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

Started by depooter, March 27, 2005, 02:24:56 PM

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Stefen

Falling in love is the greatest joy in life. Followed closely by sneaking into a gated community late at night and firing a gun into the air.

jtm

i've seen it approximately 16 times. and a few select scenes MANY times more than that... i've cut back in anticipation of the DVD.

john

Yeah, I've watched it theatrically about four times now. Each viewing has been equally emotional - it still hits every note as perfectly, even emphasizing moments I might have glossed over upon initial viewing.

But the excitement to see it waned... not in a bad way, I just worried that it would be as special if it was at my disposal. It's currently playing less than a mile away from me and I've avoided it for that very reason (not to mention that the theater it's playing in is terrible.)

So I'm now holding off until the presumed Blu-Ray... or DVD... either way. Build up that excitement again, let it grow in my mind - avoid clips and parodies... then let it be at my disposal all over again.

Maybe every day is Saturday morning.

Myxo

Quote from: private witt on February 25, 2008, 12:00:32 AM
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?

Make a picture that an audience could relate to better, or find entertaining. As much as I loved TWBB, there is a quality about the film that makes it a bit of a chore. Nobody who loves films can deny it's greatness, but something like NCFOM is indelibly fun to watch for all 122 minutes. As an Oscar voter, when you put two films side by side and you're forced to vote for one, putting bias aside, how would you do it? I think alot of voters probably remember their experience actually enjoying the film as a whole.

At the very least however, I thought PTA deserved a "Best Director" nod.

modage


Daniel Day Lewis + Paul Thomas Anderson
December 11, 2007
Daniel Day-Lewis's magnificent performance as the ambitious and ruthless oil tycoon Daniel Plainview is at the core of Paul Thomas Anderson's critically acclaimed movie There Will be Blood. In this discussion, which followed a Museum of the Moving Image preview screening of the film, the actor and director playfully and thoughtfully discussed their intense collaborative process.

mp3 interview:
http://movingimage.us/pinewood/mp3.php?media_id=335

or read the transcript!:
http://www.movingimage.us/pinewood/files/pinewood/2/96175_programs_transcript_html_296.htm
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

Redlum

Quote from: Myxo on March 02, 2008, 08:35:43 AM
Quote from: private witt on February 25, 2008, 12:00:32 AM
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?

Make a picture that an audience could relate to better, or find entertaining. As much as I loved TWBB, there is a quality about the film that makes it a bit of a chore. Nobody who loves films can deny it's greatness, but something like NCFOM is indelibly fun to watch for all 122 minutes. As an Oscar voter, when you put two films side by side and you're forced to vote for one, putting bias aside, how would you do it? I think alot of voters probably remember their experience actually enjoying the film as a whole.

Schindler's List?

Mod, thanks for the above.

thedigitalbits.com's "Bitsy Awards" honour There Will Be Blood with their poster image this year
\"I wanted to make a film for kids, something that would present them with a kind of elementary morality. Because nowadays nobody bothers to tell those kids, \'Hey, this is right and this is wrong\'.\"
  -  George Lucas

soixante

Saw TWBB twice in theaters.  First showing, Arclight, 12-26, then a few weeks ago.  This is a future classic, and unquestionably puts PTA atop the A-List.
Music is your best entertainment value.

Alexandro

from guardian

There Will Be Blood relations
In the first of a fortnightly new series, Philip Horne examines the cinematic ancestors of a newly-released DVD. This week: There Will Be Blood
Philip Horne guardian.co.uk, Monday July 28 2008 Article history


I wasn't the only one to notice that Daniel Day-Lewis's magnificently unsettling, hollow, powerfully unctuous evil-patriarch voice as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood sounded like John Huston's as the evil patriarch Noah Cross at the end of Polanski's great Chinatown – play-acting at kindly avuncularity in order to conceal a real deep loathing and distrust of others.

The link isn't, I think, a mere film-nerd footnote. The vocal echo makes sense: the Old Testament names Daniel and Noah suggest how, recent as the past being dealt with is – 1898-1927 in Blood, the 1930s in Chinatown – that can count as ancient history, as a kind of tribal, ancestral legend, in so newly modernised a territory as California. These are the founding fathers, and although the Western frontier was declared closed in the 1890s, their magnificent, sinister achievement is, by stamping their will on California's land and people, to dominate what Cross calls "The future, Mr. Gittes, the future!"

Only when I breathe ... John Huston and Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. Photo: Kobal These are elemental stories. Paul Thomas Anderson's brave, intensely disturbing, all too timely Californian epic of the early days of the oil business is based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, and correspondingly one of its dominant images is of fire; while Chinatown, from Robert Towne's original script, is all about Water – as a source of life, a commodity, a means to power – and as an image that runs right through the film. (In the sequel to Chinatown, The Two Jakes, incidentally, oil turns out to be the driving force in the plot.) In both films the patriarch embodies a capitalist will to power and ruthless expansion, seen as a kind of primal madness.

