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

[picolas]

cigs 'n' v shows the score is up here: http://www.vantageguilds.com/twbb/index.html

i don't know if it's the full score. it's mislabled. i scanned through and if it is, we may never know where that theme from the trailer comes from, dammit. has anyone figured it out?

[RegularKarate]

REMINDER!  Song titles listed on Pic's link contain spoilers.

Also, Spoiler: the soundtrack is awesomely haunting

[tpfkabi]

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/download/46754-jonny-greenwood-there-will-be-blood-ost-stream

speak of the devil, pitchfork had a link to listen to some of the score...

[Pozer]

 

Dear Castro Theatre Patron,

There has been some concern among customers who purchased tickets for the November 5 screening premiere of "There Will Be Blood." Due to an agreement with the film promoter, the screening is a benefit for the John Burton Foundation. Their request was to have tickets available at the door only and not in advance. We "canceled" the online pre-sales and your full purchase price plus any fees were refunded by TicketWeb.

To make sure you are able to get into the screening, the number of tickets you purchased for the "There Will Be Blood" sneak preview will be put ON HOLD at the Castro Theatre's box office. You have not paid for these; a donation of $10 is required for each ticket. They will remain ON HOLD until 7:30pm, at which time they will be sold if necessary. If you recieved paper tickets in the mail, they are no longer valid.  The box office will open at 1:00pm. 4 ticket limit per patron. CASH ONLY please.

Thank you for your understanding and patronage of the Castro Theatre.

[picolas]

made an mp3 rip of the score chunks. labeled for itunes.

http://www.mediafire.com/?eyidmmzxycz

it's super low qual but i don't think it's lower than the source.

missing track: http://www.mediafire.com/?2nw02emlumz

[Pedro]

made an mp3 rip of the score chunks. labeled for itunes.

http://www.mediafire.com/?eyidmmzxycz

it's super low qual but i don't think it's lower than the source.

thanks so much!  let me add to the hyperbole:  the score channels stravinsky and shostakovich.

[Stefen]

I was going anyway, but this makes things much easier.  Standing in line for hours is no fun but I would have done it for CMBB.*

*As I was typing that, there was a solid five second earthquake.

I wouldn't go if I was you. That was definetely a sign. I can't go, but if I was you and was going, I'd NOT go.

All of you. DON'T GO.

[picolas]

shot! i forgot one track. here it is:

http://www.mediafire.com/?2nw02emlumz

on second listen there might be a drop in quality simply from transcoding.

[MacGuffin]

There Will Be Blood
By TODD MCCARTHY; Variety

**SPOILER WARNING**

A Paramount Vantage (in U.S.)/Miramax (international) release and presentation of a JoAnne Sellar/Ghoulardi Film Co. production. Produced by Paul Thomas Anderson, Sellar, Daniel Lupi. Executive producers, Scott Rudin, Eric Schlosser, David Williams. Directed, written by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely based on the novel "Oil!" by Upton Sinclair.

Daniel Plainview - Daniel Day-Lewis
Eli Sunday - Paul Dano
Henry - Kevin J. O'Connor
Fletcher - Ciaran Hinds
H.W. Plainview - Dillon Freasier
Mary Sunday - Sydney McCallister
Abel Sunday - David Willis
H.M. Tilford - David Warshofsky
William Bandy - Colton Woodward
Adult Mary Sunday - Colleen Foy
Adult H.W - Russell Harvard

Boldly and magnificently strange, "There Will Be Blood" marks a significant departure in the work of Paul Thomas Anderson. Heretofore fixated on his native Los Angeles and most celebrated for his contempo ensemblers, writer-helmer this time branches out with an intense, increasingly insidious character study of a turn-of-the-century central California oil man. There's no getting around the fact that this Paramount Vantage/Miramax co-venture reps yet another 2½--hour-plus indie-flavored, male-centric American art film, a species that has recently proven difficult to market to more than rarefied audiences. Distribs will have to roll the dice and use hoped-for kudos for the film and its superb star Daniel Day-Lewis to create the impression of a must-see.
Officially penning an adaptation for the first time, Anderson turns out to have been inspired very loosely indeed by his source, Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil!" Pic betrays little of the tome's overview and virtually none of socialist Sinclair's muckraking instincts. Instead, it is more interested in language, in the twinned aspects of industry and religion on the landscape of American progress and, above all, in creating an obsessive, almost microscopically observed study of an extreme sociopath who determinedly destroys his ties to other human beings.

