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

[Ravi]

Another reminder, the theaters for the December 29 midnight screenings are listed at http://www.therewillbeblood.com .

[Pubrick]

listen up idiots.

if you post a review with a huge fucking spoiler then mark it as having HUGE FUCKING SPOILERS.,

you really gotta be a fucking idiot to post shit here without spoiler warnings. i don't care if you cut yourself over this, TheRedVine. merry xmas.

[MacGuffin]

An intense actor and director make for a fiery combination in 'Blood.'
By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

**READ AT OWN RISK**

"THERE Will Be Blood," the joint venture between actor Daniel Day-Lewis and director Paul Thomas Anderson, might be the most incendiary combination since the Molotov cocktail. Though it can be over the top and excessive, this morality play set in the early days of California's oil boom also creates considerable heat and light and does some serious aesthetic damage.

Aside from exceptional talent and triple-decker names, Day-Lewis and Anderson share a ferocity of approach to their work, investing so much intensity in the projects they choose that they don't choose very many: "Blood" is the actor's fourth film in the last decade and the director's second in the last eight years.
 
Anderson, a modern cinematic visionary, is always happiest when he is out on the aesthetic edge, determined to involve audiences in disturbing, difficult narratives, from the suburban pornographers of "Boogie Nights" to "Magnolia's" raining frogs.

As for Day-Lewis, he has become justifiably celebrated for disappearing into his characters with a completeness that is both terrifying and an ideal match for Anderson's filmmaking approach. "People don't know how Daniel can do this job the way that he does it," the director has tellingly said, "and my feeling is, I just can't understand how anyone could do it any other way."

The story that has intrigued these two men started with a venerable source, Upton Sinclair's muckraking 1927 novel "Oil!" The book, however, has a really minimal, almost "suggested by" relationship to what's on the screen, which turns out to be a distinctly timely and modern tale, albeit one with problematic aspects, that involves the unholy trinity of oil, money and religion.

For Anderson, who has reveled in multi-strand stories, this has been a chance to venture into, in his own words, "100% straightforward old-fashioned storytelling." With this filmmaker, however, nothing is ever really old-fashioned or straightforward, and there is enough savagery, extremism and grotesque violence in the way "Blood" unfolds to unsettle most folk.

Making "Blood's" story even more disturbing is the troubling score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, powerful, brooding new music that is critical to the film's impact, creating pervasive uneasiness and letting us know that, appearances to the contrary, we're not watching a conventional story.

It helps, of course, to have someone of Day-Lewis' trademark fierceness and implacability as protagonist Daniel Plainview, whom we follow from his turn-of-the-20th-century beginnings as a silver miner to a finale nearly 30 years later.

Day-Lewis works at such a high-wire level that many of the film's supporting cast members simply fade away. Only the self-possessed newcomer Dillon Freasier as his young son H.W. and the gifted Paul Dano of "Little Miss Sunshine" as his nemesis have the ability to hold the screen against him.

Marvelously photographed by Anderson veteran Robert Elswit largely around Marfa, Texas (where "Giant" was shot), "There Will Be Blood" is western to its core, presenting a vast, uncaring environment that dwarfs the grasping men who are determined to wrest hidden wealth from the earth. Anderson has said that "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," John Huston's treatise on madness and greed, was a touchstone movie for him in shooting, and it's easy to see why.

After preliminary, almost wordless sequences convincingly establishing the world of turn-of-the-last-century oil prospecting, "Blood" begins in earnest with Day-Lewis' Plainview persuasively addressing a group of citizens whose oil he wants to drill for.

He's an oilman, he says in an almost melodic voice, not a speculator, and, grandly introducing the 10-year-old H.D. as "my son and my partner," he also claims to offer "the bond of family." Convincing and compelling as all this is, there are hints of other traits in Plainview, intimations of a frighteningly indomitable man you trifle with at your own peril.

With the original Upton Sinclair "Oil!" said to be based on the Signal Hill oil strike outside of Long Beach, the largest part of "There Will Be Blood" takes place around a similar huge strike near the fictional California town of Little Boston. Plainview goes there on a tip, and the film shows what transpires as he attempts to consolidate control over the vast oil fields he discovers. It is not a pretty picture.

For as he works to gain power, Plainview turns into God's wrath, or the devil's. He engages in ferocious battles with all comers, even his son, but his most bitter fight is with young Eli Sunday (the smoothly effective Dano), a charismatic preacher and faith healer and founder of Little Boston's Church of the Third Revelation. On a personal level, Sunday is no more godly than Plainview, and their psychological and even physical combat is savagery itself.

