Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, There Will Be Blood, is as intense as it is powerful. It is a dark and beautiful movie, and if it does not earn the Academy Award for Best Picture, I feel certain it will at least be nominated.

Much has been written already about this film, and I’m not going to rehash any of what has already been said. I just have a few thoughts I wanted to share. This is not the easiest film to parse, so I will try to explain the pieces of it that make sense to me. Spoilers are therefore inevitable.

The film is about two fundamentally American characters, each conforming to a certain established type, and each wearing that type like a mask as a means of achieving success. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, an self-made businessman who is attempting to capitalize on the Oil rush of the early 20th century. He wears the mask of a plain-spoken, down-to-earth, sensible businessman, when in fact he is a ruthless and cunning entrepreneur. Paul Dano (the mute brother in Little Miss Sunshine) plays Eli Sunday, a self-proclaimed prophet and preacher who is attempting to exploit the poverty and hopelessness of the time to build his own church. He wears the mask of the man of God, when he really is a desperate, calculating opportunist.

Though there is certainly an allegory of business vs. religion underlying the film, the story mostly focuses on Plainview’s character, and on his relationships with those close to him, as he tries to build his Oil business.

Comparisons have been rightly made to Citizen Kane, and other such “Rise and Fall” stories, and Plainview has a fatal flaw like his cinematic forebearers. With a nod to the New Calvinism that is so popular today in America, Plainview’s flaw is that in his relentless pursuit of success, he has a complete lack of tolerance for weakness and failure. There is a great moment at the end of the film’s trailer where Plainview says “I can’t keep doing this on my own. With these…people.” This comes after Plainview is explaining how he hates most everybody, and has trouble finding anything to like in most people he meets. What he means is that he simply cannot stand the weakness in people, the frailty. The film opens with Plainview mining for gold on his own and suffering a broken leg. He climbs out of the mine and pulls himself back to town, surviving simply on force of will. What Plainview cannot stand is anyone weaker than he.

This complete lack of tolerance for other people’s weakness provides the conflict Plainview has with those close to him, most significantly his adopted son and his adopted brother. He clearly grows to love his son H.W., and cares for him constantly until H.W. is injured in a major oil drilling accident, and is rendered completely deaf. Only then do we start to see Plainview exhibit the kind of attitude he takes with others with his own son (though even then he tends to him still). Next, Plainview is visited by a man claiming to be his long, lost brother from another mother, Henry. Plainview latches on to Henry in a very significant way, essentially making him his new partner in the business (replacing his now deaf and understandably depressed son). This last through much of the story, until Plainview “realizes” that Henry is not really his brother, but an opportunistic con-man trying to get ahead. This “realization” only happens after Henry succumbs to alcohol and prostitutes, and we see Plainview start to look at him as he sees the great teeming masses of poor souls he cannot stand.

This is a flaw that Plainview ironically shares with his preacher nemesis Eli Sunday, as we see most starkly in one scene where Eli climbs over the dinner table to beat his father, calling him “stupid” and “weak.” He is angered that his father allowed Plainview into their community and was so easily duped into accepting far less money than the land was worth. In this incredibly un-pious behavior, Eli reveals his true masters and demons.

Ultimately the film is about some of the most fundamental issues America and American culture have been dealing with for centuries: identity, independence, strength vs. weakness, the role of religion, etc. Watching Anderson’s new film, you really do get the feeling you are watching a classic of American Cinema – a film that will be watched and discussed for the next century in the same way that many early films are still watched and discussed today.

Some random other bits:

• Before the film, we saw the trailer for Michael Haneke’s new film Funny Games. While I am definitely interested in this film, the trailer tries a little too hard to make the Kubrick connection, and if anything There Will Be Blood has more Kubrick in it than anything Haneke is likely to produce.


• Though very intense and at times violent, the film feels almost old fashioned in its lack of specific visual gore. In a time when we are accustomed to seeing ears, fingers, and even heads lopped off, the violence in Anderson’s film is starkly impressionistic.


• The music is one of the key elements that makes There Will Be Blood a success. Composed by Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead’s guitarist), it is unlike much any other movie music you’ve ever heard (with the exception of some of Kubrick’s stranger choices). Greenwood’s choices are so involved that I could see watching the film yet again simply to absorb and analyze the commentary of the music on the visuals. It really is a character in its own right and is quite the achievement from this first-time narrative film composer.

1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas


2. Dr. Strangelove


3. Taxi Driver/Badlands


4. Birth of a Nation


5. JFK/Nixon


6. The Candidate/The Contender


7. Million Dollar Baby


8. Midnight Cowboy/The Grapes of Wrath


9. Do the Right Thing


10. Citizen Kane/The Bad and the Beautiful

I just screwed up. I accidentally marked all of my Google reader items as read when what I intended to do was mark a specific folder as read. If this was a desktop application I could hit undo and I’d back up, have all of my data the way I want it, and be ready to read all of the delicious feeds I’ve been missing this week. But Google Reader is a web application, so I can’t do that, I’m just SOL.

This is actually just a problem with Google Reader, and not with web apps in general. In fact, many of Google’s applications make wonderful use of Undo. I was alerted to this fact by a talk that Aza Raskin (the late Jeff Raskin’s son) gave at Google, called the Death of the Desktop. He talks about “Are you sure” messages and why they were so problematic. Raskin explains what we all know instinctively, that when you have initiated a task any message that is trying to warn you away is going to be ignored as you are trying to complete your task. Over time we begin to develop muscle memory to just click OK. What works much better is realize that it is only after you have completed your task that you then may want to not have done it in the first place. This is why Gmail’s status messages that double as Undo controls work so well. Just selected 20 messages and marked them as junk? Gmail gives you the option to Undo. Just changed the labels on your work messages from “work” to “from mom?” Gmail lets you undo. As Raskin points out, though, some other Google apps need to get on board this train as well (he uses Calendar, Stewart is frustrated with Reader). For my money, this is how web apps should work, at least whenever they can. Anyone know what technical limitations on this feature might be?

Vinh talks about how he has been planning on replacing his Palm Treo 650 with whatever Apple decides to release in the mobile phone arena:

In fact, when I think of that passel of features in terms of what a design tyrant like Jobs might release, it seems somewhat unlikely. Very unlikely. I mean, think about it: does it seem remotely possible that Steve Jobs would release a phone that’s a browser, an application platform, a camera, a PDA, an email client and an iPod? Would you bet money that he would? That kind of modal schizophrenia seems like it would be a clear affront to his sensibilities, and none of this even addresses whether the phone will sport a keyboard. I’d be happy if I’m wrong, but can we really expect a phone with a keyboard from the Barnum-like genius who gave us an iPod without a screen?

It’s a great piece – go read it.

I’m a pretty happy Vonage user. It’s cheaper than the Cable or Telco alternatives. Especially now that we have an income (I just found a job) and have upgraded our internet to the Time Warner maximum of 5 Megabit, it works really well.

However, I just received a phone call on our Vonage line from…Vonage! Was this because we had not paid our bill? No. Was this because there was a problem with our service? No.

It was a telemarketing call. They were trying to sell, no trick, us into adding a $9.99 second line onto our Vonage account. They could not even be straight about what they were calling for. “Hello sir, we want to let you know we are adding a second line to your Vonage service.” “But”, I said “I was under the impression that that extra feature was 10 dollars extra per month.” “Not so” the kind Indian telemarketer replied. “You will be getting this second line for only $0.99, for the first two months.” You can see where this went. I promptly told him I was not interested and he hung up.

The first place I headed after that, as steamed as I was, was the Vonage website. I logged in, and looked around for a place to “opt out” of said telemarketing calls. Maybe a “how can we contact you?” option. I would not mind receiving emails, but I definitely am NOT OK with them calling my home tricking me and my family into accepting a larger bill for features we DO NOT NEED. No such option is available on the Vonage website.

The second thing I looked for is a place for feedback on the Vonage website. They have a place for email technical support, but NO FEEDBACK FORM.

Vonage, this is completely and utterly unacceptable. It also reminds me of a post I’ve thought about on great, small companies who do sketchy things for exposure (see Netflix). I’m gonna go punch something.

GAAAAAA!!

UPDATE 11/19:  It seems that Vonage is having some real trouble these days. Here’s another disturbing tale regarding privacy and exploitation.

Now, that does make some sense, because Macs don’t by default have a right click button and some people would not otherwise know how to access the right click menus, but there should certainly be a way to turn it off.

Does anyone know how to turn it off?

Update: I figured this one out myself, thank you very much…

The answer? A setting you can reach in Firefox by using the “about:config” function (for all your newbies, that’s type about:config in the Address Box and hit Return/Enter). If you search for “dom”, you will see an entry called “dom.disable_open_click_delay” with a default integer value of, I think, 1000. I changed it to 5000 and now have no problems dragging all sorts of stuff around in Google Calendar. Wonderful!

Another Update: So it appears that I was entirely wrong. The previously mentioned entry in the Firefox config has no effect on the issue I was dealing with. The reason Google Calendar started working was because Google modified their site’s code. Ah well, still looking for a solution for this behavior on Firefox for Mac.

Final Final Update: I just tried this again (holding down the mouse button over a web page in Firefox on Mac) and found that the functionality has either been disabled or completely removed in Firefox 2.0 RC1. Wonderful! Case closed.

MUSIC STORE INTEGRATION No. At Samsung’s suggestion, I tested the Z5 with Rhapsody’s store, which is available directly from the copy of Windows Media Player provided by the Z5’s installer. After banging my head on the keyboard for an hour, unable to get it to work, a Rhapsody rep finally let me know that, in fact, Rhapsody’s subscription store doesn’t work in Media Player — only with Rhapsody’s own software jukebox. (So much for the Microsoft “Plays for Sure” logo. Try “Plays for Some People.”)

Oh well, I just wanted to recognize the fact that the grass is still a little greener for us Mac users here in terms of iTunes functionality.

Now, on to more substantive matters. There are some major areas in Apple’s OS X OS that need improvement. While Tiger (10.4) was a terrific release, it has only marginally improved through the subsequent point releases (now at the Universal 10.4.4).

Let’s get it started:

1. Safari – Chief amongst the stagnant and dire bunch is Apple’s browser. While rumors have been brewing about a myriad of new features coming in the fruit company’s upcoming Leopard release (10.5), new features are NOT what Safari needs the most. The biggest problems with Safari still lie with the rendering engine itself. Comments from Dave Hyatt and the rest of the WebCore/WebKit team on their blog make it sound like they are convinced the engine is done and are now just tidying up and getting ready for the next gen content rendering stuff. The engine is NOT DONE. Most of us who follow at least some blogs have seen puzzled posts like one from James Rocchi (then the film critic for Netflix) that he could not figure out how to post to his weblog from a film festival’s press center, because they were using macs. Are macs really that different? Do they have keyboards that look different or require fundamentally different skills to use? No. The problem was simply that the WYSIWYG functionality in Movable Type does not work in Safari – the default browser on the Mac. Robert Scoble had the same problem with Wordpress at an Apple Store. So did his son Patrick, though he was using Blogger. In all these cases (and many more), these PC users got very bad impressions of the so-called “ease of use” of the Mac, when it required that they know and remember the HTML link tag to link on their blog posts. This is the sort of problem that should be first on Apple’s list of things to fix in Safari.Why am I so riled about this? Because there is no good explanation. If they’ve already solved this problem and are simply waiting to give us the new rendering engine in Leopard, then that in and of itself is unacceptable and unprecedented. New features? Fine to use to sell a new release. Bug fixes and rendering engine improvements? Bordering on exploitative when used to sell their new release. And in fact, Apple has shown this to be their view as well. When WebCore/Webkit underwent a serious overhaul, they released the upgraded engine inside basically the same Safari as version 1.3 for current users, and that same engine, albeit with many new features in Tiger as Safari 2.0. So it would not seem that they are merely waiting for the next release to bless us faithful customers with these fixes. Which means they are simply not fixing them.There are many other issues with Safari rendering I could talk about. Apple needs to continue to work with banks and e-commerce sites to make sure that they do not lock out Safari users. There is nothing more confusing to my mom than thinking that Safari is the web, until she reaches The Gap and finds that it will not work on her nice white Mac computer. Us techies may be able to abstract the application and its particular compatibility issues away from the computer itself, but normal users don’t. If they cannot reach a website or interact with it succesfully on a Mac using Safari, then they will blame the Mac – not the application.


2. iCal – This one is not nearly as dire as the other, but is still pretty important. Calendering is an area where not much innovation is taking place and where so much innovation needs to happen. Jon Udell talked about this recently on his blog, though he was certainly not the first and will definitely not be the last to have this problem. While at least Microsoft believes they have solved the calendering space for corporations, noone has even really tried to deal with group calendering on the consumer level. That is except Apple. If you’re entire family is on Macs, you can each use iCal and subscribe to each other’s calenders, and things will basically work fine. There is not such a great web story, but then again, Apple has never really gotten the web, so that’s no surprise. What I have been hoping for (and am seeing glimmers of in the Hula project) is an Open Source web calendering initiative that would use any of the standards used by iCal for syncing to interoperate with desktop clients. This would give us the best of both the web and the desktop and once someone wrote a killer Windows client that could handle this (MS has a new Windows Calender in Vista that may play this role) things could really be peachy.So what am I asking Apple to do? Most of what I wrote above does not rely on anything that they may do or not do. Well, I would like them to push forward. While the rest of the pack are simply trying to replicate basic calendering functionality on the web, Apple should be doing what they are really good at – moving the pale a football field further. I’m not a researcher, nor am I a software dev, but I am certain that there are many ways that we can improve upon the basic calender functionality that is contained in every calendering application. I’ve seen no indication that anyone else is working on this – so I really hope Apple is.


3. iChat – Here is where I want Apple to do a bit of following, in contrast to my last point. Microsoft has already started showing off the next generations of MSN Windows Live Messenger. The piece that Apple should have gotten first, and that Microsoft seems to be jumping right into, is the collaboration over IM application. Microsoft is tackling this on two levels: on the consumer level with Windows Live Messenger and on the corporate level with Office Communicator. The fact is that Apple needs to give us a way to better collaborate over iChat with our documents and browsing.

There’s probably some more, but this has gone on long enough, so I’ll cut it off here. I’m staying realistic but here’s hoping Apple will deliver.

Something like this would be really useful on the Mac as well. While Firefox on Mac has been getting steadily better, there are many times when I want to open something specifically in Safari and an extension that passes the URL to Safari would be great. I could Applescript it, but FF does not have AppleScript support, as least not as of yet.

So, any extension devs up to the challenge?

UPDATE: Check the comments for the solution. I checked—it works.

I’ve got a new cell phone, as of Saturday evening at around 8PM. What’s the big deal? Well, it’s a black RAZR:

That would be enough to go crazy about, but it’s replacing utter crap in the form of the Sony Ericsson T635. I’ve now used each model of this phone from the original iMac-inspired one on. My previous phone was the SE T610, and when that was stolen I lived out the remainder of my T-Mobile contract with an old Nokia. I then got the (then new) SE T635, hoping and hearing that they had indeed fixed some of the major flaws of the previous models. Alas, after about a year, I can safely say that not only have they not fixed those problems (hanging interface, no I/O interrupt system, bad joystick hardware implementation, etc.) but they actually introduced some new ones!

Anyway, this is supposed to be about how overjoyed I am with my new phone, the Motorola Razr V3 Black Edition. First, the geekiest thing I love:

Yup, that’s a standard mini USB connector right smack on the phone. In fact, it’s the ONLY connector the phone provides other than the cellular connection and the Bluetooth wireless. The included power plug is an AC/Mini USB cable. This is absolutely amazing for me – after years of struggling with Sony Ericsson’s flimsy proprietary connectors, I finally can connect my phone to anything over mini USB/USB. Proprietary connectors are not inherently evil. Case in point, my iPod mini uses Apple’s own private standard “Dock Connector” for connection to computers and other devices. But it has never broken on me, I have never had a problem with either the cable or the port on the iPod (am I jinxing myself) and believe me, I am not so gentle with either sometimes. SE’s connectors, on the other hand, even when I treated them like newborn babies, would stop working, need to be jiggled, and any time a cable went bad, it was back to eBay to see how much it would be for a new one this time, cause buying one of those charging cables out in the real world is just too damn expensive. OK, so I love the USB connection (the same as on recent Palms and Digital Cameras, like my fiancée’s Palm Z22 and our Canon S410).

And look how thin…

Other thoughts…

Battery life so far is great. I charged it the first night and have not plugged it in since. Let’s see how long that lasts.

The interface is nice and the responsiveness is almost perfect – a far cry from my infuriating T635.

The reception is excellent. Voices sound crisp and clear and I’ve been quite pleased with the quality of the speakerphone.

More thoughts to come later…

Dave Winer is now using LemkeSoft’s GraphicConverter on his mac instead of Adobe ImageReady, which he had been using on Windows:

Anita Wilhelm, illustrating the spirit of TagCamp in Palo Alto on October 29. Notable because it’s the first graphic I produced on the Mac. Took about an hour, but I figured out how to use Graphic Converter Pro, which is pretty nice, but not quite as easy as ImageReady. The good news is now I should be able to do new little graphics in the margin. Ever since switching to the Mac, I’ve just been snarfing old ones from the archives.

Why not use ImageReady on the Mac, Dave?

I’m using the old version of Firefox on my laptop, and it confirms my impression that they took a feature out of the browser in the latest release that I want back.

If you single click on the URL in the address field, the whole thing is selected. That’s the old, correct behavior. The new behavior is to give you a caret and make you manually select all the text. But it’s so easy to select part of the URL if that’s what you want (when exactly do you want that, btw). As a blogger selecting URLs in that bar is on the path to my linking to something, and I fight against anything that makes that path longer. The Firefox guys just did that. Why?

I figured out the solution. It turns out the Mozilla guys did not totally alter the functionality Dave is talking about. Rather they just swtiched the default. In versions of Firefox prior to 1.5 there was an entry in the config (about:config) called “browser.urlbar.ClickSelectsAll,” which was by default set to True. The only change in 1.5 was to set it as default to False. Not sure why that makes sense to them, but in any case Dave, all you need to do in 1.5 is change that back to True and you’re on your way.

Yesterday Microsoft made some pretty big announcements, and while much of the web does not seem to understand their significance, at least some of the stuff they showed off yesterday is getting some real buzz. Only problem, there is no stream of the announcement available from Microsoft’s web site. We know that one exists, since Scoble was watching it internally. Microsoft, please open it up to the rest of us?

Maybe it has something to do with Dave Winer’s comments on the presentation…