New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
David Smyth's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson.
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Kevin J O'Connor, Dillon Freasier
Description: At the turn of the 20th century, Daniel Plainview has made a small fortune by drilling for oil: buying vast plots of land and draining them dry of black gold. A tip-off leads Daniel and his 10-year-old son H.W. to a rural community in the thrall of charismatic preacher Eli Sunday. Daniel establishes one of his rigs and taps into a huge underground reserve of oil, which he hopes to sell via an ambitious pipeline across the state. However, the tug of war between business and the church threatens the entire enterprise, pitting Daniel against an increasingly evangelical Eli in a battle for the residents' hearts and minds.
Country: US. 2007. 158mins
Demonic looks and sounds: Daniel Day Lewis as oil prospector Daniel Plainview
Paul Thomas Anderson's first film in five years opens on a wide shot of a Californian hillside, while orchestral strings swell to a deafening discordant climax. Then silence. Already there is the sense that this is not a film that will conform to type.
Anderson has taken pleasure in wrong-footing viewers before, notably with Magnolia's bizarre closing frog scene, but it is thanks to Jonny Greenwood's overpowering music, which won the Best Score prize at the Evening Standard British Film Awards, that we remain unsettled throughout this black-hearted parable.
Radiohead guitarist Greenwood's score, though composed mostly for strings and accompanying the story of the early days of oil prospecting at the start of the 20th century, is a deliberately modern construction.
Just as Day-Lewis's roaring portrayal of limping, bear-like oil baron Daniel Plainview is not chiefly concerned with realism, the music has greater impact for being atypical of the time.
Rarely pretty, it skitters restlessly up and down the register when the black gold first bursts from the ground, chugs in industrial rhythms as machinery churns at the soil, sounds demonic as Plainview smiles, black-faced, congratulating himself in front of a flaming derrick.
The music also benefits from extended periods of absence, never reduced to the background mush so common with film strings.
The real dominant role is reserved for Day-Lewis, surely an Oscar winner later this month, who rampages through nearly every scene, even managing to be the sole mesmerising focus in an extraordinary, wordless, opening 20 minutes.
Paul Dano is impressively creepy as his young preacher rival Eli Sunday, a man who appears to represent spiritual purity above capitalism, but it always feels as if Plainview will make mincemeat of him in the end.
It is Day-Lewis's film, and it is disconcerting to experience a film that is epic in tone and length but focuses so intently on one man, especially one so dislikable.
Yet that is Anderson's intention. From Greenwood's awkward melodies to the film's violent climax, when a harmonious moment from Brahms's violin concerto bursts in, the expected hardly occurs.
No wonder it is set to be rewarded as the most daring film of the year.
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