Western

Steeped in Buddhist philosophy and set against the backdrop of a remote Korean lake, Kim Ki-duk’s Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring focuses on the relationship between an elderly monk and his young protégé.

The film is set out in a series of five vignettes which correspond to the titular seasons. In the first, Spring, the child protégé is taught a lesson about respect. In a spirit of boyish experimentation, he ties stones around the bodies of a fish, a frog and a snake, as his master silently looks on. That night the older monk ties a heavy rock to the boy as he is sleeping, which won’t be taken off until he frees the animals. There is a comic element to this very fitting punishment, but it also places a heavy burden of responsibility on the young boy’s shoulders: if any of the animals have died as a result of their entrapment, the old man warns, “you will carry this stone in your heart for the rest of your life.”

(more…)

Directed, written and produced by Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood is loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!. This masterful epic, spanning the first three decades of the twentieth century, centres on the loathsome and unflinching silver miner-cum-oilman Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a man driven entirely by greed and his hatred of people (“I look at people and I see nothing worth liking”), who will go to any measures to stifle all competition.

The film opens with a 15 minute wordless sequence in which Plainview is seen toiling as a silver-miner. On the basis of a tip-off from a visitor named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), Plainview travels with his adoptive son to the town of Little Boston, California, where the Sunday family home is brimming with oil.

(more…)