Though he starts out almost likable, as Plainview stores up hatreds and animosities over the years, his coldness and arrogance become more visible and his indifference to and contempt for humanity grows exponentially. This, "There Will Be Blood" is in part saying, is what we do to ourselves when, as either business or religious leaders, we deny the humanity in us and overvalue wealth and power.

This study of rapacious, uncaring capitalism points up the uncertain philosophical legacy of the original novel, for where "Blood" shows its limitations is in the realm of subtleties of character development.

It's important to remember that Sinclair was as much a committed socialist as a novelist, someone who probably wrote for political purpose more than for dramatic effect. So while Day-Lewis' gorgeous acting largely disguises it, the people in "Blood" tend to be schematic and the film as a whole has a weakness for the didactic. In its willingness to push everything, even personality, to extremes, this is a film with the defects of its virtues, so it's fortunate that those virtues are very great indeed.

[MacGuffin]

Movie Review
There Will Be Blood (2007)
By MANOHLA DARGIS; New York Times

**SPOILERS**

"There Will Be Blood," Paul Thomas Anderson's epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of greed and envy of biblical proportions — reverberating with Old Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism — which Mr. Anderson has mined from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil!" There is no God but money in this oil-rich desert and his messenger is Daniel Plainview, a petroleum speculator played by a monstrous and shattering Daniel Day-Lewis.

Plainview is an American primitive. He's more articulate and civilized than the crude, brutal title character in Frank Norris's 1899 novel "McTeague," and Erich von Stroheim's masterly version of the same, "Greed." But the two characters are brothers under the hide, coarse and animalistic, sentimental in matters of love and ruthless in matters of avarice. Mr. Anderson opens his story in 1898, closer to Norris's novel than Sinclair's, which begins in the years leading up to World War I. And the film's opener is a stunner — spooky and strange, blanketed in shadows and nearly wordless. Inside a deep, dark hole, a man pickaxes the hard-packed soil like a bug gnawing through dirt. This is the earth mover, the ground shaker: Plainview.

Over the next two and a half mesmerizing hours Plainview will strike oil, then strike it rich and transform a bootstrapper's dream into a terrifying prophecy about the coming American century. It's a century he plunges into slicked in oil, dabbed with blood and accompanied by H. W. (eventually played by the newcomer Dillon Freasier), the child who enters his life in 1902 after he makes his first strike and seems to have burbled from the ground like the liquid itself. The brief scenes of Plainview's first tender, awkward moments with H. W. will haunt the story. In one of the most quietly lovely images in a film of boisterous beauty, he gazes at the tiny, pale toddler, chucking him under the chin as they sit on a train very much alone.

"There Will Be Blood" involves a tangle of relationships, mainly intersecting sets of fathers and sons and pairs of brothers. (Like most of the finest American directors working now, Mr. Anderson makes little on-screen time for women.) But it is Plainview's intense, needful bond with H. W. that raises the stakes and gives enormous emotional force to this expansively imagined period story with its pictorial and historical sweep, its raging fires, geysers of oil and inevitable blood. (Rarely has a film's title seemed so ominous.) By the time H. W. is about 10, he has become a kind of partner to his father, at once a child and a sober little man with a jacket and neatly combed hair who dutifully stands by Plainview's side as quiet as his conscience.

A large swath of the story takes place in 1911, by which point Plainview has become a successful oilman with his own fast-growing company. Flanked by the watchful H. W., he storms through California, sniffing out prospects and trying to persuade frenzied men and women to lease their land for drilling. (H. W. gives Plainview his human mask: "I'm a family man," he proclaims to perspective leasers.) One day a gangling, unsmiling young man, Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), arrives with news that oil is seeping out of the ground at his family's ranch. The stranger sells this information to Plainview, who promptly sets off with H. W. to a stretch of California desert where oil puddles the ground among the cactus, scrub and human misery.

Not long afterward oil is gushing out of that desert. The eruption rattles both the earth and the local population, whom Plainview soothes with promises. Poor, isolated, thirsting for water (they don't have enough even to grow wheat), the dazed inhabitants gaze at the oilman like hungry baby birds. (Their barren town is oddly named Little Boston.) He promises schools, roads and water, delivering his sermon with a carefully enunciated, sepulchral voice that Mr. Day-Lewis seems to have largely borrowed from the director John Huston. Plainview is preaching a new gospel, though one soon challenged by another salesman, Paul Sunday's Holy Roller brother, Eli (also Mr. Dano). A charismatic preacher looking to build a new church, Eli slithers into the story, one more snake in the desert.

