Award Season

As a guild member I am supposed to note and vote on 2007 releases. Screening films these past few months has felt like being water-boarded.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD has so many stupid and trashy and phony elements that I can't even begin to list them. So I won't.

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD is easier to describe. Every character in it is stupid, venal, criminal and vicious. Sidney Lumet once directed a film version of LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, Eugene O'Neill's classic play about a dysfunctional family. It has taken him about forty years, but Lumet has finally found a script depicting the most dysfunctional family life since Medea. I hope the old fart is happy.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a totally stupid story with fair acting and a non-ending.

I walked out early on MICHAEL CLAYTON so I don't know how bad it got, but claptrap, illogical dialogue drove me out before I started to yak back at the screen.