No matter how full a woman’s wardrobe, there inevitably comes a point when she feels she has nothing to wear. Expensive, fashionable new purchases that just somehow don’t look right are cast aside in the frantic search. It is at times like these that a woman turns to her saviour: the Little Black Dress (LBD). The LBD is widely regarded as an essential part of any woman’s repertoire. It can be dressed up with chic accessories: Audrey Hepburn wore a pearl choker with her Givenchy LBD in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Equally, it can be dressed down for day-to-day wear; perhaps teamed with ballet pumps and a cropped jacket.

Not that the LBD is Plan B when all else fails. Rather, as Wallis Simpson once declared, ‘When the little black dress is right, there is nothing else to wear in its place.’ And it’s popular with both men and women: a survey found that 96% of women owned an LBD, and 31% of men stated that it was the outfit they would most like to see their partner wearing. It is now even used as a metaphor: a new mobile phone may be described as ‘the little black dress of mobile phones’, implying that its design is timeless, elegant, and iconic.

The first LBD was designed by Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel in 1926: a plain, short silk dress with simple diagonal pin-tucks. Prior to this, black had been reserved for mourning. In the new Jazz Era, however, Chanel’s simple LBD was embraced as liberating. Throughout the 20th century, starlets continued to favour the LBD both in movies and on the red carpet. Marilyn Monroe became an object of desire in a low-cut LBD in Some Like It Hot; Edie Sedgwick was the epitome of glamorous rebellion in an LBD in the 1960s; and Liz Hurley was catapulted to stardom almost purely as a result of the daring Versace safety-pin LBD she wore to a film premiere in 1994. The Season One Sex and the City DVD featured the four female stars, idolised by millions for their fashion savoir-faire, in LBDs, and thousands were either online or queuing at Topshop stores at 4am on May 1st 2007 in a bid to own the LBD in Kate Moss’ first collection for Topshop.

Current catwalk trends often have fashionistas and starlets adorning themselves like birds of paradise in garish colours and elaborate designs. Within a few years these all look dated. You can be confident, however, that when looking back at photos of yourself at university, the ones that won’t make you blush with embarrassment are those where you were wearing a Little Black Dress.

