There Will Be Blood - now with child/partner forum we call H.W.

[MacGuffin]

A Critic's Critic
Source: David Carr (The Carpetbagger blog); NY Times

Paul Thomas Anderson, apart from being the holy vessel of hope and aspiration for critics and cinéastes, is known in the industry as both a straight shooter and a barrel of monkeys, someone who takes the work, but not himself, seriously. He did not disappoint.

At STK, a restaurant in West Hollywood, he was in full cry with his mates, staying late and talking with all comers. The Bagger, who has admitted here that he finds "There Will Be Blood" more admirable than convincing, introduced himself. Mr. Anderson laughed for a while. And they he laughed a bunch more.

"You know you don't know a [gosh darn] thing about movies," he said.

Um, gee, the Bagger thought, maybe this is the point where he should change the topic to "Punch-Drunk Love," one of his favorite films of all time? But the filmmaker just kept laughing. (This being a blog, a medium where snide rules, the Bagger wants to be clear. He does not mean that the director was chuckling ironically or darkly or portentously. He was just having some fun with a little playful payback.)

"'There Will Be Blood' was the best movie of the year," Mr. Anderson said. "Except for maybe 'Juno.' And 'Clayton.' And 'Atonement.' Other than that, it was the best movie of the year."

Um, there seems to be one omission in that gracious tick-tock, the Bagger noted. The one that sent the Bagger into fan-boy convulsions.

"You really think ['No Country for Old Men'] movie was better than ours!" Mr. Anderson hooted. "C'mon, do you really believe that?"

The Bagger was flattered that anyone cared about his opinion on films, even if it was someone who kept telling him that he knew nothing. Mr. Anderson laughed one more time, clapped the Bagger on his back and wished him on his merry, misguided way. (He then bumped into Anderson's dear friend John C. Reilly who asked him how he could miss the excellence, miss the point, of "There Will Be Blood.")

The Bagger has admired Anderson since he watched him on the set of "A Prairie Home Companion," where he literally served as insurance for Robert Altman, whose health was quietly failing while he made his last film. Mr. Anderson came over the man's shoulder with input on some shots, but he was really there to make sure one of the treasures of American cinema got to make as many movies as he wanted to. And along they way, he either learned, or had already baked in, Altman's reflexive tendency to say whatever was on his mind.

[The Red Vine]

I would've thought time and growing up would've matured PTA of those tendencies but obviously not. This reminds me of his Boogie Nights days where he would tear up the poor rating papers from the test screenings, put them in his mouth, chew them up, and spit them out. That event was obviously worse, but this still makes him look like a spoiled child.

[©brad]

oh come on he was obviously joking.

i feel there's a fairly large chunk of the evening the bagger choose not to include in that post.

[modage]

oh shut up redvine!   this is SO funny.  another reason that PTA fucking rules.

[Pedro]

He then bumped into Anderson's dear friend John C. Reilly who asked him how he could miss the excellence, miss the point, of "There Will Be Blood."

They were totally fucking around.

[tpfkabi]

There Will Be Bell

Trailer mashup with Saved By The Bell.  Only moderately amusing, but worth posting.

i finally came across this and i thought it was pretty funny.
as it was loading up i remembered that oil episode.
they should have found some way to put in the "i'm so excited, i'm so..........scared," scene (even thought it's a totally different episode).

[MacGuffin]

Blood and 'Oil!'
By ANTHONY ARTHUR; New York Times

**READ AT OWN RISK**

The best moments in Paul Thomas Anderson's film "There Will Be Blood" and in "Oil!," the 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair on which it is loosely based, are identical. They depict the fiery immolation of an oil rig. "There was a tower of flame," Sinclair writes, "and the most amazing spectacle — the burning oil would hit the ground, and bounce up, and explode, and leap again and fall again, and great red masses of flame would unfold, and burst, and yield black masses of smoke, and these in turn red. Mountains of smoke rose to the sky, and mountains of flame came seething down to the earth; every jet that struck the ground turned into a volcano, and rose again, higher than before; the whole mass, boiling and bursting, became a river of fire, a lava flood that went streaming down the valley, turning everything it touched into flame, then swallowing it up and hiding the flames in a cloud of smoke."

Anderson's magnificent film fire bursts with the same kind of destructive energy — and the fascination with the hard, gritty detail of social and industrial processes — that marked Sinclair's writing at its best. Indeed, Sinclair was not without big-screen ambitions of his own. He flirted with Hollywood for most of his long life, beginning in 1914 with a six-reel silent movie of his most famous novel, "The Jungle" (1906). After moving to Pasadena in 1916, he made friends with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and other movie people. Through Chaplin he met Sergei Eisenstein in 1931, and he ended up footing the bill for Eisenstein's aborted documentary about Mexico. In 1932, an MGM film version of his novel "The Wet Parade" was modestly successful. And in 1967, the year before Sinclair died at the age of 90, Walt Disney released "The Gnome-Mobile," based on the author's only children's book, the story of a brother and sister who band together with some forest gnomes to save a stand of ancient redwoods from a logging company.

