Photos of today

Slideshow here. Click on first pic. Goes better with your favorite music.

Cleansing the tongue

In a stunning innovation in Newsspeak, I mean lingusitic cleansing, the New York Times redefined blatant corruption as "confidence in one's integrity" to describe their allegation that John McCain has been fucking his lobbyist and doing her political favors for sex and money.

Note that "political favors" is so ingrained as Newsspeak that it has become almost totally disassociated with its meaning. Poor "corruption's" harshly interrogated letter structure as been linguistically cleansed and now resides in a relocation camp somewhere in the Mideast.

But that triumph of the journalism is not enough for the world's greatest newspaper! Today we get a twofer!

Not content to merely use the word integrity in place of corruption, the Times also officially ordained the term "draw sharp contrast" as official Newsspeak for "go negative." In order to not be repetitive, the style manual allows "draw tough contrasts" as an acceptable euphemism for "slime your opponent" as well.

Computational anxiety

Today's Washington Post reports that parents are rising up like peasants with pitchforks against a new approach to math being used in elementary education across the land.

In Prince William and elsewhere in the country, a math textbook series has fomented upheaval among some parents and teachers who say its methods are convoluted and fail to help children master basic math skills and facts. Educators who favor the series say it helps young students learn math in a deeper way as they prepare for the rigors of algebra...

The program de-emphasizes memorization and drills and pushes students to use more creative ways to find answers, such as drawing pictures, playing games and using objects.

Sounds like my kid's math class, only much more structured.

On the positive side, according to the Post, the new math program raises test scores and prepares children to learn algebra later on. On the negative side -- gasp -- children do not always get the correct answer without having to think about it for awhile. The article doesn't say it, but sometimes they won't get the correct answer at all. My kid's teacher mentioned that in passing at the recent parent/teacher conference. The important thing at this stage (3rd grade), she said, is that they think.

The post gives an example: "There are 28 desks in the classroom. The teacher puts them in groups of four. How many groups of desks are in the classroom?"

I got that right away by dividing 28 by four so I can see how parents could think that it is more important for children to memorize the multiplication tables than to struggle to find their own methods for solving elementary math problems. But at what stage of development did I learn that I could use the multiplication tables to solve a problem like that?

The point is that once you have the thinking skills, the computational skills are easy. Not the other way around.

And my kid's teacher made another good point, which the Post article neglects to mention, when a parent asked her how kids are supposed to do computation if they're not drilled in it? Just like you or I or any mathematician does computation these days, she said, they'll use a calculator.

Duh.

Update: On the other hand, those of you who wonder how kids who aren't taught computational skills in school still manage to succeed, I noticed my wife drilling poor little John Bob on the multiplication tables last night. Probably a lot of that going around.

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Reading lesson

George Orwell had some small amount of respect for Rudyard Kipling, therefore George W. Bush is a hero and the Democrats are unfit to govern. This is so because in 100 years everyone will remember the name “George W. Bush” while Denis Kucinich and his lot will be forgotten. It’s right there in Orwell’s essay. You can read it yourself. Trust me on that. And btw, Orwell says Kipling’s not a Fascist so neither are today's Conservatives. Thus goes the “logic” of William Kristol.

Of course Kristol regularly finds evidence that the Democrats are fools, knaves or traitors in the cooing of pigeons or the honking of taxi’s or the pitter patter of raindrops on the windowsill, and more likely than not pulls some dead white guy out of his ass to agree with his reading of the portents, so neither his conclusions nor his “logic” are remarkable. But Orwell was an interesting writer and it’s usually a hoot when a Conservative pulls poor dead Orwell out of his ass to justify some kind of policy that normal readers would recognize as an “Orwellian Nightmare,” so I looked up the good George’s little essay on Kipling to see what it really said and how it actually relates to our current political climate. It’s yet another example of the “intellectual” somersaults Conservatives will turn in order to pretend that the Fascist looking back it them in the mirror is Winston Churchill. Kristol’s attempt to use Orwell’s “defense” of Kipling gives great insight into the mind this particular Conservative pissant, and Conservative pissants in general.

Let’s start with Orwell’s description of Kipling:

It is no use pretending that Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a 'nigger' with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling's work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct--on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.