Joshua Freedman talks to lastminute.com creator Martha Lane Fox Talk about last minute. Martha Lane Fox was lucky to make it. The entrepreneur was meant to be popping up to Oxford to judge a bunch of Varsity Pitch contestants at the Said Business School, and, damn me but she cut it fine. ‘I didn’t know what time train I was going to take to get here until ten minutes before I left,’ she admits.It takes someone like this to make a fortune out of a site that has a section called ‘Go last second.’
She got there on time, of course. It was one rather minor gamble in a life of gutsy risks. She gave up easier careers for a bit of entrepreneurial fun, and ended up with a £5m bank balance at the age of 31. Life in the fast lane has its dangers — Lane Fox was almost killed in 2004 when her Moroccan jeep overturned, leaving her with half a body made of metal — but she’s proof, if it exists, that you don’t have to live life out of a filofax to get success.Hers is no story of rags to riches. In fact, her upbringing is one that plenty find difficult to shrug off. The daughter of Old Etonian and Oxford don Robin Lane Fox, she went to Oxford High School and then Westminster, before reading History at Magdalen. She worked for Spectrum, a strategy consultancy firm, and then moved to Carlton, the TV network, where she helped develop the firm’s internet plans and new digital channels.Most people would have been satisfied with a cushy creative job in the media. Lane Fox thought differently. ‘It was too corporate. I was quite excited to get out of that.’She was right to be. She co-founded Lastminute.com in 1998 with fellow Oxford graduate Brent Hoberman (‘probably one of the most last-minute people I’ve ever met’), but she insists it was unquestionably his idea. Hoberman seems to have fitted the bill perfectly. ‘Everything happened at the last minute, from going to meetings when we were working together, to organising dates with his millions of girlfriends,’ she says.Taking his own hectic life as a model, he suggested setting up a website that would let people buy theatre tickets, book flights and reserve hotel rooms by clicking buttons and receiving electronic mail. And, with the help of the Real Time revolution, people could do this whenever they bloody well felt like it. ‘The first time he told me, I said I think that sounds like an absolutely awful idea,’ she admits. ‘He then explained in more detail how the internet enabled you to do something like that. He convinced me that you could do this business that would be very, very, very complicated in the real world.‘If you’re trying to organise a weekend away at the last minute, you have to call up hotels, call up airlines, put it all together yourself, whereas the web enables you to have this incredible live availability and book it in real time.‘So, eventually, he convinced me and we set about raising money, writing a business plan, going to venture capitalists, being told everything from “sod off” to “OK, we’ll give you 50p” to “OK, we’ll invest.”’ The last of the three came eventually. They raised £600k.You don’t have to spend long looking at the site, or reading the mailing list e-mails, to gather that Lastminute.com is the definition of the 21st-century cyberbusiness. It’s all pink, for one thing. One panel on the site alerts you to ‘Newsletters ‘n’ things.’ The ‘a’ and the ‘d’ got left somewhere in the mid-’90s.There was a great eureka moment when she decided pink would do it, and, as she says, the ‘brand was forever born.’ Why pink? ‘I was just trying to create a brand that I liked myself, because I think that that’s where you have to start — if you go with your own gut instinct.’ The branding, she says, ‘was friendly and on the customer’s side’, a rarity at the time. ‘In our day, it was very unusual to write in a chatty way on a website. We had a weekly email that was very chatty. That’s made us stand out a bit I think.’It took the others a while to catch up. ‘Not because of Lastminute.com, but since Lastminute.com,’ she notes, ‘it’s become a lot more common parlance to talk to customers in a friendly tone — Innocent smoothie drinks, for example.’ The intro to the ‘Our Story’ section of their site is ‘We had good jobs before we started Innocent. Why did we change?’‘As it grew,’ she goes on, ‘the products on there appealed to everybody. You want to get on a flight, someone else wants to stay in a hotel, other people buy theatre tickets. It’s very, very broad-ranging. The site turns over $2 1/2 billion of revenue, so you have to appeal to everybody to get to that.’
At first sight, Lane Fox and Hoberman were lucky with timing. The site did exactly what she says — it appealed to all sorts — and it came to fruition at the peak of the late-’90s internet boom.

This, though, had its setbacks. The only way was down, even if people didn’t want to admit it at the time, and Lastminute.com’s share price took a notorious plunge, from a peak of 555p in 2000, to just 17p two years later. It was sold in a £577m deal in 2005, which saw her pocket a reported £13.5m. But, in true clichéd style, she dismisses the importance of money. ‘I think it’s a bit of a slippery slope when you start doing things for money,’ she says.Maybe we should take with one big pinch of cybersalt her claim that cash isn’t all. After all, she was in lucky enough straits to start with to be able to risk giving up her job to start a business just for fun. She owned her own home and, so she says, wasn’t even giving money a thought. ‘I didn’t ever even imagine that we would make so much money,’ she concedes. ‘I think you can separate out people who are driven purely by money, and people who are driven by great ideas and a passion for making them succeed.’Surely what made Lane Fox succeed, though, was a lifestyle that married her perfectly to the role of running a website that capitalises on the modern man’s lack of foresight. She calls herself ‘spontaneous’, but says she’s not really a last-minute person herself, and doesn’t like leaving things to chance. What do we think that means? That she books important things (holidays, theatre tickets…) six months in advance, maybe? Plenty would agree on that as a fair definition of advanced planning.Not so for her. ‘I probably know that I’m going to go away for the weekend in the next month, but I haven’t done anything about it.’ It’s relative, you see. ‘Last minute for me might be different from what last minute for you is,’ she ventures. For her, it means ‘today, tomorrow or next weekend. That’s kind of what I think of as last minute. But actually lots of people on the website still book six weeks ahead, two months ahead… You can book anything up to a year ahead if you feel like it and you’re particularly anally retentive.’ Anyone born before 1970 has permission to weep.

