I just got back from a sold-out screening of P.T. Anderson’s long awaited opus, There Will Be Blood. The first impressions I had when the credits started to roll, was that it was going to take me a long time to get my thoughts together on this film.

After discussing it for some hours afterwards, it clicked in my that this is what makes the film so good. On the surface it is the story of the life of Daniel Plainview, a self-made oil mogul and his struggles to grow his already prosperous business into something much grander. Along the way he raises his young son, and clashes with a young fiery preacher named Eli Sunday.

Look beyond that and the whole film raises questions. Some are answered, some are hinted at, but all shed light on the larger-than-life characters and ultimately much more. Like most people trying to write about this film, I find it hard to punch out a normal review. I have questions that aren’t completely answered, symbolism that hasn’t been worked out, and other thoughts that are on the tip of my brain. It’s like a giant puzzle begging to be put together. The “joy” in this film is that it stays with you.

So without any real structure, I will list some of my thoughts about what happens in the film:

Note: Spoilers follow!

The conflict between Eli and Daniel is of “biblical” proportions, and it points to the larger battle between religion (faith) and ambition (money). At several points in the movie Daniel attacks Eli in different ways. He doesn’t let him bless the first derrick, he attacks him for not being able to heal his son, and debases him at the end.

There is also the question of Paul and Eli. Twins, different only in the fact that one took the money and ran and one wanted to get the money and stay with his church. The question is are they really different people? Paul, contrary to what you might think the opposite of Eli would be, was a religious person. He questions Daniels faith, and even blesses him at the first meeting. After that scene, he leaves the film. Later on, when Eli attacks his own father after being humiliated by Daniel, he mentions that Paul brought him here. Eli rightly should not have known Paul did such a thing.

If there was some sort of schizophrenia going on, then that would mirror the two sides of Daniel Plainview. Eli was a religious savior. Paul was a money-hungry schemer. Daniel was definetely a money-hungry schemer, but at times he was also a loving father. When his son becomes a liability more than a help, he sends him off. Then, we see him as the loving father when he has a change of heart.

With his mounting fortune, that side of him disappears until at the end he is a sad miserable man with only one thing on his mind: keeping his fortune and getting rid of the competition. Until Eli again appears in his life. A foe he did not completely vanquish, and one who made him go through something demoralizing, the baptism, in exchange for the land Daniel needed.

This time though, Eli needs money and wants to sell Daniel the last tract of land in the area. Daniel returns the baptism humiliation by making Eli call himself a false prophet in order to let him sell the land. Then Daniel pulls the rug out from under him by saying he doesn’t need the land. With the explanation containing one of my favorite lines of dialog: “I drink your milkshake!”

Eli breaks down, saying that he has committed sins, and that the lord has not made things easy for him. The devil has taken hold of him in ways he never knew were possible. Is that Paul he is speaking of? I don’t know, but I think it might be. Daniel berates him about this, telling him that he is worthless and that Paul was the important one. He clearly lies, trying to get Eli to feel bad. Trying to completely break him down. He says how he paid Paul lots of money for leading him to the oil. This hurt because he had promised Eli money for the church, and never provided. Paul, the one who sold out his family is heralded by Daniel as a hero, the savior, while Eli, the self-named healer, is called only “after-birth.”

Then the climax, and then those simple words: “I’m finished.” And finally, so am I.

Note: End Spoilers!

All these rambling thoughts have made me wired. This film will live in my brain for a few more days I’m sure. The acting, directing, writing, and score create palpable tension and bring to life the turn of the century United States. Even more impressive, Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Upton Sinclair, and P.T. Anderson have created two characters that live and breath. Their dynamic clash in this film, to quote Jack Burton, “really shook the pillars of heaven.”

Now, I must close this so-called review with a final summation: In There Will Be Blood, P.T. Anderson has made a film that deserves to be as highly touted as it is, a film that demands repeated viewings, and a film that many people will be talking about for a long time.

Many people look down upon comic books as a pedestrian past-time. They are a means for proles to while away their days and nights because they don’t have the intellectual capacity to read a novel without pictures.

Years ago I would have agreed, but then my outlook started to change and I realized that art could appear anywhere. From painting, novels, and film to comic books, TV shows, and video games.