Yes, yes, Kristol seems to be saying, we Conservatives are jingo imperialists, morally rotten, and aesthetically disgusting, but like Kipling according to Orwell, we are not Fascists. And the left, well, Orwell nails them:

But because he (Kipling, read Kristol) identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which 'enlightened' people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases.

So you see. We don't dislike Bush because he is an imbecilic piece of shit and his policies have proven disastrous. We dislike him because he's a paragon of responsibility. That and because we are hypocrits. Both left and right want the same material things and in order to get them we have to exploit the poor folk at home and abroad. The only real difference between left and right is that the right take responsibility for their actions while the left live in a fantasy land. That’s why the right must govern, however incompetently, and the left can only whine in opposition.

Fortunately, Orwell’s argument that freedom for me requires slavery for thee and thou is just so 19th century. With education, democracy and rule of law, we can overcome the master/slave economic relationship that requires the poor of one country to slave eighteen hours a day to make shoes for the poor of another country. The history of the United States offers strong evidence that rule of law and intelligent economic management can balance regional differences. The European Union’s unwieldy march toward freedom and economic justice provides a current example of how that fight can be won. It’s really not that difficult to figure out intellectually. Pulling it off politically is quite another matter.

And here, Orwell nails Kristol and his empire-building buddies. You know, the realists, the responsibility-takers:

Kipling (read Kristol, Conservatives in general) spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed 'natives', and then you establish 'the Law', which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it.

Yea, I’m sure it’s satisfying for a Conservative like Kristol to pull a dead white guy of Orwell’s stature out of his ass to tell him how superhumanly responsible he and his fucked up warmongering, torturing economy destroying, American hating buddies are, but it requires a lot of skimming or he’s likely to find Orwell’s up his ass in a sense that’s not so pleasant.

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More than words

Eric Hirsch Jr. published an informative article on the failure of the No Child Left Behind law in yesterday's Washington Post. He points out that reading scores have shown gains in fourth grade but have not been maintained in higher grades when reading comprehension matters so much more.

I'm sure it won't surprise anyone who follows these education brouhahas that schools are increasingly teaching to the test rather than teaching actual subjects.

...this causes schools, as many complain, to teach to reading tests rather than educate children. But intensive test preparation by schools has resulted in lower reading test scores in later grades. "Teaching to the test" does not effectively teach to the test after all.

But this inability of so many older students to comprehend what they read, despite so many hours studying reading comprehension, is not as mysterious as it may sound.

In light of the relevant science, an analysis of the textbooks and methods used to teach reading and language arts -- for three hours a day in many places -- indicates some of the reasons for the disappointing later results. These test-prep materials are constructed on the mistaken view that reading comprehension is a skill that can be perfected by practice, as typing can be. This how-to conception of reading has caused schools to spend a lot of unproductive time on trivial content and on drills such as "finding the main idea" and less time on history, science and the arts.

Yes, history, science and the arts. Who needs em? Humans, apparently:

Studies of reading comprehension show that knowing something of the topic you're reading about is the most important variable in comprehension. After a child learns to sound out words, comprehension is mostly knowledge. Many technical studies support the assertion that after students can fluently sound out words, relevant knowledge is the crucial difference between students who are good or poor readers.

In other words, a person who knows nothing whatsoever about a subject can understand every word in a paragraph and still have no idea what the pargraph means.

But what can be done? Isn't reading comprehension one of those questions for which there are not answers? Well, no.

Consider the eighth-grade NAEP results from Massachusetts, which are a stunning exception to the nationwide pattern of stagnation and decline. Since 1998, the state has improved significantly in the number of eighth-graders reading at the "proficient" or "advanced" levels: Massachusetts now has the largest percentage of students reading at that higher level, and it is No. 1 in average scores for the eighth grade. That is because Massachusetts decided in 1997 that students (and teachers) should learn certain explicit, substantive things about history, science and literature, and that students should be tested on such knowledge.

Well, duh, you'd think. So how is it that so many experts somehow manage to miss the obvious. You won't be surprised the George W. Bush and the Republicans played their usual role in fucking things up for money. This time in the form of Reid Lyon:

So, again, a tutor of George W. Bush developed a program/policy that imposed a structure on America’s public schools that further complicated the practice of educating children, while funneling federal funds to the profit margins of... friends of George W. Bush.