There has been outrage among Oxford students at the promotional tactics employed by the PR team behind an upcoming student production of John Ford’s “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore”.Students complained after being pidged condoms and women’s underwear. One student from Magdalen College described the promotional tactic as “in bad taste” and having “offended a lot of people”.She said, “Other people I know think it’s a pretty disgraceful thing to do, as they’re a bit more conservative and Christian and don’t think condoms should be flying around people’s pidges.”However the play’s director, Sam Pritchard, was keen to defend the decision to pidge condoms. He said, “I don’t much care if people have been offended by our marketing.“While I understand that some people might find this a bit confrontational, I think it’s ridiculous that someone would be offended by a plastic packet appearing in their pidge.“The idea is certainly not a marketing gimmick; our interpretation of the play confronts issues of sexual consent and unwanted pregnancy. The condom acts as the perfect symbol of these issues.”John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy is known as one of the most controversial works in English literature. The production will feature hardcore pornography presented on an onstage television set.Elle Graham-Dixon, in charge of marketing for the play, was also keen to defend their strategies. She said, “The initial concept behind both the play and the pidge condoms was to confront issues of sex, violence and degradation head on. The marketing reflects this.“If people are shocked by the material, then it will probably be representative of how they would feel about the play,” she said. “This is certainly not a case of using sex as a selling tactic. There is nothing sexy about big white pants with the word ‘whore’ emblazoned across them. If I receive promotional material that does not fit in with my personal beliefs, I throw it in the bin. I suggest they do the same.”However, one student, who wished to remain anonymous said, “They’ve been using welfare condoms, so are basically wasting college resources on a prank which most people don’t even find amusing.”

The caption for Rob Reiner’s (of When Harry Met Sally) new film The Bucket List is ‘Find the Joy’. Unfortunately there is very little joy to be found in this film, and unless you are a middle- aged man with similar mortality issues it is rather unlikely that you will find anything in it at all.The story is simple: Carter Richards (Morgan Freeman), an auto mechanic, and Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson), a corporate billionaire, share a room in a hospital where they are being treated for cancer. The doctors give both of them no more than a year to live. Predictably enough, Mr. Nice and Mr. Snob become friends and decide to live out their dreams before they ‘kick the bucket.’ Together they compose a list of things to do, like skydiving, getting a tattoo, and kissing beautiful women. Clearly the makers of the film were very concerned with showing the process of how both men eventually overcome the delusions they had about themselves and their lives and realise what really matters.This sounds more promising than it is. From the very first scene predictability guides the story. Imagine all the clichés and platitudes about love, friendship, family and religion thrown into one bucket and you will understand the tone of the picaresque voyage the two dying men embark on. The screenplay is mediocre, the level of conversation is sentimental bordering on trivial, and the supporting cast is embarrassingly weak. The only truly impressive feature is how Freeman and Nicholson still manage to convey emotions through even the most simplistic lines, yet the acting genius of the film’s two stars seems wasted in this one-dimensional film.So if you are in fact looking to ‘find the joy’ this week, you’ll have to look some place other than this dreary tale about two old men confronting death. By Marina Zarubin

Who does Sunday Roast represent and why should we sign up?
We are an eclectic club night every other week at the Cellar, representing various artists, with exquisite and free cake, the dispellation of Sunday night sombreity, and even sometimes a good foot stamp.

Why do you think Sunday Roast is important?
We get a variety of acts to perform every time; we’ve had some excellent student bands (i.e. Madrigals, Me & the Neck), ska, klezmer, rock’n’roll, funk (QT and the Reservoir Dogs), live electronica, hip hop, reggae, loads more.