But Sinclair, the author of more than 90 books, never made the big movie strike he hoped for. Anderson's version of his long-forgotten novel, however, has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best picture and best adapted screenplay. What is there about "Oil!" that has made it, by proxy, such a gusher?

Like most of Sinclair's books, "Oil!" was larger than life in subject and in theme. Set during the early Southern California oil boom and encompassing World War I, the Red Scare, the Teapot Dome scandal and the rise of the evangelical movement, it's about an oil baron who rips wealth from the earth, drives other men to do his will, fights off competitors and builds an empire through vision, courage, ruthlessness and the general greasing of palms.

The story of J. Arnold Ross, called "Dad," is told through the eyes of his loving but increasingly skeptical son, nicknamed Bunny; in fact, "Oil!" is more Bunny's story than Dad's. Following what for Sinclair was a familiar (and partly autobiographical) plot, the novel describes how a naïve, idealistic youth, born to privilege, becomes converted by degrees to a position of radical socialism. That transformation begins when Dad buys a remote Southern California ranch, where he will later strike oil, at a distress-sale price. Mr. Watkins, the owner, is a dimwitted religious fanatic with two sons, Paul and Eli. Paul, the older boy, rejects his father's religious views in favor of social activism. Honest and direct, Paul becomes a carpenter, working for Dad even as he becomes Bunny's friendly tutor and guide in the ways of social justice. Eli, by contrast, is sick in body and mind, an epileptic who claims to have religious visions and the power of healing. Modeled after the famous evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, Eli is cunning, devious and ambitious, a gifted misuser of words that mislead and delude those who heed them.

While Bunny attends school in "Angel City" (Los Angeles) and Eli builds his church, Paul continues to work for Dad until America enters the war in Europe. Drafted into the Army and sent at the end of the war to fight the Bolsheviks in Russia, Paul is outraged and radicalized by what he experiences there. He joins the Communist Party of America upon his return home and becomes a labor union organizer in the California oil fields. As a former working man, Dad is unusually solicitous of his employees, but the more powerful oilmen in the region pressure him to resist Paul's union efforts. In the end, Paul is murdered by a right-wing mob, and Dad, who is not involved, dies of pneumonia (in reality, a broken heart), ruined by the oil cabal. "Oil!" closes with Bunny's sad realization that an "evil Power" "roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor."

Anderson's self-sufficient and misanthropic Daniel Plainview (as he renames Dad Ross) has no truck with Sinclairean theories of cause and effect. "I don't like explaining myself," says Anderson's Plainview, perhaps reflecting the director's own wish that his poetic and ultimately rather cryptic film speak for itself. Upton Sinclair, to the frequent detriment of his novels, loved explaining himself, especially his ideas about what was wrong with capitalism. Although "Oil!" is one of Sinclair's better novels, it still suffers from the author's insistence that literature should lead to the solution of social problems. Less interested in human psychology than in ideas, he blamed the capitalist system for all social ills and directed his literary and other energies (he ran for governor of California as a Democrat in 1934) toward changing that system to socialism. Sinclair's critics gibed that he had sold his birthright for a pot of message, and even his admirers wished that he had paid more attention to his art.

By contrast, "There Will Be Blood" is ingeniously artful in many ways, not least in its enthralling re-creation of the oil-boom era that Sinclair evoked in his novel. But where Sinclair could be overly didactic, Anderson's film suffers from a lack of thematic clarity, compounded by some of his shifts in emphasis. Paul, the avatar of honor in "Oil!," appears in the film only briefly, selling the secret of his father's oil to the rapacious Plainview before disappearing entirely. Eli the evangelist, who is presented satirically and largely fades from view after the novel's opening section, becomes Plainview's primary antagonist, and a wholly unredeemed villain, in the film. Sinclair would hardly have objected to the punishment Anderson ultimately inflicts on this charlatan — just a few years before "Oil!" he wrote "The Profits of Religion," a scorching broadside against organized churches, which he saw as "a source of income to parasites, and the natural ally of every form of oppression and exploitation." But for Sinclair, the problem was not with outright villains, of which there are few in his work, but with the system itself, with the false beliefs that cause people to behave badly.

In a crucial moment in the film, Paul and Eli's father asks Plainview about his religion. Amused, he responds vaguely that he admires all religions. In "Oil!" Dad teasingly claims adherence to an entirely new religion, the Church of the True Word. He suggests to Mr. Watkins that his son Paul looks to him like "the bearer" of "the true spirit of the Third Revelation." Eli then falls into a convulsive fit and rises born again as the prophet.