Still, until recently I stayed away from comic books besides the occasional graphic novel. I completely avoided superhero comics. I never looked down upon them, I just thought that my time was better spent elsewhere. A few days ago something took over me and I started to read up on comics and graphic novels. With and without superheroes.

Wow, boy was I surprised. I think I have been ignoring a whole wondrous world of story, imagery, and emotion that deals with many important themes. I did not know that the comic book industry was so mature. And I don’t mean gore and sex. When I say mature I mean that the art has developed to such a point that it can handle subtlety and satire, multi-layered storytelling and over-the-top campiness all at once. Just like film!

I have read a few things in the past few days, but the highlight in my eyes has been the Batman & Dracula trilogy. In the 90’s, Doug Moench wrote three books for the Elseworlds series. This series involved taking familiar characters and putting them in completely unfamiliar “what-if” situations.

Dracula and Batman is a good “what-if” combination, because both characters have the same dark edge. The first book in the series, Red Rain, tells the story of Dracula arriving in Gotham City in order to create an army of undead vampires below the city. Batman is recruited by a gang of “good” vampires who have been battling Dracula for hundreds of years. In the process, he is turned into a vampire because it was the only way for him to be powerful enough to defeat Dracula.

The second book, Bloodstorm, continues Batmans transformation. He now has to battle with his inner drive to drink blood. While he refrains from it he does not suffer any of the usual vampire handicaps (crosses, sunlight, etc.), but the drive to do it is getting stronger every day. Things get tougher when Batman needs to use all his strength to stop the remnants of the undead army. They have found a new leader in the Joker, and his maniacal plan may win if Batman can’t hold back his craving for blood.

The third and final volume, Crimson Mist, shows what happens when Batman can no longer hold back. He is turned into what he hates most. When a group of super-villians run rampant in Gotham, Batman uses his new found bloodlust for good, but what happens when all the bad guys are gone?

The transformation of Batman from weary superhero to all-powerful unstoppable vampire is a great arc for a story. You can really feel him struggling to remain human in the face of this power and the price it comes with. You can see the transformation he goes through in the three panels to the right. The art is dynamic, and it really brings across the torment and darkness in the story.

Batman is such a human character, and that is why he is my favorite superhero at the moment. You can understand why he does things, even if the story involves vampirism and were-cats.

To sum it up, you can definitely find art in strange places. I’m very glad I read this trilogy, and I plan on reading comics more often. Being new to this, I would love any recommendations. Let me know if you have any. In the meantime, I’ll explore this vast new world of art and post reviews when I find something as dynamic and interesting as Batman & Dracula.

Again, I should warn you that this entry won’t make sense to the table-top roleplaying uninitiated. So only read on if you know what a dungeon-crawl is.

Last night I took part in my regular role-playing session, so today I bring you the top 5 quotes from the game. Last episode we fought vampire hill giants. This time we spent the whole session wandering aimlessly around a cave trying in vain to come to an agreement about what is the best way to escape. Drow, gnomes, displacer beasts and other things roamed the caverns, but we managed to survive. However, at the end of the session we were still lost.

Now, to the quotes. It looks like Nelson and Paco are the winners this week, taking all of the top 5 spots. This isn’t surprising because Nelson can be as boisterous and entertaining as LCD. But that’s just a coincidence, mind you.

5) “Why doesn’t anyone speak Gnomish? What is wrong with you people?!?” - Nelson
Who even knew Gnomes had their own language?

4) “What’s more natural than yeast?” - Paco
Paco is extremely concerned about the quality of ingredients that go into his snack chips.

3)“It’s about to get Smurfy in here!” - Nelson
Relating in-game events to 80s cartoons in provocative ways is just one of the talents Nelson has.

2) “You Palpatined yourself!” - Nelson
This was said to Paco after he critically failed a lightning bolt, sizzling himself for massive damage.

1) “The one good thing about dead comrades is free gear!.” - Paco
You can really feel his great concern for the well-fare of the other party members.

That is all for today. Will we finally get out of this cave alive? Tune in next time for the thrilling conclusion!

I was privileged to get hold of an advanced readers copy of Chuck Palahniuk’s new book, Snuff. I will preface this review by saying that I am an avid Chuck fan. I have read all of his previous work, and I can be found regularly hounding the pages of The Cult, an excellent site. His writing has influenced me almost too much, but I have enjoyed using all of the tips, tricks, and lessons that he gives.