What has been your most memorable experience so far?
It’s one that happens at most Roasts; there’s a moment at about 12 o’clock, everyone’s dancing around you and you feel like you want to keep jumping in the air for a lot longer. It feels a little bit like a community to me. I love the way that there are regulars who always turn up in braces, or when the bands you’ve booked surprise you by doing somersaults,guitar in hand, and you become pals with them afterwards.

What do you have planned for 2008?
We have four sessions every term, every other Sunday. Feb 17th, we’ve got an indie night with a french band Smack La and a new student one called High Risby along with some ‘folktronique’ DJs. On March 2nd,we’re getting QT and the Reservoir Dogs to come back because they funked our socks off last time. There’s going to be a singing competition:if you fancy your chances at being the next Tina Turner then email [email protected] to get more details.

Tell us something you didn’t / couldn’t say at fresher’s fair?
Bring a permanent marker pen with you to graffiti in the bogs.

How can we get involved?
We’re on at the Cellar from 9pm on the dates above, and every other Sunday from the first one of term in Trinity. Check out our facebook group; just type in Sunday Roast. We’re always looking for people to help out, it’s a beautifully rewarding thing to be involved in. If not, just poke your head in and have some flapjack.by Louise Collins 

Student parents have criticised Oxford University for failing to provide enough nursery places and childcare support. Oxford’s provision of financial support for student parents ranks well behind several other UK universities, where student unions frequently provide their own financial backing. Queen’s University, Belfast pays 80% of the childcare costs of its students while Keele University pays 85% of the childcare costs of its student parents, charging them only £72 a month. Oxford University nurseries charge students who manage to obtain a place on the system a total of £580 a month.
Student parents have criticised University nurseries for not being flexible to accommodating their academic timetables. Parents who want to leave their children in nursery care also face waiting lists of up to twenty-four months.The University has three nurseries of its own, providing a combined total of 161 places, as well as 58 subsidized places in private nurseries. Currently, there are 285 children waiting to receive places at these facilities and there is a typical waiting period of between one and two years. Childcare provision and support varies dramatically from college to college. 23 colleges that contributed to the building of two of these University nurseries are also given the right to place one student or staff member on a ‘priority list’. Another four colleges are privileged enough to have their own College nurseries, containing ten to 30 places each, which are cheaper alternatives to the University childcare centres. However Somerville, St Anne’s, Balliol, and Wolfson’s nurseries give priority to their College’s own staff and members, and their facilities have been criticised for poor standards of service. Kerri Hamberg, a D. Phil student with a child at Somerville’s college nursery told Cherwell that the college nursery was not as good as private nurseries outside of the city centre. “The nursery is small and oversubscribed, has limited hours (9 to 5, which makes working a full day at an office impossible), and the cost is quite high given my earning potential here. Some of the city centre nurseries I’ve visited recently are also not up to scratch; all the adequate childcare centres appear to be beyond the ring road in the villages around the city.” OUSU has said that it lacks representation on the University committee responsible for allocating funding to different schemes. Hannah Roe, OUSU Vice-President for Women, said, “OUSU VP (Women) has the responsibility of supporting student parents and representing their views to the University. However, it’s hard to address these issues at the University level, especially when OUSU doesn’t even have student representation on the Planning Resources Allocation Committee.” Roe warns that unless the University invests in childcare provision and support, it will lose out to Ivy League universities.  “Oxford needs to realise that it is competing on the international market for graduate students and academics. Currently, it’s losing.” “Oxford can’t continue to live in a world where graduates and academics having childcare responsibilities is a novelty. This isn’t just about a ‘culture’ change. It’s not just about writing some guidelines. Oxford’s greatest academic rivals like M.I.T. and Princeton are outperforming us in childcare, investing serious cash in nurseries and relief funds.”One graduate student said that Oxford had been extremely unhelpful when she faced difficulties, telling her that hardship grants were for “extreme cases of financial hardship” only. Claire Fernandez was reading for a D. Phil when her funding body’s research grant ran out during her maternity leave. When the funding body refused to extend the grant, she turned to the University for help. Fernandez said: “The University Union and Graduate Office provided no relief whatsoever when I contacted them while I was pregnant and they were not interested in providing any useful advice or support. They just referred me to my college.”