Whether by design or due to a series of accidents related to the hubris and incompetence of trust fund babies like Bush, vast swathes of our education system no longer teach children in a way that enables them to understand history, social studies, science, or the arts -- essentially the basics necessary for a functional democracy.

As with any great crime, its rarely a bad idea to follow the money and see who profits, in this case by the demise of democracy in the United States and you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that it's the politicians of the one dominant party and so many of the corporations that profit most from a widespread lack of reading and reading comprehension. Unfortunately, those who would profit most from a better an educated commonweal don't know what the words mean and if they do can't adequately distinguish between the constitution, the bible, and the words coming at them from the tv.

Photo of today

There she goes, again

Fascist fascism

Did you know that Leo Strauss, the infamous Godfather of Neo-Conservatism, coined the term Reductio ad Hitlerum, which is Latin for “Jonah Goldberg.” Sorry, that’s not entirely fair. To be a bit more precise, Reductio ad Hitlerum describes the logical fallacy which posits that Hitler (or the Nazis) supported X, therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad. For Goldberg, it should be modified to read ascistsfay oughtthay xay andway iberalslay inkthay xay
ereforethay iberalslay areway ascistsfay, since he is a pig.

We all know that Goldberg is a colossal buffoon and maybe some day he’ll get his own pithy Latin saying to deride his “thought,”, but in the meantime it’s just a bit funny that such a fatuous asshole-buddy of the Neo-Conservative cause is the foremost practitioner of Strauss’s logical fallacy. It makes one kind of hope there’s a hell so that Strauss can contemplate the real world shambles his brain dead followers have made of his thought as he roasts in it. The Nazi’s, you know, picked on stupid fat kids and liberals pick on Jonah Goldberg, so, you know...

But Goldberg notwithstanding, Fascism is typically defined as an extremely nationalistic political philosophy that advocates an autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader and suppression of opposition. Fascist tendencies include a belief in some combination of national, racial, and/or religious exceptionalism, political violence, arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, race-based expulsions and brutal invasions and occupations of other countries. Much like the Republican platform.

For the past 65 years or so all we’ve heard about Nazis and Fascists is that those people and their ideology are bad, bad, very very bad. These days one simply cannot describe oneself as a Nazi or a Fascist and run for office or become part of the serious media.

What to do? What to do? This social condemnation of Fascism is a great hindrance to people who otherwise could accurately describe themselves as Fascists. It’s not like Fascist thinking has ever gone away. As you know, extreme nationalism, “executive privilege,” brutal police state tactics, racist roundups and deportations, insane foreign wars and many other trappings of Fascism have become mainstream. Its would-be practitioners simply recognized the need to re-brand.

So what could they call themselves? “Authoritarian” worked okay for our Fascist allies abroad, but wouldn’t play well at home. “Neo-Authoritarian” never had a chance. “Neo-Liberal” didn’t work out for rather obvious reasons. “Neo-Conservative” had a much nicer ring to the Fascist ear, but contained too many syllables for the average Jonah to wrap his little brain around. “Christian Conservative,” even with all those syllables, works for a lot of our Neo-Fascists, but doesn’t include a lot of the more economic focused volk. In the end it seems the best word they could co-opt as the new “Fascist” was just plain old “Conservative.” Extreme nationalism, “executive privilege,” brutal police state tactics, racist roundups and deportations, insane foreign wars, and torture are unquestionably Conservative values these days. Don’t believe me? Just read the Washington Post’s editorial page.

Anyway, I think Strauss recognized the danger that people might call his Fascist crap Fascist crap, and being a very smart man realized that simply not referring to one’s beliefs as Fascist or Nazi-like was not enough, that it would be necessary to take the possibility of calling a Fascist a Fascist off the table entirely. Thus he gives Fascists Reductio ad Hitlerum as a shield which is followed by Godwin’s Law which also keeps the word Fascist at bay, and the linguistic legerdemain eventually degenerates into Goldberg’s fart of a thesis ascistsfay oughtthay xay andway iberalslay inkthay xay
ereforethay iberalslay areway ascistsfay, which essentially says that those who oppose Fascism are Fascists.