Mr. Anderson has always worn his influences openly, cribbing from Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman among others (he helped the ailing Altman with his final film, "A Prairie Home Companion"), but rarely has his movie love been as organically integrated into his work as it is here. Movie history weighs on every filmmaker, informs every cut, camera angle and movement. "There Will Be Blood" is very much a personal endeavor for Mr. Anderson; it feels like an act of possession. Yet it is also directly engaged with our cinematically constructed history, specifically with films — "Greed" and "Chinatown," but also "Citizen Kane" — that have dismantled the mythologies of American success and, in doing so, replaced one utopian ideal for another, namely that of the movies themselves.

This is Mr. Anderson's fifth feature and it proves a breakthrough for him as a filmmaker. Although there are more differences than similarities between it and the Sinclair book, the novel has provided him with something he has lacked in the past, a great theme. It may also help explain the new film's narrative coherence. His first feature, "Sydney" (also known as "Hard Eight"), showed Mr. Anderson to be an intuitively gifted filmmaker, someone who was born to make images with a camera. His subsequent features — "Boogie Nights," "Magnolia" and "Punch-Drunk Love" — have ambition and flair, though to increasingly diminished ends. Elliptical, self-conscious, at times multithreaded, they contain passages of clarity and brilliance. But in their escalating stylization you feel the burdens of virtuosity, originality, independence.

"There Will Be Blood" exhibits much the same qualities as Mr. Anderson's previous work — every shot seems exactly right — but its narrative form is more classical and less weighted down by the pressures of self-aware auteurism. It flows smoothly, linearly, building momentum and unbearable tension. Mr. Day-Lewis's outsize performance, with its footnote references to Huston and strange, contorted Kabuki-like grimaces, occasionally breaks the skin of the film's surface like a dangerous undertow. The actor seems to have invaded Plainview's every atom, filling an otherwise empty vessel with so much rage and purpose you wait for him to blow. It's a thrilling performance, among the greatest I've seen, purposefully alienating and brilliantly located at the juncture between cinematic realism and theatrical spectacle.

This tension between realism and spectacle runs like a fissure through the film and invests it with tremendous unease. You are constantly being pulled away from and toward the charismatic Plainview, whose pursuit of oil reads like a chapter from this nation's grand narrative of discovery and conquest. His 1911 strike puts the contradictions of this story into graphic, visual terms. Mr. Anderson initially thrusts you close to the awesome power of the geyser, which soon bursts into flames, then pulls back for a longer view, his sensuously fluid camera keeping pace with Plainview and his men as they race about trying to contain what they've unleashed. But the monster has been uncorked. The black billowing smoke pours into the sky, and there it will stay.

With a story of and for our times, "There Will Be Blood" can certainly be viewed through the smeary window that looks onto the larger world. It's timeless and topical, general and specific, abstract and as plain as the name of its fiery oilman. It's an origin story of sorts. The opening images of desert hills and a droning electronic chord allude to the beginning of "2001: A Space Odyssey," whose murderous apes are part of a Darwinian continuum with Daniel Plainview. But the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.

[martinthewarrior]

Of all the nights for my credit card to be fucked up! Chicago! Oh jesus, oh God! I hope there are still tickets tomorrow. Fuck. Damn. Yowza.


Sob.

[JG]

Darghis's review is the ultimate hype machine.  Here are some non-spoiler highlights for those of you who are scared to read these reviews (i don't blame you):

Mr. Anderson has always worn his influences openly, cribbing from Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman among others (he helped the ailing Altman with his final film, "A Prairie Home Companion"), but rarely has his movie love been as organically integrated into his work as it is here. Movie history weighs on every filmmaker, informs every cut, camera angle and movement. "There Will Be Blood" is very much a personal endeavor for Mr. Anderson; it feels like an act of possession. Yet it is also directly engaged with our cinematically constructed history, specifically with films — "Greed" and "Chinatown," but also "Citizen Kane" — that have dismantled the mythologies of American success and, in doing so, replaced one utopian ideal for another, namely that of the movies themselves.

This is Mr. Anderson's fifth feature and it proves a breakthrough for him as a filmmaker. Although there are more differences than similarities between it and the Sinclair book, the novel has provided him with something he has lacked in the past, a great theme. It may also help explain the new film's narrative coherence. His first feature, "Sydney" (also known as "Hard Eight"), showed Mr. Anderson to be an intuitively gifted filmmaker, someone who was born to make images with a camera. His subsequent features — "Boogie Nights," "Magnolia" and "Punch-Drunk Love" — have ambition and flair, though to increasingly diminished ends. Elliptical, self-conscious, at times multithreaded, they contain passages of clarity and brilliance. But in their escalating stylization you feel the burdens of virtuosity, originality, independence.