Don’t worry, this isn’t a film about clothing. Doug Liman’s fast-paced, action centred style provides some stunning visual effects in this sci-fi thriller. But be warned: watching items of knitwear on screen might provide more chemistry than Hayden Christensen and Rachel Bilson. ‘Jumpers’ are a select group of people with the power of teleportation. When David Rice (Christensen) realises he has this power, he leaves his alcoholic father to lead a new, luxurious life of globetrotting. But his actions soon attract the attention of Roland (Samuel L Jackson), leader of the Paladins, the group that seeks to destroy them. Liman seems to have focused so much on pioneering effects – such as taking the viewer through the process of teleportation with the characters rather than objectively – that he totally forgot about character development. Thus, when the fighting and chase sequences take place, they look great, but the stakes are simply not built up high enough for you to care who prevails. And at the time when the action slows and the film relies solely on human interactions, the story line is deplorably predictable and the scenes boring. The drunken father, the childhood romance, the school bully; these are the terribly clichéd characters that the story is told through that are simply lifted from countless other indistinguishable movies. Samuel L Jackson may as well have been getting some more motherfucking snakes off another motherfucking plane; Christensen could have been carrying a light-sabre throughout – you wouldn’t have noticed. None of the performances carry any panache or originality. Jamie Bell is the saving grace, playing another Jumper. By the time of his appearance, the film is screaming out for the injection of verve he gives it.Sadly, his performance, some really excellent special effects, and wonderful filming locations (like inside the actual Colosseum) are not nearly enough to save this ‘thriller’ from joining the steadily growing stream of mediocrity expelled from Hollywood’s microwave meal industry of producing quick thrills devoid of substance.By Ben Williams