Digressing a moment to add another element – the air – we could add the New Yorker Scorsese's own contribution to the sub-genre of Californian capitalist epic, his exhilarating Howard Hughes movie The Aviator. If Noah Cross is pretty clearly a villain, and Daniel Plainview at best an anti-hero, Scorsese's Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, after all, might appear to be more like a conventional hero – he starts as an underdog, and heroically overcomes huge obstacles en route to world domination. We certainly root for him in his majestic performance in the Senate hearings, and against his splendidly hateful competitor Alec Baldwin. But Scorsese, who thinks of American directors as smugglers of non-obvious subversive arguments and analyses, builds up a picture of Hughes's private insanity and drivenness which suggests that the corporate-technological modernity we're still increasingly experiencing has been shaped by something dark and out of control. Like Cross, Hughes ends by signalling his interest in us, in posterity: his way, he declares, resoundingly, is "the way of the future".

Singing in the bathtub ... Leonardo DiCaprio in The Aviator. Photo: Kobal Both Daniel and Noah in their different ways disfigure their own families. These movies are foundation myths, and there's something allegorical about the tragic distortion of family relations in both. In his overweening desire to dominate and possess Noah Cross sleeps with and impregnates his own daughter Evelyn (Faye Dunaway), so that the resulting child is both his daughter and granddaughter. It ends, unforgettably, in bloody destruction – but not (capitalists are survivors) of Cross himself. The apparently sexless Daniel Plainview has no real family, only surrogates: the adoptive orphan H.W. (Dillon Freasier), whom he pretends is his son (he needs "a sweet face to buy land", as he brutally says); the haunting, gentle stranger (Kevin J. O'Connor) who pretends to him that he is his long-lost half-brother Henry; and then Eli (Paul Dano), the charismatic young preacher whose weirdly ambivalent quasi-Oedipal relation with the violently atheistic Daniel seems a metaphor for the queasy relation between capitalist greed and religion in America. Of these three intimate ties, none survives at the end: Daniel has laid waste to all around him.

Daniel Day Lewis and Cillian Hinds in There Will Be Blood. Photo: Kobal There Will Be Blood and Chinatown both look back to the time when California was uncultivated, or unspoilt – a blank slate, often a mere desert. They present and dramatise, and problematise, the process by which money and power transform the original landscapes of what used to seem a paradise into corporate domains – owned, overbuilt, profit-yielding properties that have been wrenched by fraud, strength and cunning from original small-holders (the dodgy acquisition of land is a focus in both). To construct their stories of how California so quickly came to be what it is today, they individualise and pathologise the drive to power. In Anderson's disconcerting anti-epic, mining becomes an image of the human urge to dominate the earth – the blasting and drilling of the land to gouge out silver and oil, a dirty process that also involves as his title implies the shedding of a good deal of blood.

Erich von Stroheim's Greed. Photo: Kobal In this respect, it looks back to the father of all Californian capitalist sagas, made three years before the action of Blood Will Have Blood finishes. Greed, Erich Von Stroheim's ill-fated silent masterpiece of 1924, was cut down by MGM from nine hours to just over two. Greed, based on the naturalist novel McTeague (1899) by Sinclair's contemporary Frank Norris, takes gold as its element – symbolically linking mining (McTeague's first job), dentistry (his second) and the all-distorting fact of money – and like Anderson's film follows through to its logical conclusion the murderous competitive drives of its central character (they're also alike in their minute attention to the realistic details of their protagonists' trades). Greed's tale of atavistic appetites and competitive rivalries culminates in an absurd, murderous fight – an image of human fatuity, bringing mutually assured destruction – in the middle of the baking, dry-as-a-bone Death Valley. That scene – two tiny figures, slugging it out to extinction in the middle of a white, horrifyingly alien blankness – might be the emblem of these bleak, visionary, thought-provoking films.





MacGuffin

Fipresci hands prize to 'Blood'
Anderson to receive award in San Sebastian
Source: Variety

MADRID — Paul Thomas Anderson's searing portrait of overweening ambition, "There Will Be Blood," has won the Fipresci (the Intl. Federation of Film Critics) Grand Prix for film of the year.

Anderson will pick up the prize in person at the opening ceremony of San Sebastian Festival on Sept. 18.

The latest kudos comes after "Blood" took director at Berlin and Academy Awards for Daniel Day Lewis for lead actor and Robert Elswit for cinematography.

The plaudit from the world's foremost film critics' org consolidates Anderson's position as one of the most critically admired directors out.

Fipresci noted Monday that Anderson had been a clear winner among the 242 critics who voted this year for the Grand Prix.

Anderson already won a Fipresci Grand Prix in 2000 for "Magnolia."

Other recent winners, pointing to top niches in a modern critics' pantheon, are Nuri Ceylan Bilge's "Uzak," Jean-Luc Godard's "Notre musique," Kim Ki-duk's "3-Iron," Pedro Almodovar's "Volver" and, last year, Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks


Convael


matt35mm


New Feeling

Quote from: matt35mm on September 01, 2008, 07:25:34 PM
It probably just looks like it did on the Magnolia DVD.

except that was PTA winning the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2000 for Magnolia instead of PTA winning the Fripisci prize for TWBB in 2008.  But other than the fact that it's a completely different time, place, and event, never to repeat itself in all of history, and experienced and witnessed by an almost completely different group of people, it will probably be exactly the same. 

matt35mm

They all look the same to me.  Guy up there with a golden thing, saying thanks.  From what we know of PTA, it's not unlikely that he was wearing the same suit.

Of course it's not the same event.  You didn't have to explain the nature of time to me.  I just said that it probably looks the same.  If you just change the last words of your post to say, "will probably look exactly the same," then that would be what I would have liked to say.

But I did confuse the Golden Bear with the Fripisci.  You got me there.