Also, I am going to judiciously avoid giving out any spoilers. I don’t want to give away anything to ruin the experience of reading Snuff, especially since we still have months till the novel comes out. So I will start with a brief summary that most of you already know:

“Six hundred dudes. One porn queen. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic.”

Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera. With six hundred men. Snuff unfolds from the perspectives of Mr. 72, Mr. 137, and Mr. 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room. This wild, lethally funny, and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet underacknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last. Who else but Chuck Palahniuk would dare do such a thing? Who else could do it so well, so unflinchingly, and with such an incendiary (you might say) climax?

The first thing that struck me about this novel was how dirty it was. Not Porn-dirty, because I was expecting that, but grimey/disgusting dirty. The novel opens on a description of the green room where these 600 guys are hanging out, waiting their turn. Now, a large room with 600 sweaty naked guys is going to be disgusting, and Chuck doesn’t pull any punches when describing everything from the craft-service table to the one lone bathroom to questionable tanning methods. He is definitely at home with the “unpacking” method we know so well from his other books.

In fact, from there on the whole novel feels like how-to examples of Chuck’s writing exercises. (These essays can be found at The Cult) From the unpacked descriptions, to the chorus, to the endless spewing of facts. He even has his characters “keep time” in interesting ways: number of scenes in a porno, number of dandruff flakes picked up and discarded, etc. It is all familiar territory. Familiar, but oh so invigorating.

After the scene is set and the mood is drawn (sweaty, impatient, claustrophobic), we get to learn about the four main characters, how they came there and what it means to them. Through those characters we also get a good portrait of Cassie Wright. There is Mr. 600, the veteran porn actor, who has done many films with Cassie in the past. Then, there is the young Mr. 72, a guy who is obsessed with Cassie Wright to a (un)natural degree. Mr. 137 rounds out the men, an ex-TV star who is at the end of his career, trying to get some valuable face time.

The narrators are rounded out by Sheila, Ms. Wright’s personal assistant and pud-pumper wrangler. Her chapters give Chuck about a billion chances to come up with different synonyms for “pud-pumper”. Including “ham-whammer”, “monkey-milker” and “ceiling-spackler”. She also gets to tell many true(?) behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories of pain, death, grooming, and the pain involved with being good at your craft. These facts are extremely entertaining and fit well with the style of the story.

As well as being full of interesting facts, this novel is also very funny. The porn industry in the book is like an over-the-top version of real-life. Every porn film that is mentioned seems to be a rip-off of a legitimate film, and each scene in the porno is a innovative re-imagining of the equivalent movie scene. From A Handmaid’s Tale to The Bridges of Madison County, nothing is safe. One of my favorites is from The Miracle Sex Worker:

Cassie Wright takes the hand of a deaf and blind actor. She folds his fingers into a pattern and presses his hand into her crotch, saying, “Water…”

One of the funniest scenes in the book is a scene I heard Chuck describe somewhere. In a video interview, or text interview, or somewhere else. It was from his first unpublished novel, and it involves a blow-up doll. If anyone knows where I heard this quote from, please let me know. I’ll just say for now that I was glad to see this scene found a home in Snuff. It was great when I first heard it described, and it was great to finally have read it. It had me laughing out loud.

The book is short, the ARC I have is 197 pages, but it is chock-full of this sort of humor, and even more full of interesting facts and stories. But that is not why we read a Chuck Palahniuk book, right? That is just the icing on the cake. We read them because they take something real, an emotion, an idea, a theme, and throws it in our face. Making us see the ugly side of life that is always hiding below the surface. The side where 600 men will line up to bang a women they don’t know for a few minutes, and then hope that at the end she dies just so they can become famous.

Snuff does just that. It shows us the ugly side, but slowly brings out something more. What I really got out of reading it was the search for belonging. For family. The green-room of the world’s biggest gang-bang, with death and fame on everyone’s mind, is not the setting I would expect to find a story about family. But that is what I got. At the end, after a climax no one can see coming, the point of the story really became focused. And after reading the last sentence I was struck by the layer of beauty behind this ugly, ugly story.