What do you have to do to become a ‘charitable’ Oxford student? Perhaps it’s easier to say what you don’t have to do. You don’t have to have a lot of spare time, climb mountains for breast cancer or make tea and coffee in a hostel. You don’t even have to spend a day in sponsored silence, three-legged agony or waving a bucket at random passers-by. If you happened to have strolled into Merton quad last Friday you would have been witness to the climax of Merton RAG Week: the custard vote. Members of the college voted throughout the week on who they wanted to pour buckets of custard over, the prime contenders being the JCR President, members of her exec, and the Chaplain. The charitable thing to do, of course, was to give money to watch others suffer the fate of cold custard. There is a myth that if we buy the Big Issue (and recycle it after we’ve read it), we have somehow become ‘a better person.’ But at Oxford, it is possible to redefine what it means to be charitable. Charity doesn’t have to be difficult.
We all tend to ignore our dreaded bank statements and, irrespective of our charitable aims and high morals, most of us simply cannot afford to splash out on generous charity donations. You don’t have to have a smoking wallet however, as student charities such as RAG put emphasis on raising as well as giving – an ethos which paid off in £30,000 worth of charitable donations last year alone. A small lifestyle change can also go a long way. Having drunk a bottle of wine before hitting town in order to save on extortionate club drink prices, how many of us shrug our shoulders and walk past the Big Issue seller sitting by the cash point on the way to the Bridge? We tell ourselves that the £1.50 required for a Big Issue could contribute to a well needed pint or some cheesy chips whilst stumbling home. Realistically, if you bought the Big Issue instead of cheesy chips then the world would be a better place; you would both be making a charitable gesture as well as taking small steps to that supermodel waistline. You don’t have to be loaded to donate and have fun; the Entz rep at Merton was sold at a slave auction for the bargain price of two pounds.
It is also true that we aren’t all lucky enough to have six weeks of our summer to give up to volunteering at a hospital in Africa or teaching at an orphanage in India. An occasional afternoon or evening a week for KEEN can nevertheless make a big difference to people’s lives. KEEN recruits student helpers from both Oxford and Oxford Brookes to help out with mentoring and sports coaching for children and young adults with special needs in Oxfordshire, and a session of volunteering is both rewarding and fun.
Even sex can become charitable, with a fair-trade chocolate bar or a novelty RAG condom rose for Valentine’s Day. Speed dating, blind dating, crew dating and that romantic one-on-one with your significant other can all raise money for a good cause: a £5 Rendezvous ticket for Tuesday of sixth week will give you club entrance to Bar Risa and discounts of up to fifty percent off at loads of top Oxford restaurants.
Sixth week of Hilary is Oxford’s RAG week and it provides the opportunity for everyone, even the laziest or poorest among us, to do something good for charity. There are events planned that should appeal to everyone; the fit among us can sprint a few laps of University Parks in the great RAG run. If that sounds too much like hard work, the less energetic could go to a film screening. Saturday night down the pub recycling old jokes could be swapped with a night of laughter at The Big Rag Comedy Night at St John’s. And if none of that appeals, then you could always bear witness to the ritual humiliation of your friends in ‘Mr & Miss Oxford’ at the Union on Wednesday night.
We’ve all heard about ethical shopping – in fact we can’t escape from it. It seems virtually impossible to keep up with which high street chains use slave labour, which banks invest ethically, and which budget supermarket gives their battery chickens the best quality of life. Instead I propose a new concept – Ethical Clubbing. Eclectric at Love Bar on a Thursday donates a third of its profits to RAG charities, so it is possible to get that smug, feel-good charity feeling while drinking yourself into oblivion and throwing some dodgy shapes on a dance floor. Despite your pile of unwritten essays, and the fact that you promised your housemates you’d clean the kitchen, a night on the tiles with your student loan in tow would instantly make you a model citizen.
And if VK ices and sweat isn’t your scene, then the Hands up for Darfur Fashion show in Trinity might be more up your street. The event in first week of Trinity hopes to exceed the staggering £50,000 total raised at last year’s Hands up for Darfur Ball, and looks to be one of Trinity’s hottest social events. Fashionably FAIR is also geared up to set the Oxford catwalk ablaze. Following in the footsteps of last year’s sell out event Fashionably RED, which raised £1500 for Aids and HIV charity Avert, the event in third week of Trinity is promoting and selling fair trade and ethical clothing.
Whilst we can neither escape nor forget Mr Big Issue and his guilt inducing pleas, there are other ways to be a ‘good’ Oxford citizen. You don’t have to be six foot and gorgeous to get involved in a fashion show (always more of a spectator sport); public nudity can become instantly acceptable if you strip off and pose naked in a charity calendar (for the exhibitionists amongst you) and pulling that fit grad student in a charity kiss-o-gram is fun that won’t ruin your reputation on a bogsheet…
The options are endless, so I urge people to get up and get involved. While being charitable can make someone a better person, it doesn’t have to make them boring… and it certainly doesn’t have to make them well behaved.