Notwithstanding its passing resemblance to "Citizen Kane," this theme is an odd one on which to build a big movie, especially in view of the extreme manner in which it ends; one can only guess at Anderson's personal reasons for dwelling on it with such unremitting fervor. But his commitment to going all the way must be respected in the face of conventional commercial considerations. Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview is a profoundly anti-social fellow, malevolently so, and "There Will Be Blood" devotes itself to scratching, peeling and digging away at a man determined to divest himself of his past and everyone associated with it.

Foregrounded by an electronic sound that soars to an almost unbearable pitch, the first 15 minutes unfold with essentially no dialogue, as Daniel, in 1898, digs laboriously for silver and gold, then moves into oil. By 1911, he is a man of some means and has a son, although no wife. Tipped off about the abundance of oil in a rural area, and about Standard Oil's activities thereabouts, Daniel visits the farm of the pious Sunday family on false pretenses, obtains drilling rights at a bargain rate and immediately constructs the derricks on the property that will make his fortune.

Notably distinguishing the film during this initial stretch are its fulsome physicality, its linguistic distinction and the extraordinary originality of the musical score. Filmed around Marfa, Texas (where both "Giant" and "No Country for Old Men" were shot), pic presents a vivid, visceral account of the risky and sometimes dangerous labor it took to summon up black gold. With its functional, makeshift buildings and scattered equipment lending the parched landscapes a scarred beauty, Jack Fisk's production design indelibly brings to life the evocative photographs that exist of such industrial communities, and Robert Elswit's lensing captures it all with strong widescreen compositions and muscular camera moves.

More striking, however, is the nature of the language. Day-Lewis may well have used John Huston as a vocal model for his line deliveries, and it may not be farfetched to suggest that Plainview reps a younger incarnation of Huston's memorably corrupt tycoon Noah Cross in "Chinatown." Beyond such a comparison, however, lies Anderson's remarkable achievement in creating dialogue marked by different cadences than we're accustomed to today, with heightened formality, clarity and precision that lend it a slightly theatrical quality rooted in the 19th century. The unashamedly declarative talk, set against the backdrop of an America quickly transforming from rural to industrial, brings to mind a bracing fusion of Eugene O'Neill and John Dos Passos.

On top of these elements is the sweeping, surging, constantly surprising score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, which could be described as avant-garde symphonic. It develops over long, sustained periods, not always in precise emotional alignment with what's taking place onscreen, but generally deepening and making more mysterious the film's moods and meanings. It's a daring, adventurous, exploratory piece of work, one that on its own signals the picture's seriousness.

From the outset, when Daniel suffers a leg injury, a sense of foreboding exists that, in concert with the title, promises worse to come. Accidents take place on the job, notably one in which Daniel's son H.W. (the marvelous Dillon Freasier), now about 10, loses his hearing. Until now very close to his father, the newly impaired H.W. is soon heartlessly banished by Daniel.

Further disturbing developments involve Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), the son of the landowner Daniel took advantage of. A young, charismatic evangelist, Eli builds a considerable congregation of staunch believers in Daniel's midst, and while Daniel pays lip service to the community, he clearly views Eli's activities with contempt.

Then there's the arrival of Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor), a derelict who claims to be Daniel's half-brother and informs him their father has recently died. A jailbird and vagabond, Henry wants nothing but a menial job. Daniel takes him in, and eventually confides his radically misanthropic views to him as he does to no one else.

"I hate people," Daniel bluntly admits. "I want to earn enough money so I can get away from everyone." It's an ambition money can facilitate, but not before a terrible crime is committed and Daniel launches a one-man war against Standard Oil that involves acquiring more land to build an oil pipeline to the sea.

Drama's final 25 minutes play out in 1927, with an ultimate reckoning among Daniel, now crazy as a loon and living in Kane-like isolation, Eli and the now-grown H.W. Visually and dramatically, the final scene is a jaw-dropper, one that fits with what has come before but may still leave even partisan viewers a bit flummoxed.

The film's zealous interest in a man so alienated from his brethren can be alternately read as a work abnormally fascinated by cold, antisocial behavior, or as a deeply humanistic tract on the wages of misanthropy. Either way, Anderson has embraced his study of a malign man intimately, as has Day-Lewis, who, as always, seems so completely absorbed in his role that it's difficult to imagine him emerging between takes as just an actor playing a part. Daniel is a man who will stop at nothing to achieve the unnatural state of becoming an island onto himself, and Day-Lewis makes him his own.