So here we are. The stink of Fascism fills the air and it’s considered extremely bad form to call a fart a fart, much less point out who farted.

Part of the problem with calling a Fascist a Fascist is that the Nazis, in addition to being Fascists, were genuinely pathological racist nut cases on a historic scale. Few American Conservatives would advocate, even in the privacy of their empty skulls, killing all the Jews. Many are racists, obviously, but for the most part they’ve learned to keep that shit to themselves and would be happy with separate and unequal rather than gassed and dumped in mass graves.

Still, the success the Conservatives have had taking the word “Fascist” off the table is yet another indication of just how pathetically weak our so called Liberals and Democrats have become. Conservative policies are, by common definition in popular dictionaries and encyclopedias, Fascist. Either intelligent, educated people need to start using the word accurately and educating others to the existence of things such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, or we need to find or create another word with the same meaning. The specific, individual acts of Bush and the Conservatives -- brutal invasions and occupations, war crimes, torture, etc. etc. etc. -- are too numerous to get into a sentence or even a paragraph. That’s why we end up sputtering when we try to list them all. But there is a word that describes Conservative policies accurately. The word is Fascist. It’s in the dictionary. You can look it up.

Ticker tape

After the Giants won the super bowl all of the old photos and newsreel clips I've seen over the years started talking to me saying that I had to go to the ticker tape parade and take some photos. Frankly, I wasn't that enthused, but a New York ticker tape parade is such a hokey over-hyped piece of americana that I couldn't come up with a compelling argument not to go.

Funhouse mirrors

The news tells me that yet another gumman went on a shooting spree, this time at a small college in Illinois. That makes like what, three mass murders in a week? We're becoming like Iraq. Is there some kind of rule that you become what you conquer? Of course our mass murderers are typically white Christian conservatives and their jihads tend to be more personal than their radical Islamic brethren. But still. Blow yourself up in a crowded market or go out in a hail of bullets while shooting as many people as you can. What's the dif? Ain't no dif. Not as much as people think, if they think at all.

Africain american

Photo of today

Writing's becoming difficult. Here's a photo for now. Nothing special, but not without some interest formal elements. Click on it for a larger view.

Bad week at the end of the world

Poor Atrios seems to be having a hard time lately.

He goes to great lengths to inform you that he doesn't give a shit about what you think, cause, you must understand, it's not about you, it's about him.

Kind of humorous coming from someone who makes a living telling other people what he thinks, eh? Of course plenty of people really do care to know his opinion, so perhaps that gives him license to tell other, lesser mortals, to shut up? No, of course it doesn't. That's the kind of info one should keep to oneself. To act otherwise is simply bad manners. And I'd hazard a guess that all but a few of the filthiest, most vile wingnut losers have at least a few people who care about their opinions, or at least care enough to pretend. Who is Atrios to try to burst their bubbles?

But hey, I can sympathize with the feeling. I've been a bad guy. A bubble burster. I'm not proud of it, but shit has happened. And I'm sure it sucks being bombarded with other people's unsolicited opinions on a scale that most people probably can't imagine. Still, I can't condone the behavior. Not by me. Not by anyone. When opinion writers bitch about people writing about their opinions, it appears a bit hypocritical, to put it mildly.

I don't mean to attack. As I've mentioned before, I like the Atrios blog and read it daily. And I've a short fuse myself when it comes to people telling me what I should do. So I'm not angry with Atrios. Just concerned. He seems to be a bit down.

As further evidence, we see him complaining earlier in the week that he doesn't make enough money, then asks those little people he doesn't give a shit about to send him money, and then brags (defensively) about how much money he makes. It's a very weird sequence.

Well, here's hoping he gets a lot of money for his work and it cheers him up! I won't be sending any, of course, but if I ever run into him in a bar or a green room, I'd happily offer to buy him a drink in appreciation for all the entertainment and information he provides. But here's also hoping the celebrity crap doesn't get to him. I don't wanna see no paparazzi shot out front the Betty Ford clinic. But if he wants to date Jessica Simpson, I guess that would be okay. Anything to take his mind off all those terrible nobodies with their worthless opinions.

Swish swash

Just got my 8-year-old's report card. It's not your typical report card. His school doesn't give grades. It's more like an essay.