"There Will Be Blood" exhibits much the same qualities as Mr. Anderson's previous work — every shot seems exactly right — but its narrative form is more classical and less weighted down by the pressures of self-aware auteurism. It flows smoothly, linearly, building momentum and unbearable tension. Mr. Day-Lewis's outsize performance, with its footnote references to Huston and strange, contorted Kabuki-like grimaces, occasionally breaks the skin of the film's surface like a dangerous undertow. The actor seems to have invaded Plainview's every atom, filling an otherwise empty vessel with so much rage and purpose you wait for him to blow. It's a thrilling performance, among the greatest I've seen, purposefully alienating and brilliantly located at the juncture between cinematic realism and theatrical spectacle.

With a story of and for our times, "There Will Be Blood" can certainly be viewed through the smeary window that looks onto the larger world. It's timeless and topical, general and specific, abstract and as plain as the name of its fiery oilman. It's an origin story of sorts. But the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.

[Stefen]

Has anybody downloaded the DVD screener that was released today? I'm hesitant.

[md]

Its funny that the 1 star reviewer had a writing partner.  "Add this, hun.  I'll write the first paragraph, you write the second one and so on; we'll see how bad we can paint this picture..." 15 minutes later "hey hunny, I'm starving, lets go to kfc...fuck the review...the movie sucked anyways.  Just make sure to bring the pan flute music for the car ride. Yanni makes me hungry"

Darghis lost me after the fine directors of today show little on screen time for women. 

And Stef, hit the showers man, make sure its extra cold.

[Sleepless]

Got my tickets for Saturday  How happy am I?

[tpfkabi]

word on the street aka imdb is that it will expand to 800 theatres mid January...
no source cited.

[md]

i'd sure hope so.

[MacGuffin]

**READ AT OWN RISK**

Paul Thomas Anderson has made the tracking shot a trademark of his, particularly in "Boogie Nights" (1997) and "Magnolia" (1999). His new, acclaimed "There Will Be Blood" is shot in a different style, but does contain one shot where the camera tracks Daniel Day-Lewis's character carrying his injured child.

"It's only impressive because Daniel could actually carry that boy for that long," joked Anderson in an interview.

The director, a great fan and friend to the late Altman, said a guiding ethos of is to have fewer cuts: "The more things can be condensed or simple is ideal," he said.

Discussing the appeal of the tracking shot, Anderson said: "You're after one thing, which is nice, as opposed to 10 or 15 small things when you have to chop it up. You get that terrific feeling at the end of it, like `We did it. We got it.' Or you don't."

Digital editing, Anderson said, has given him a new perspective on the length of his takes.

"You really see the length of your shots. It's kind of hilarious. You sort of look at the graph and it chops along, chops along, then flatlines for a long time. You see a movie as a graph."

Entire article on long tracking shots here:

http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=9729.msg256244#msg256244

[bonanzataz]

WATCH AT OWN RISK

http://www.ifilm.com/video/2926199

10 minutes worth of clips from the movie. probably to be used for talk shows and shit.

[©brad]

DON'T WATCH AT OWN RISK BECAUSE IT'S DECEMBER 26TH AND YOU'RE SO CLOSE TO SEEING IT AND EVEN THOUGH YOU'VE BEEN INCESSANTLY SPOILED TO THE POINT WHERE YOU FEEL AS IF YOU'VE ALREADY SEEN THE FUCKING THING YOU CAN STILL SALVAGE WHAT WILL BE A MOMENTOUS EXPERIENCE IN YOUR MOVIE-OBSESSED LIFE BY NOT WATCHING IT OR ANY OTHER CLIPS OR REVIEWS YOU STUMBLE UPON AND IF YOU'RE REALLY SMART YOU'LL GO AHEAD AND AVOID THE PAULTHOMASANDERSON FORUM ALL TOGETHER BECAUSE AT THIS POINT, NOTHING IS SAFE

[cine]

WATCH AT OWN RISK

http://www.ifilm.com/video/2926199

10 minutes worth of clips from the movie. probably to be used for talk shows and shit.

i'd say the first half of the clips are pretty harmless.. clips 4 and 6.. best to avoid those ones.


.. but nonetheless, cbrad's right.