Entire cast looks to have stepped out of a photo album from a century ago. Bulky but cherubic-faced, Dano ("Little Miss Sunshine") ranges from politely deferential to frothingly enraptured in a powerful performance as the young man of God, while O'Connor quietly rivets as a lifelong unfortunate. Pic could have used a developed sequence or two to establish the relationship between Daniel and his right-hand man, a role in which the imposing Ciaran Hinds gets short shrift. By contrast, numerous other supporting players have at least one scene in which they can shine. Women count for nothing in Daniel's rough and rugged world.

On a craft and technical level, the film is of the highest quality, not least in the sound department, where the mix is exceedingly complex and expressive.

Camera (Deluxe color, Panavision widescreen), Robert Elswit; editor, Dylan Tichenor; music, Jonny Greenwood; production designer, Jack Fisk; art director, David Crank; set designer, Carl Stensel; set decorator, Jim Erickson; costume designer, Mark Bridges; sound (DTS/SDDS/Dolby Digital), John Pritchett; sound designer, Christopher Scarabosio; re-recording mixers, Michael Semanick, Tom Johnson; stunt coordinators, Jeff Habberstad, Myke Schwartz; assistant director, Adam Somner; casting, Cassandra Kulukundis. Reviewed at Paramount studios, Los Angeles, Oct. 25, 2007. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 158 MIN.

[MacGuffin]

**SPOILERS**





"There Will Be Blood" (***1/2)
Source: InContention.com

Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" might be one of the most fascinating films ever crafted. It is operatic and sinister, all at once beautiful and magnetic in its depiction of a deplorable human being through and through. But there is a deeply buried empathetic virtue to the character of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) that suggests some twisted personal connection on the filmmaker's part.

There is plenty to be said and speculated upon regarding Anderson's dicey relationship with his father, and portions of that may have played into the creation of this film, which is based on the novel "Oil!" by Upton Sinclair. Whatever the case, "There Will Be Blood" is a stark narrative that counts among the best films of the year for its sheer artistic brilliance and, indeed, defiance.

Taking his lead from Sinclair's portrait of turn-of-the-century oil men, Anderson's effort has already drawn comparisons to Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane." Such comparisons may be exaggerated, but it isn't out of the question to consider Daniel Plainview in the same wheel house as Charles Foster Kane. I would wager that the character is a weird combination of Kane and Howard Hughes, with dashes of Frankenstein, the Wolf Man or some other movie monster thrown in, because "There Will Be Blood" is just that – a monster movie. It twists the viewer's sense of expectation into knots and then casually releases the tension, only to wrench them back up again. It's an imperfect film that terrorizes the mind nontheless, and I loved every second of it.

The film opens on Plainview in the desert of the Southwest in 1898, the latter days of westward expansion and yet the beginnings of American capitalism in the West. Drilling in the dry, powdered rock of the region, a lone man on a search for the beginnings of a new, lucrative life, Plainview inhabits the entire first reel of the film (15 or 20 minutes) largely by himself with not a line of dialogue in sight. An eerie, locust-like score rises and falls, drones throughout and recalls the scratching of nails on a chalkboard, much like the early portions of "The Exorcist." Indeed, composer Jonny Greenwood's work throughout the film is wonderful in its ambition and ignorance of convention.

A few years trickle by as Plainview adds onto his enterprise until finally, oil. A black-tarred hand reaches to the sky and suddenly you sense the influence of Stanley Kubrick on the film. Like the apes who discovered weaponry in "2001: A Space Odyssey," Plainview has come upon the object that will dictate America's destiny for the next century and more.

Yet more years pass and Plainview has established himself, along with an adopted son he claims as his own, in the business world of oil. New opportunities arise in various communities where Plainview can take full advantage, and finally, Day-Lewis speaks. It's the beginnings of one of the year's most dynamic performances, an absolute terror of a turn from one of the screen's most gifted actors.

Anderson's film moves forward, dabbles insistently in religion (Paul Dano's work as Eli Sunday, an evangelical preacher taking advantage in his own way, illuminates a lot of the film's interior) and soon enough moves quickly, forcibly toward a conclusion, and indeed, a final line that will go down as one of the cinema's greatest. I can't conceivably ruin the ride for you here, as "There Will Be Blood" MUST be experienced personally and without much in the way of preparation.

Daniel Day-Lewis has spit out a tour de force performance like it was on the agenda before breakfast. He makes it look so easy that one must think he has oil in his veins. As mentioned, Anderson has buried empathy so deep within him that it's almost unnoticeable (and surely will be to passing viewers...i.e., the AMPAS). But it's there. Plainview is a man willful in his ignorance of the saviors of religion, love and family. At the first spark of potential fraternal camaraderie, we see it in Day-Lewis' eyes. He wants to feel that warmth, but he detests it all the same. Indeed, he might be the epitome, the embodiment of hate. For some, it will be impossible to look away from the performance. For others, the closest exit won't be close enough.