The teacher included one of his poems:

Why do Dragons Go To Sea

Dragons soar across the sea thinking
"The ocean is scaly like me when the
Waves go swish swash.
Maybe it's another dragon."

Dragons soar across the sea.
"Perhaps I'm seeing things,
But I'm going to dive in
To eat fish. I roast them
With my sun level fire
Breath."

Dragons soar across the sea.
"I go to my island.
I am marooned on my island.
People come with torches but
I can breathe the sun."

Not bad for a third grader, huh? Don't get me wrong. My purpose is not to brag about my kid, more to lament the state of education in this poor world. I'm sure that he wouldn't be much of a poet if he didn't go to a progressive school where they start teaching serious poetry in kindergarten. He also takes dance, two music classes, and art in addition to the regular academic subjects. It's not like he's the best in the class or anything. They all know how to use anaphora and I'm happy for them. What saddens me is that more kids don't get that kind of education. It's really not that difficult.

Yet the trend is away from quality education. A lot of kids do nothing but reading, writing and rithmatic and that creativity-stifling limited curriculum is pretty much limited to test preparation. Passing the test is the be all and the end all.

There's some push back against quality education even in our school. There was a funny scene with the math teacher at a recent parent/teacher night. She was explaining what the children did in class, which is pretty much all games and puzzles. As she went on about how much fun the kids had and how it was important for them to see the higher beauty of math, many of the parents grew uncomfortable. One of them asked if they did any typical math like multiplication, long division or fractions. The poor teacher misunderstood the nature of the question and went to great lengths to assure us that she didn't waste the kids time with that crap.

I know, I know. Would that kind of thing work in the worst schools? Me? I think yes. Would it take a lot of money? No doubt. But we get what we pay for. Bush's new budget contains 515 billion for "defense" and the interest we'll pay on the resulting deficit is far more than he proposes for education. We pay for war and inequality and that's what we get. We'd be better off well-educated.

Another day at the races

In personal news, the chuckling household recently got cable tv. The last time we had it was about 18 years ago. The signal from the antennae had become so weak that we finally gave in. It was painful to watch the boy try to figure out what was happening to Jackie Chan beneath all of that video noise and horizontal wiggling.

We did without for all those years for a variety of reasons. Mostly it was out of a belief that if watching tv were not so difficult on the eyes we would watch a lot more of it, thus making us fatter and less intelligent. But more specifically, I was afraid that I would watch the news. Particularly cable news. I read a lot, and that's bad enough, but television news tends to make me angry (as well as stupid), not only at the content of the news, but at the terrible incompetence of the news organizations. It's not like the major print media is all that great, but tv is infinitely worse.

I've done pretty well for the most part. Outside of the regular broadcast channels we mostly watch Monk and Comedy Central, as well as the near daily re-runs of Overboard and Ghostbusters. On the negative side, there have been several occasions when we've watched CNN and CNBC to see election news. As predictable as it was, we were still a bit surprised at the staggering incompetence of the tv news creatures and we quickly got angry and turned them off.

The news media's offenses against intelligence and basic competence are many, but what stands out is their sickening obsession with race. The election night coverages we saw were all stupid race shit all the time. Given how much I read and the fact that the print media has the same unhealthy preoccupation, I can't say I was particularly surprised. My wife, however, doesn't read the New York Times and the Washington Post every day, much less any blogs, so the utter depth of the media's racial obsession like totally freaked her out. She was shocked, disgusted and ultimately angry. What is wrong with these people? she asked. After a few minutes, we changed the channel back to Overboard.

Normally, we cluck and nod our heads in agreement. Yep, them media creatures sure are stupid. Yep, they really suck. But do they? All the way up the organization? I don't doubt that the talking hairstyles really are that vapid, but what about their bosses, and their bosses' bosses, and the top executives?

Think about it. As the graphic above from Nielsen Media Research (used under the jurisdiction of the Fair Use doctrine) demonstrates, television news viewership is tanking and has been for the last twenty five years or so.

I'd wager that if it were possible to quantify quality, the quality graph would track the viewership graph pretty much peak for valley. The news department staffing chart is similar:



And anecdotal evidence also supports the point:



So why, given the significant financial stakes involved in news ratings, does quality continue to decline? Why do the talking hairpieces babble on and on about subjects that literally make millions of people change the channel? And more importantly, why do the executives in the boardroom continue to let the talking hair pieces destroy the product? The executives have something more than air beneath the hair. They understand the bottom line.

