Now that spring break has come to an end and I have a little bit of time to reflect on it, I would have to say that it’s probably been one of my favorite spring breaks in recent memory. I didn’t take a vacation to Siesta Key or do any traveling at all for that matter, but I still had a great time. I house sat all week and fortunately for me, the house had a 50-inch wide screen plasma TV with on-demand cable and surround sound. I spent the majority of my free time sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner in front of the TV, getting up only to warm a frozen pizza or crack open another can of beer. I was living the dream of a lazy college student with no job and no responsibilities. The only decisions I had to make were which movie to watch next and whether I wanted a pepperoni or sausage pizza.

I saw some excellent movies over break. Let’s see if I can remember them: Bananas, Deconstructing Harry, Manhattan, Grand Canyon, Babel, Children of Men, Hannah and Her Sisters, 21 Grams, Ghost World, and There Will Be Blood. I also watched the entire third season of Weeds, which is an edgy and very funny show on Showtime about upper middle class life in the suburbs of California. However, the show is not about your everyday family in suburbia. The mother, the main character of the series, is a drug dealer who accidentally gets her family involved in her shenanigans with gangs, the Mexican mafia, the DEA, and the FBI. The plot is completely absurd, which is what makes the show so entertaining, and the characters (including one played by Kevin Nealon) poke fun at the usually boring and uneventful life of suburbians who all live in identical “little boxes made of ticky-tacky.”

I also caught a few episodes of HBO’s new series, In Treatment. The show has been adapted to the U.S. from a popular and award-winning show in Israel. The premise is simple: each episode is a therapy session with the same psychiatrist and one of his patients. I found some of the patients uninteresting and the dialogue to be a little stilted, but nonetheless the psychology-loving side of me enjoyed learning about each patient’s problems and how the therapist approached them. I recommend this show to anyone with an interest in psychotherapy and who does not mind watching a TV show entirely focused on dialogue between two people. There are no car chases or explosions in this series which is kind of refreshing.

The best movie I watched over break would have to be There Will Be Blood. There Will Be Blood is currently playing at Cinema Center Tech over at Indiana Tech’s campus (which is a great independent movie theater, by the way). It was actually my second time seeing this movie, and I think I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that There Will Be Blood is possibly one of the greatest American films ever made. I was drawn to this movie even from the very first scenes. Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) is an ingenious director, and for the first 20 minutes of the film there is no dialogue at all. Anderson emphasizes the allure of oil to Daniel Plainview, masterfully played by Daniel Day-Lewis (Gangs of New York), by keeping the camera focused on him as he hacks away at rocks while pausing for several beautiful landscape shots with hints of Jonny Greenwood’s (from Radiohead) haunting musical score creeping in.

Some of the first words spoken in the movie are from Plainview in which he declares, “I am an oil man” to a room full of potential investors in his oil business. These words echo throughout the rest of the movie while we learn of his monomaniacal love of oil and capitalism. The war between capitalism and religion in America is the main theme underlying There Will Be Blood with Plainview representing capitalism and Eli Sunday, wonderfully played by Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine), representing religion. Both characters have a fanatic love of their warring ideals and they continue to clash more and more as the movie progresses eventually coming to an intense climax at the end of the movie.

The ending consists of some of the most intense scenes I’ve seen in any film and Plainview’s dark and megalomaniacal personality is reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s character in the Shining. Of course Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning performance is what makes the movie superb, but it is the deftness of P.T. Anderson as a director which takes the movie to an almost transcendental level. His graceful, tracking shots of the characters coupled with cinematography comparable to Terrence Malick, his timing of Greenwood’s score, and his unrelenting focus on the evil and greed within Daniel Plainview and the allegorical nature of his personality to the undercurrent of capitalism and religion in America are what make this film a masterpiece.