Coming on the heels of the federal budget, the writing of this week’s installment might sound like it’s inspired by that hallowed day when, in carefully chosen rhetoric, the government in power – this time the minority Conservatives – will lay out how they plan to spend, or not spend, Canadian taxpayers’ money. Although budget day does seem to be a guaranteed attention grabber, it is my own financial concerns, more like woes, that have compelled me to choose that staple of classic rock radio, Pink Floyd’s “Money.”

Trying to describe “Money” might be superfluous to most people: it is after all probably played at least once a day if not more on any number of radio stations throughout the world specializing in guitar oriented rock from mostly the 60s and 70s.

Found on the seemingly immortal Dark Side of the Moon, “Money” begins with Roger Waters’ famous bass line accompanied by now iconic sound effects – the repeated opening and closing of cash registers, the throwing of change and the staccato of adding machines. From this, the bass is given a sort of whimsically mechanical rhythm over which it lays down its groove.

Perhaps best described as “blues rock,” the song does seem to play out in a certain heaviness that echoes back to blues dominated bands such as Cream. However, different from Cream’s propensity for guitar-solo dominated jamming, “Money” is far more rhythmic, and in a way, thanks to Waters’ bass playing, kind of swings. Except for David Gilmour’s screaming solo towards the end, guitars seem to linger behind the rhythm section and keyboards. As if adding texture, the guitars in the song are alternately played through heavy reverb then through a wa-wa pedal, giving “Money” a definite raunchines, I would even venture, sleeziness – a sonic connection to the song’s subject matter.

The song appears to be written from the point of view of someone who regularly worships at the unaltruistic altar of greed: “Money, it’s a hit/don’t give me that do-goody-good bullshit/I’m in the hi-fidelity first class traveling set/And I think I need a Lear jet.” Although written apparently tongue-in-cheek, “Money” seems to offer a first glimpse into Roger Waters’ now famous disdain for society’s shallow obsession with wealth and fame – themes he would pursue to greater depth on Wish You Were Here, Animals and The Wall.

Michael Clayton begins with a series of night shots passing over and through the office towers of Manhattan. As the camera presumably presents the audience with the faceless centers of commerce and law, a voiceover spoken through a phone with the clarity of a manic-depressive on a high accompanies the passing corporate vista. The voice belongs to Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) and here’s part of what he has to say: “I realized, Michael, at that moment, that I had emerged — as I have done nearly every day for the past 28 years of my life — not through the portals of our huge and powerful law firm, but rather from . . . an organism whose sole function is to excrete the poison — the ammo — the defoliant — necessary for even larger and more dangerous organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity.”

Eden’s convoluted yet intensely clear monologue sets both the high pace and tension of the film right from the start – and it doesn’t let up. But it is Michael Clayton’s central theme, power and the lengths people will go to maintain it, that makes the film an anxiety-ridden meditation on corporate life and the price it exacts from its participants.

As lead defense counsel for agribusiness giant UNorth fending off a massive class action lawsuit, Edens discovers he has been on the wrong end of a fight after 16 years of litigation. Foregoing his medication (Edens suffers from bi-polar disorder), he has a manic episode during an on-camera discovery meeting. Naturally, the corporate brass at UNorth are freaked out. Fearing the loss of a client with very deep pockets, Edens’ firm sends out “fixer” Michael Clayton (George Clooney) to the hinterlands of America to bring their top defense attorney to heel. But in the end it is not Edens’ erratic behaviour that frightens UNorth, it is the fact that Edens is in possession of documents that prove his client to be an unethical, indeed downright evil organization.

Michael Clayton could easily have been played as a good versus bad morality tale along the lines of a David Grisham legal thriller, but the conflicted natures of the central characters consigns the film’s moral center (if it even has one) to a permanent grey zone.

None of the main characters are presented as a foil for the others because all of them have been slogging it out in the same moral vacuum, it seems, for decades. Clayton himself, the film’s under-hero and played with a broken dishevelment by Clooney, has spent a career fixing the “mistakes” of a certain class of people with the money to pay for his services; while head counsel for UNorth, the seemingly cold and calculating Karen Crowder, performed as though she were on nothing but a diet of ice cubes and speed by Tilda Swinton, seems to act out of desperation at the behest of her corporate overlords rather than from any psychopathic intent.

Despite one plot oversimplification and an ending bordering on the melodramatic, Michael Clayton, saved by its exploration of moral ambiguity, remains a superb film about the damage caused by the pursuit of wealth and power. But given that Edens — who himself is inextricably linked to the same regime of greed that his clients are committed to — is able to acknowledge that he has been serving an “even larger and more dangerous organism,” suggests a moral victory no matter how difficult Michael Clayton makes it to find.

After the light-hearted yet dark – and comparatively short – Punch Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson returns to epic movie making in his latest film There Will Be Blood. But whereas the sprawling Boogie Nights and Magnolia seem to have been concerned with the profane details of their all-too-human characters, There Will Be Blood takes on themes as grand and as stark as the southern California desert where it takes place.

As if echoing popular conceptions of the holy land at the time of Christ, the story unfolds in a dry barren landscape populated with poor farmers and their families who can barely scratch out an existence from its unproductive ground. With the discovery of oil underneath their land by the likes of prospector and subsequent “Oil Man” Daniel Plainview – played with both control and an intensity bordering on the diabolical by Daniel Day-Lewis – the temptation to sell overrides all other concerns, particularly that of the social bonds of family, and specifically those between fathers and sons and brothers. It is through these relationships, however tentative and contingent, that the film’s epic narrative is propelled.