Therein lies the rub. If the top executives understand the bottom line and they allow both quality and the resulting ratings to decline so precipitously, then they must believe that they profit by having fewer viewers who are significantly less well-educated on the issues.

My guess is that they make a lot more money by controlling the government than they do by selling soap and to control government so thoroughly requires an ignorant and easily manipulatable electorate. So they propagandize the morons that enjoy being whipped up into a frenzy of hate and stupidity and encourage everyone else to watch Entertainment Tonight, or Overboard.

The ground in winter

Just that.



In case you don't get out enough



in the cold.

Fire up the presses, it's printin time!

The Times reports:

WASHINGTON — House leaders and the White House on Thursday announced a tentative agreement on an economic stimulus package of roughly $150 billion that would pay stipends of $300 to $1,200 per household, and more for families with children, plus provide tax incentives for businesses to encourage spending.

Translation: They're gonna print a lotta money and throw it in the air by the fistful. A lot more money, to put it accurately. It won't be long before we're all carrying around suitcases full of Benjamins to buy groceries. That's already the case if you travel. Funny how you don't hear much about the deficit these days.

Or perhaps the plan is to trick the Arabs and the Asians and the Europeans into going to war with each other over who gets to buy up everything of value in this country? Nah, there is no plan. At least nothing beyond getting a blip in tomorrow's polls. Maybe they'll kick tomorrow?

And of course it could just be another ruse. Last time we learned that the supposedly free money was just an advance on our tax cut, you know, money we would have gotten anyway. Is that trick in the works again? The news stories describe it as a "stipend" or a "rebate," but it'javascript:void(0)s an unfortunate, and very real, possibility that our top flight media don't know what those words mean, or just take dictation without bothering to stop and think about it. We'll see. It'll probably end up being some combination of the two.

Guy knows how to dig a hole

When There Will be Blood first came out, I was enthused to see it and my daughter wanted to go as well. But her schedule is full and the weeks went by and my interest began to wane, as is prone to happen as a movie's initial hype wears off. Then I saw that it was up for a lot of Oscars, and always in the same sentence as No Country for Old Men, a film I truly hated, and I decided not to waste my money, or my time on it, that it was bound to suck like all the other movies. But then my daughter had a free night and wanted to go, so here I am.

If you plan on seeing There Will be Blood, I recommend that you don't read past this paragraph. I will not give the details of what happens, but I will discuss what I thought about some of the major plot elements. You would do better to see it without letting me color your judgment, one way or the other. It's an interesting movie and worth seeing. And if you want a more intelligent review, I trust Roy will provide one soon.

Okay, you were warned. I thought the ending really sucked and it practically ruined the entire movie for me. It felt like one of those tacked-on studio endings where the big shots snatch the film maker's dream at right before release and turn it into crap. Of course it's also possible that the screenwriter just had no idea how to end it and took the easy way out, but I don't think so. The film was intricately plotted and all the pieces were in place for a satisfying ending that was true to the story, but for whatever reason, that just did not happen.

And it's unfortunate because There Will be Blood had the potential to be a truly great movie. The first two thirds of the story arc provided a nearly immaculate example of visual story telling at its finest. The movie began unraveling a bit as it approached the end, but there were still many good moments and the film was entirely salvageable until the next to last scene.

I know that sounds a bit too much like a lot of the complaints about No Country for Old Men. A lot of people thought that was a potentially great movie until the unsatisfying ending. I, however, was not one of them. Although the movies are similar on one level -- interesting leading man, black humor, unsatisfying ending -- the stories are not comparable. No Country is lame-assed kitsch. There Will be Blood came damn close to nailing it.

Beyond commenting on the story, I'd say the cinematography had its moments. There are some interesting images of warm light in late afternoon and during fire scenes and some interesting use of depth of field and a couple incredibly well-framed close-ups, but overall it was not what you'd call spectacular. The acting was good, particularly Tom Selleck, or some guy that looked like him, in the lead role. If that was old Tom, his acting skills have sure improved since Three Men and a Baby.