The first ever Oxford Afro-Caribbean Society Ball has had to be cancelled after lack of cooperation from other universities, leaving it to pick up £3000 worth of costs.The ball, which was scheduled for Saturday of fifth week and was organised in conjunction with Durham, Birmingham and York Universities, was called off following a meeting on Monday. The Oxford society, which has around two hundred members, sold the required seventy tickets for the event, while York managed twenty eight, Durham three and Birmingham only one. Ticket-holders are now to be refunded the forty pound ticket price, leaving the Oxford branch of Afro-Caribbean Society (xACS) to come up with £3,000 towards the cost of the ball and the responsibility for ensuring that the other universities’ societies also pay their share.Ball President Ore Oyeleke, who had been working on plans for the ball for over a year, said, “The initial premise was that we would all sell seventy tickets so that we would have two hundred and eighty people.”“When I came up with the idea I wanted it to be an inter-university ball which just happened to be in Oxford. It would have been annual so next year it would have been held in York and so on.” As Oyeleke was responsible for liaising with the Kassam Stadium and the onus is on xACS to make sure that the other societies pay up.According to Oyeleke, xACS is currently receiving advice from law tutors on the issue. She said, “The emails between the universities count as legal contracts. The only problem we have now with the ACS is that events will have to be more profit-based because we owe someone money, rather than just giving our members loads of stuff.” Members of the society had being looking forward to the ball and, given the late announcement of cancellation, had already bought outfits for the event which was to be held at Kassam Stadium, which has been the venue for the Oxford University Hindu Society’s Michaelmas Term Diwali Ball. In an email she sent to members of the Oxford society, Oyeleke said that she expressed “extreme regret to have to announce that the Homeland Paradise Ball has been cancelled.” Oyeleke said that she hoped that the cancellation would not damage the reputation of Oxford’s Afro-Caribbean Society. She said, “When cancelling became an option, I was worried because as I’d put so much work into it, I thought it would damage my personal reputation. But the fact is that Oxford has the smallest percentage of ethnic minorities whereas Birmingham have maybe double that.” She adds that members have been supportive and understanding of her decision.  Although the xACS is simply a society for the appreciation of African and Caribbean culture, Oyeleke says many people mistakenly think that in order to join you have to be African or Caribbean. Oyeleke said, “At events like our street-dancing, most people who turn out are white or not Afro-Caribbean.”The xACS is now beginning plans for another big event for its leavers in the beginning of Trinity term.

From the start, There Will Be Blood instils expectation. The opening fifteen minutes set a truly epic and remarkable stage: without dialogue, lone oil prospector Daniel Day-Lewis toils ceaselessly in the depths of a forbidding mineshaft against a tense and uneasy orchestral score. It is intense and gripping, and augurs for an ambitious film. Ambition can be a dangerous thing for a filmmaker, and director/ producer Paul Thomas Anderson certainly stakes his intentions from the off – but this is what we have come to expect from the director who brought us Boogie Nights and Magnolia and he does not disappoint. Inspired by Utpon Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood begins in 1898 and follows the fortunes of oil prospector Daniel Plainview, played by the masterly Day-Lewis. It is a story of dark ambition: the ugly side of the American ideals of independence, entrepreneurship and competition. Its themes are not original. It depicts the terrifying greed of man and the conflict between America’s two masters – pursuit of money and religion – in its 20th century infancy. Yet Anderson has dealt with them deftly. The film is rich with symbolism and powerfully fueled by the deviance of Plainview. Day-Lewis is utterly mesmerising and absorbing in a performance that will assuredly win him his second Oscar. Anderson places him in nearly every shot, and such an intimacy would seem a brave move from the five-times Academy Award nominated filmmaker were it not for the alluring presence and performance of Day-Lewis. He has perfectly captured the disturbing nature of Plainview. It is that of a character whose conscience has long since been consumed by ambition and hate; a desire to dominate his fellow man. Yet for such a disturbing character, Day- Lewis’ charisma and voice are bewitching, delivering an ultimately moving performance. While Day-Lewis is undoubtedly the pivot on which the success of this film turns, Paul Dano provides admirable support as the unnerving preacher Eli Sunday, Plainview’s adversary. Anderson has an audacious eye for the visual. He aptly combines the panoramic with the close-up and his command of colour and imagery is excellent. The destruction of the oil derrick as a sequence is simply enchanting. The menacing score comes courtesy of Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame, and is a perfect complement to the dark soul of the film. There Will Be Blood is a film with distinctiveness and grand intentions, but it is also a movie that has not shied away from the edge. Ambition can be a dangerous thing, but for Anderson and Day-Lewis it is this that sets them free to create a thrilling, potent and exceptional film. By Christopher Jackson