Eli's new religion, in Sinclair's novel, is not so much inspired by greed, as it is in the film, as by delusion. In the film, he's already on the make when Plainview first appears. Here, Sinclair's version is the richer; it's one of those moments when we understand that despite his limitations as a novelist, he could be witty and clever in getting his ideas across — in this instance, that it is vital to know when words are true and when they are false. A hint of this playful wit, critical but not malicious, would have been welcome in Daniel Plainview, allowing him to be regarded as something more than the destructive and ultimately unexplained villain and victim of "There Will Be Blood."

Anthony Arthur's biography "Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair" was published in 2006.

[Redlum]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/filmprogramme/filmprogramme.shtml

This starts out as fairly typical interview and film description but actually has some excellent tidbits and anecdotes from Paul Dano and PTA.

[©brad]

a-holes over at gawker obviously didn't get it.

Paul Thomas Anderson: Crazy Asshole, Apparently Liked Juno

Paul Thomas Anderson, the auteur behind There Will Be Blood, recently had some angry words for Carpetbagger and delightful character David Carr. Anderson, who "can be a real arrogant brat", evidently flipped out on Carr when he overheard Carr saying that Blood wasn't his absolute, super-ist favorite movie of the year. "You know you don't know a fucking thing about movies!" he shrieked at "the Bagger", and added, cryptically, "[Blood is] the best movie of the year. Except for maybe Juno. And Clayton. And Atonement. Other than that, it was the best movie of the year." Well, I guess that's rather diplomatic of him. Though he's still an asshole: "You really think No Country for Old Men...that movie was better than ours? C'mon, do you really believe that?" Yup. A glorious, gifted asshole. Maybe he could take some lessons from Carr, who used to be quite the hard partier, on calming down and being cool. We think Carr's pretty good at it. [Hollywood Elsewhere] After the jump, video of the Carpetbagger kicking off the awards season.

[private witt]

I'm so fricking sickened that TWBB didn't get best director or best picture.  NCFOM wasn't a quarter of  There Will Be Blood.  There is no justice.  What in fuck does PTA have to do to win best fucking picture?

[tpfkabi]

there have been snubs.

[MacGuffin]

Daniel Day-Lewis and the act of being
His ferocious commitment to his roles wins him Oscar No. 2 for 'There Will Be Blood.'
By Rachel Abramowitz, Los Angeles Times 

In the age of celebrity, where have all the actors gone?

That's what crossed the mind when Daniel Day-Lewis ascended the stage to collect the statuette for best leading actor for his role as the rapacious oilman Daniel Plainview in the epic "There Will Be Blood." From the moment he emerges from the bowels of a mine in the film's opening, Day-Lewis incarnates the spirit of unhinged American capitalism, just as he once vivified a gay English punk, a furious disabled artist, a 19th century American aristocrat and other iconic parts.

The 50-year-old, double-earringed Day-Lewis began his acceptance speech by sending up his own super-serious image, kneeling to Helen Mirren and cracking, "This is the closest I'll ever come to getting a knighthood." He then thanked the academy for "whacking me with the handsomest bludgeon in town."

For many moviegoers, Day-Lewis himself might be the handsomest bludgeon in town -- a pure, untainted artist who knows how to wallop the audience with raw emotion.

More than almost any other living actor, Day-Lewis has been able to escape the tarnishing effect of celebrity culture. He lives off the media grid in Wicklow, Ireland. He works rarely and speaks even less, appearing miraculously out of the collective memory to take on parts that it's hard to imagine anyone else playing.

And then there's the power of the transformation.

"He doesn't perform or act but mutates," said Michael Mann, who directed him in "The Last of the Mohicans."

The stories are legend of what Day-Lewis will do to fully inhabit his character. To play an Irish Republican Army partisan turned boxer in "The Boxer," he trained twice a day, seven days a week, for three years. For "Mohicans," he learned to hunt and built a canoe. To play a crime kingpin in "Gangs of New York," he practiced throwing deadly knives and reportedly glared so much at costar Leonardo DiCaprio he intimidated the young superstar.

To those who've worked with Day-Lewis, the legends often misconstrue what he is actually doing.

"It's a kind of a different level of focus than the normal person," said director Jim Sheridan, who's worked with Day-Lewis on a series of films, including "My Left Foot."

Yet Sheridan stresses that Day-Lewis' ferocious commitment is not an exercise in ego but in empathy. For instance, in "In the Name of the Father," which was based on true events, Day-Lewis plays a man falsely imprisoned for an IRA bombing. One of the plot's conundrums was why Day-Lewis' character would sign a false confession.

"That seemed very hard to muddle through logically," Sheridan said. But not after Day-Lewis stayed up two to three days in a row in a prison cell. "He was in a kind of emotional condition when we were doing the scene. . . . He was close to tears because he was very tired. That answered all the questions of logic."