Paul Dano is somewhat capable in a role that seems to be a bit out of his artistic reach for the most part, but who could keep up with Day-Lewis in a film like this? Still, Sunday is a maniac in his own right, a terribly interesting foil to Plainview that leads to a battle of souls if nothing else.

And in that final sequence, even though Dano comes off a touch awkward, even though Day-Lewis flies so far off the handle it's as if he is chewing through the concrete of the set, it all feels appropriate. The tone, the ultimate chill left in the viewer's stomach, the entire scenario seems skillfully plotted by Anderson, deliberately constructed and exactly as it was going to be.

So it goes that Paul Thomas Anderson remains one of the cinema's greatest living treasures. Shrewd in his decision to move to unoriginal material, perhaps wary of the pitfalls of the writer/director mold, perhaps not, he has taken yet another leap within a cinematic resume that keeps getting better and better, more and more impressive. "There Will Be Blood" is a horrific work of mastery that I don't imagine any other filmmaker would have ever been capable of accomplishing. Take Stanley Kubrick, breed him with Terrence Malick and wallow the result in the world of Robert Altman's "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" and you might come close. You might.

http://www.incontention.com/2007/11/there_will_be_blood.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ThompsonOnHollywood
Source: Variety

My take on the movie: it is brilliantly written, acted, directed, mounted and scored. Like the novel, it reveals a key aspect of the American character. The oil catter played by Daniel Day-Lewis--who gives a towering performance sure to earn him award consideration--is driven, powerful, tenacious, and greedy. He is the sort of man who made this country, and still does. But he is also deeply sociopathic.

In some ways the movie is a companion piece to Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Americans are a remarkably violent people. Our country breeds and foments violence. But the movie's dark, grim, assaultive nature, and the finale that does not offer any light in the darkness, will drive many viewers away, especially women. It's an art-house movie for smart people with strong stomachs. Cinephiles will revel in this. As a writer-director, PTA will earn the respect of critics and peers. But a wide-audience spectacle this is not.

PTA lacks that warm touch that can open a movie up to a broader swath of viewers--compare this to the Coens' No Country for Old Men. That movie in its way also reveals the darkness in mens' souls. But there are many people--like Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff--fighting the good fight. Even if they lose, they are still fighting.

Finally, There Will Be Blood's greatest achievement is Day-Lewis's performance. He brings humanity to a character who might otherwise not have any, as interpreted by another actor.

http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononhollywood/2007/11/there-will-be-b.html#more

[JG]

thats a new trailer that apple is streaming right? 

the last 5 or so images before his monologue at the end there look incredible. 

[Pozer]

'tis another hype machine indeed.  monday will be extraordinary.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/therewillbeblood/domestictrailer1/

[modage]

HD dude, HD!

http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/therewillbeblood/hd/

i think i am actually going to stop visiting this thread on sunday.  and not for almost two months.  i'm sure there will be like 50 pages of comments to catchup on.  that will be insane.

[w/o horse]

The only reason I know this thread exists is because it's constantly in the recently posted section.  I'd ask if there's anyone else avoiding the hype but you're reading this so you're not.  For those reading I don't know how you do it, like pump yourselves up for so long and make 16 hour trips for the preview and talk about every minor detail.  It'd kill it for me.  I haven't watched a trailer, read an interview, etc, and when I see this movie I'll see it alone and without my friends who are like you guys.  Not because that's the better thing to do, but because there's so much excitement surrounding this movie that it floats into my experience anyway, so without even attempting anything I have these expectations forming and I'm just the kind of guy that likes to keep the personal movies personal.  Opening night in a crowded theater isn't how this one seems it should be seen.  It's also the reason I've never seen Taxi Driver in a theater.  Taxi Driver in a theater?  IThere'd have to be puddles on the ground, and the guy in front of me would be masturbating in one hand, holding popcorn in the other, there'd be a group of kids in the back who snuck in and won't shut up, and the sound would be a little off.  My setting would have to be like the movie's setting I guess.  I couldn't see the thing in a cineplex, with a bunch of film geeks worshipping in quiet reverie.  I can't treat There Will Be Blood like Transformers.

[I Love a Magician]

you can't treat it like a movie and that's fuckin stupid