My Milkshake Brings All The Boys To The Yard

Rating: 10/10 (29 February 2008)

At first I was a little disappointed, I came out of the theater after what felt like forever and I couldn't really make out what I had seen. The performances are as good as you are likely to see anywhere, visually it's stunning with moments of beauty(the fire), but for me the music is really what carried this movie, which opens sounding like "2001" and ends sounding like "Clockwork Orange", Kubrik seems like a driving influence here, and for the most part it works seamlessly and really propells the film through some of it's slower moments. However, he story does takes a bit too long to unfold, there could have been a cut or two here and there, but nothing major. That being said, it's one of those movies which I couldn't grasp the first time around, ("Babel was another of these, which I love now), but whose scenes end up playing themselves out over and over days later. It's a less technical and less sentimental Citizen Cane, which though technically set before that film, is much more topical, showing oil, ambition, and fundamentalist Christianity at a unique juncture in history that ends up, if not mirroring our own modern time, than definitely refracting it. Better than No Country For Old Men, in verisimilitude of performances, it's ability to mix humor and repulsion, and it's construction, which is less formulaic than No Country, and more satisfying. So yeah it's worthy of it's hype, if only for it's last ten minutes, which contain one of those instant "classic" scenes that comes around rarely. "I drink YOUR MILKSHAKE! I drink it up!"