Although they aren’t blood relatives, the most significant relationship in the movie (it seemed to me) was the recurring association between Plainview and Eli Sunday. A civilization of sorts springs up around one of Plainview’s most productive oil wells – complete with tent city and a church. Boyish preacher Eli Sunday, played with schizophrenic aplomb by Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine, Fast-food Nation), leads the congregation of the Church of the Third Revelation. Both Eli and Plainview, with varying degrees of enthusiasm take on the role of father figure. But whereas the role of father is incidental to Plainview’s more earthbound role as leader of men and captain of industry, Eli takes his own leadership as something god-given and holy, and therefore above the rabble of men who chase after wealth and power. But at the same time, no matter how much Eli plays at moral and religious superiority, deep down he longs for power. In doing so, he becomes a reflection of Plainview. In essence, Plainview and Eli are spiritual father and son in their shared desire for the things to be gotten in this world. For Plainview however, power is a means to an end: namely in his wish to “get away from people.” Alternatively, power for Eli, in his willingness to lord it over others for his own edification like a domineering father, is entirely attached to his ego and is an end in itself.

Although both characters are ultimately despicable, in his honest misanthropy, in his ability to see people like Eli Sunday for the dishonest beings they really are, Plainview comes across as the moral center, if there can be one, of the film. When he says to “half brother” Henry, “I see the worst in people,” it isn’t just a flippant remark: Plainview means it, and carries out his mean perceptions of the world to the bloody end — and seemigly on people who deserve to have there skulls bashed in with a bowlling pin. In this way, Plainview, rather than being presented as simpy evil, is given a depth and complexity that perhaps only an actor as talented and obsessed as Daniel Day-Lewis could pull off.

There Will Be Blood is brilliant filmmaking. Check it out.

The Savages, written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, is a touching, if at times heavy piece of filmic realism. Although there are laughs to be had, anyone expecting a straight-up comedy – as The Savages seems to have been promoted – will be taken aback by the naturalism that is its primary recommendation. Having said that, the verisimilitude that the film creates, thanks to Jenkins’ simple story and astute direction along with brilliant ensemble acting by Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, is both striking and harrowingly recognizeable.

Seemingly estranged siblings Jon and Wendy Savage, performed with dour grace by Hoffman and Linney, are brought together in order to decide what to do with their father Leonard who is sliding into the abyss of dementia. Because of his past abuse of his children, neither Jon nor Wendy are particularly thrilled with the prospect of caring for their ageing and increasingly irrational father. After the death of a long time live-in girlfriend, along with his growing antisocial behavior brought on by dementia, Leonard is given the boot from his Arizona retirement community. First presenting retirement in a series of surreal, drugged-out visual clichés – happy old folks playing golf and dancing under desert blue skies – the movie switches to the winter industrial landscape of Buffalo, New York where Jon lives. It is here, at the Valley View retirement home, essentially a hospital for the soon-to-be-dead – and the only place Jon could find that accepts Medicaid – where Leonard will live out his final days.

For reasons left unknown, Wendy is loath to the idea of allowing Leonard to languish in less than ideal surroundings. Jon, on the other hand, is far more pragmatic and content with their father’s living situation. As if giving us insight into Leonard’s past as an abusive parent, Jon says to Wendy while framed in the bleak surround of Valley View’s parking lot, “We’re taking care of him better than he ever took care of us.”

The rest of the movie plays out against the backdrop imposed by a bleak northern winter. We catch glimpses of the passing industrial landscape of New York, poetically captured by cinematographer Mott Hupfel through the windows of cars and trains. Certainly the recurring motif of a passing and wasted landscape touches on the film’s themes of entropy and death’s inevitability; however, that a definite visual aesthetic anchors the repeated imagery – barren, sillouetted trees, the shadows cast by abandoned buildings – seems to point to the redemption that Jon and Wendy are seeking for each other and themselves.

In its honest portrayal of a family struggling with life’s hard realities, The Savages, albeit at times hard to watch, is both sweet and sad. The subject matter that it takes on will no-doubt be unpalatable to many – this ain’t no Hollywood romance. However, the striking realism with which it is presented is reason enough to see it. Don’t expect a comedy, but do expect to be impressed.

“Your Ex-lover is Dead” by Stars is a peculiar “pop” song. Found on 2004’s Set Yourself on Fire, “Your Ex” is both wistful and mesmerizing in its combination of
musical arrangement and narrative.

Essentially orchestral, the initial pace of the song, provided by an intermittently struck bass drum, is slow and elegiac – something more akin to a funeral march. With its liberal use of strings and horns “Your Ex” is given an intimacy reserved for a small concert hall or private room. The almost whispered vocals of Torquil Campbell and Amy Milan along with a loosely strummed electric guitar and forceful snare drum give “Your Ex” its pop hook, but the song seems to bare a greater resemblance to a chamber music recital. Considering the title of the song and the lyrics, the choice of musical style is fitting. Mournful and ponderous, the music seems to capture perfectly the sentiment carried by the words.

On the subject of the lyrics, “Your Ex” is more of a narrative relating to a specific time and place. With clearly articulated concrete imagery, its story-telling style seems to draw the listener in closer: “captured a taxi despite all the rain/we drove in silence across pont champlain/and all of that time you thought I was sad/I was trying to remember your name.”

Although “Your Ex” sounds as if it’s the direct personal experience of the songwriters, its very specificity gives the song a compelling force. Like an eavesdropper, the listener is, through compulsion or recognition, forced to listen.