similar to Day-Lewis’s turn in that Scorsese turd, Gangs of New York.

The ad features Daniel screaming “I’ve abandoned my boy!” with spittle flying from his cavernous mouth, which was much too reminiscent of Day-Lewis incessantly braying (with spittle flying from his cavernous mouth), “I will find you!” in an ad for The Last of the Mohicans. (And that film was a real dud!) I hoped that in a future movie the actor would combine the two spittle shouts and vow:

“I will find my abandoned boy!!” with twice as much slobber and maybe multiple veins bulging from his forehead.

They could call it, There Will Be Mohicans.
I dunno, could happen.

Anyhoo, my beef with the trailer maker is that the actor actually turned in a nuanced, slow-burn performance as a rapacious oil predator. Day-Lewis took his time and did it right, eventually erupting like a black gusher of evil, the raging Id of big-man capitalism. In other words, search no more OJ, we’ve found the real killers. But not to worry Juice, they’ll get off too.

But I didn’t get off or have any kind words for this year’s other Oscar-magnet, No Country for Old Men. Despite all the awards and acclaim, it seemed like the Coen brothers phoned this one, or maybe texted it in with a lot of photo attachments. Whatever the case, this mildly diverting film seemed to be decidedly less than the sum of its parts, with the flick’s characters (and the narrative as a whole) all gradually losing steam over the course of the movie. Ultimately, pretty flavorless.

It screened more like TOFU than steak.

My biggest beef with No Country involved Javier Bardem, who landed the best supporting actor Oscar for his windup-toy psycho killer role. Though amusing for a while, Bardem’s ’70s acid-flashback follicles seemed to do all the acting, shabby strands of hair imitating a villain. And his affectless, bowl-cut menace also seemed eerily similar to KGB killer Kosygin (Olek Krupa) on Season 3 of the HBO prison drama Oz, right down to his frosty demeanor and supremely bad hairdo. Check out their hair battle above (and rent Oz to see why Kosygin is the most dead-on dude).

Final Scorecard: one underrated flick burned by an overheated ad campaign; one overrated flick undercooked by my cinema heroes Joel and Ethan Coen who must have been asleep at the wheel or sleepwalking.

Okay, that’s MY meat on a platter for today. Lucky thing I own a copy of The Big Lebowski, because I forgot to buy desert. SWEET!

Fuck, it’s a fucking great fucking movie! WTF with all the fucking fucks?

Click on the vid below: