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Like other Adams pieces that I heard, it was an interesting combination of things - the broader harmony of modern music combined with a somewhat tonal sense of progression; complex rhythms, dissonances, and instrumental combinations combined with an ear for beautiful sonority and dramatic effect; lyrical tunes that come off as instrumental transcriptions of the original opera's vocal lines, combined with shattering passages of chaos and anxiety in which no tune at all could be discerned. It was unique and new, yet so appealed to popular taste that the audience received it with great enthusiasm - not at the beginning of a long program, as modern pieces are often placed, but at the end.
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Tonight, I took myself out to see a movie based on Upton Sinclair's book Oil! The film, currently nominated for some Academy Awards, is called There Will Be Blood. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and dominated by the performance of Daniel Day-Lewis, it was long enough to make me desperate to go to the toilet (3 hours or so), but very impressive nevertheless. It does a good job of creating the look of the western U.S. between 1894 and the Depression years, as it follows the fortunes of an "oilman" named Daniel Plainview from a leg-breaking fall down a shaft where he is prospecting for silver to a brutal murder in the private bowling alley of his palatial home at the end of a long, ruthless career in the oil business. Wow, that was a long sentence.
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Day-Lewis's performance is fascinating. He often has the look of a man on the verge of going wild, of barely restrained savagery. That restraint gradually thins until, in the final handful of scenes, it utterly crumbles. One of the fascinating contradictions of his character is how gentle he is with the boy. Also, there is something very cultured about his voice - something that profoundly conflicts with one's expectations of a western prospector-turned-oil tycoon. On the other hand, there are moments when the Plainview character gets a little "too close" to a young girl named Mary...and in those moments I somehow sensed a certain danger, perhaps temptation. And when he realizes the man claiming to be his half-brother is an impostor...well, his face is such an open book, you know exactly what is going through his mind, what he is going to do about it.
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Filling out the cast are Ciaran Hinds, Kevin J. O'Connor, and the young Dillon Freasier as H. W., a boy whose upbringing is so strange that, hurtful as his final break with dear Dad is, it also comes as a relief.
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