4. There Will Be Blood
"I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people."
From the film that is all about war, but not at all about the current war, to a film that has nothing to do with war, but is particularly about the current war. Suffice it to say Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterpiece swims in two things, oil and religion. Equal parts character study and political allegory, the film piles baptismal imagery on top of another whirlwind performance from Daniel Day-Lewis to produce a dark fable about what happens when an "oil man" who raises misanthropy to an art form comes to town. The scary thing about this is that Anderson, already an accomplished filmmaker, is getting better. And keep your eye on Paul Dano, who between this and Little Miss Sunshine is eclipsing most of his peers.
3. No End in Sight
"When we were first starting the reconstruction, there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two or three ways to do it right. What we didn't understand is that we were gonna go through all 500."
While a slew of films attempted to address Iraq from a fictional perspective this year, none had the efficacy of docs on the same topic, which have been rolling out for the past few years. Of all those docs, however, it's hard to find a more cogent overview than Charles Ferguson's profile of the first infrastructure-oriented boots on the ground and how they were basically undermined from the very beginning and how that got us where we are today.
Not questioning for a moment whether or not it was a good idea to go in in the first place, No End in Sight instead concerns itself with the dream that was a democratic Iraq and paints a pretty convincing picture that at first, at least, it was achievable. At least that's the impression you get from the insiders tasked with that mission who very honestly depict the clusterfuck that awaited them.
The most telling stat the film highlights is that the post-WWII occupation of Germany was literally years in the planning. The Iraq occupation, maybe 60 days. And strange as it may sound, after watching the film, the surge actually begins to make sense. Scary, unfortunate, eponymous sense.
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