Similarly, in his last Oscar-winning performance, "My Left Foot," Day-Lewis spent eight weeks learning to paint with his left foot like his true-life protagonist, Irish writer and artist Christy Brown, who had cerebral palsy. And yes, he did spend the whole time making the film in his wheelchair. But, Sheridan pointed out, "we actually filmed with children who had cerebral palsy. I wondered what it would be like if you had an actor who stood up [at the end of] filming and walked out. It was a commitment to their suffering that he stayed in character."

Paul Dano, the young actor who plays Plainview's antagonist Eli Sunday in "There Will Be Blood," did keep his distance from Day-Lewis during the filming. "A lot of people think he's strange to be that committed, but it really makes sense when you see it in person." During the film, Daniel Day-Lewis shoved Dano's face in the mud and hurled prop bowling balls at him, but, Dano explained, "as much as he goes through or puts himself through, he never expects another actor to do the same, as long as they get to where they need to get to. . He doesn't have any ego. He would let me slap him in the face, but he'd never expect to slap me in the face unless I wanted it to happen."

In today's film world, transformative acting is more often associated with women. The great chameleons of today are people like Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett. Their essential natures remain mysterious no matter how much the media attempt to pin them down. By contrast, the male stars, even great ones like Will Smith or Sean Penn, maintain some recognizable vestige of themselves from role to role.

But not Day-Lewis. He can truly mutate because of the unerring and often thrilling control he maintains over his physical being.

Mann said that physicality is one of Day-Lewis' important portals through which he arrives at a character's emotional state. For "Mohicans," the actor learned all the skills of an 18th century Native American. "He kind of works through the physical," said Mann, so much so that it affects "all the complex circuitry in his wiring pattern" of his brain, which "starts to refract into your attitude."

"Daniel had just come off of what happened on the London stage," recalled his "Mohicans" costar, Madeleine Stowe, referring to the notorious incident in which Day-Lewis, playing Hamlet at the National Theatre, ran from the stage crying, convinced he was talking to the ghost of his own dead father. "I felt from him a great deal of uncertainty until he got into the physicality of the character."

Day-Lewis often seems to fuse with his directors, working repeatedly with Martin Scorsese and Sheridan. In his Oscar acceptance speech, he said that his Daniel Plainview "sprang like a golden sapling out of the mad beautiful head of Paul Thomas Anderson."

Sheridan says Day-Lewis doesn't like to rehearse and doesn't need direction, just a kind of watchful nurturing. "There's the being observed by whoever directs. Although I think Daniel comes as prepared as any actor, the observation is still of paramount importance."

And then there's just Day-Lewis' own idiosyncratic brand of magic -- the ineluctable energy that defies parsing. In retrospect, it's easy to see how he merged so completely with Daniel Plainview, the ferocious human inferno who nonetheless encapsulates human frailty.

Whenever he was asked to describe his character's driving impulse, Day-Lewis often used the metaphor of a man gripped by a fever. In Plainview's case, it was for oil; in Day-Lewis' case, the sometimes-brutal quest is for transcendence.

"The work becomes an end in itself," Day-Lewis explained to one interviewer. "And I think that's also true of the, you know, if you compare that fever to the fever of prospecting, that those guys that thought they knew what they were after, which is the vast mansion on the Pacific Coast, by the time they had accumulated enough wealth to build that pyramid for themselves, the work was actually an end in itself. The fever was the thing that they lived for."

[Pozer]

a-holes over at gawker obviously didn't get it.

Paul Thomas Anderson: Crazy Asshole, Apparently Liked Juno

Paul Thomas Anderson, the auteur behind There Will Be Blood, recently had some angry words for Carpetbagger and delightful character David Carr. Anderson, who "can be a real arrogant brat", evidently flipped out on Carr when he overheard Carr saying that Blood wasn't his absolute, super-ist favorite movie of the year. "You know you don't know a fucking thing about movies!" he shrieked at "the Bagger", and added, cryptically, "[Blood is] the best movie of the year. Except for maybe Juno. And Clayton. And Atonement. Other than that, it was the best movie of the year." Well, I guess that's rather diplomatic of him. Though he's still an asshole: "You really think No Country for Old Men...that movie was better than ours? C'mon, do you really believe that?" Yup. A glorious, gifted asshole. Maybe he could take some lessons from Carr, who used to be quite the hard partier, on calming down and being cool. We think Carr's pretty good at it. [Hollywood Elsewhere] After the jump, video of the Carpetbagger kicking off the awards season.

sounds like a classic case of purple monkey dishwasher.

[72teeth]

wow, "Oscar" gets cheaper and cheaper by the year, doesnt he....

[Astrostic]

the best thing to come out of the TWBB imdb message board: http://transcendentfilms.com/monopolyboard_fin.jpg