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

[Stefen]

This is one of the reasons I hate the internet. Especially now there there is a screener posted everywhere. Back before the internet, these things were probably easier to avoid. Was the term spoiler pre or post interweb?

[idk]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17620996

thats a story/interview with DDL, plus it has links to audio clips from the interview, i haven't read it so beware of possible spoilers.

[B.C. Long]

"There Will Be Blood" also features the worst score of the year by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood.

INVALIDATED

[matt35mm]

So this was officially released today.  I happen to be in Orange County for the holidays, and shall trek up to L.A. tomorrow or Friday to see this at the Arclight.

[B.C. Long]

typo?

[modage]

i'm still in virginia with the family so it kills me a little bit not to be there on ppening day for a new PT film, regardless of having already seen it.  i did purchase tickets to see it tomorrow night at 10:30 after i get back into town even though it means dragging one of my old friends who is coming up to visit and his girlfriend.  it will be interesting to see what they make of it, but mostly i'm selfishly dragging them so i can see it again ASAP AND at my favorite screen in the city.

[meatwad]

Lincoln Plaza is your favorite screen in the city?

or is it playing somewhere else that i'm not aware of?

[modage]

theatre 1 at lincoln plaza is my favorite screen in the city. (saw PDL open there too.)

[MacGuffin]

There Will Be Blood Review
Paul Thomas Anderson makes a film as distinctive and important as those by the directors who inspired him.
by Todd Gilchrist; IGN Movies

**READ AT OWN RISK**
 
December 26, 2007 - Immediately after watching There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's new film about a prospector searching for oil in turn-of-the-century Texas, my first thought was, "Wow. I didn't know Stanley Kubrick made movies any more." Notwithstanding the obvious fact that Kubrick is no longer with us, my casual joke proved ironic when I spoke to a few of my colleagues who confessed admiration for Anderson's work but worried that he would spend much of his career imitating other directors rather than simply distinguishing himself as a filmmaker.

In all honesty, I don't consider in any serious way for the style of Anderson's latest to be directly pilfered from Kubrick, nor do I see his other movies as derivative of the filmmakers -- Scorsese, Altman -- from whom he has admitted seeking inspiration. But There Will Be Blood is part of a larger cinematic tradition than most movies in that it reveals a genuine genius at work, an artist in his wheelhouse without regard for the commercial repercussions of following that impulse. A film of staggering ambition, epic scope and yet remarkable, subtle insight, There Will Be Blood is as defining a work as the most famous of any of those filmmakers mentioned above and one of the very best movies of 2007.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a prospector who after some difficulty manages to secure a thriving business drilling for oil. After losing one of his partners in a drilling accident, Plainview unofficially adopts the man's son H.W. (Dillon Freasier) and raises him as his own; in the meantime, he expands his empire by buying land around small towns and sucking them dry. But Plainview finds himself struggling to maintain control of a new find when he encounters Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), an ambitious minister who hopes to expand his congregation. Soon, the two men are locked into a battle of wills over control of the oil, falling into an increasingly dangerous game of one-upmanship that threatens to end in violence and self-destruction.

First (and foremost to get them out of the way), those elements that evoke the spirit, if not some of the visual style of Kubrick: Anderson's agile but frequently still camera; Jonny Greenwood's incendiary, sometimes Ligeti-like score; and the film's overall objective point of view and/or refusal to judge Plainview's behavior, no matter how bizarre or reprehensible it becomes. To say that Day-Lewis gives the performance of the year is virtually an understatement given its intensity and singularity; no actor comes close to the depths he lends to virtually any role, but here he reveals Plainview's scarred soul in the smallest of actions and with devastating impact. But like Malcolm MacDowell in A Clockwork Orange or even Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Day-Lewis isn't aiming as much for realistic as he is the all-important "interesting," and Anderson facilitates an environment in which his eccentricities flourish and appreciate.

But what's even more remarkable about the film is how Anderson tackles what purports to be its central subject: oil. Particularly in today's contentious political atmosphere, a film about the value of oil -- even in the context of a period piece -- seems ripe with opportunity for social commentary. Instead of even remotely exploiting the script's potential relevance -- borrowed loosely from Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! -- Anderson transforms the story into a searing character study, looking inside one man's ambition as it provides him with professional success but jeopardizes his personal happiness. There is a hugeness to the story, an epic quality that will no doubt leave many viewers breathless from the weight of the director's canvas, but ultimately the landscape that interests Anderson is not the barren Texas plains but Plainview's far more jagged psyche.

Further, Anderson's narrative and directorial choices resemble nothing so much as his previous films, eliminating claims that there is someone other than him at the helm defining the look and feel of There Will Be Blood. As with previous movies, Anderson writes dialogue that is direct, blindingly clear and yet deeply meaningful, and best of all in that way that reveals character without the characters themselves realizing it. Plainview of course gets the lion's share of the great lines, exuding cynicism and practicality in his pointed dealings with Eli and others, but overall there is both an acknowledgement of the theatricality of the film and a clear desire to function within the semblance of a real world (not to be confused with ours). When Plainview unceremoniously threatens another prospector and finds his sanity being questioned, for example, we both understand his excessively aggressive sentiment and his poor adversary's logical reaction.

Anderson's camerawork has also always distinguished him from his colleagues, and in this film he merges style and substance into one indelible package. (By comparison, as gorgeous and ambitious as were Anderson's shot-by-shot lens flares in Punch-Drunk Love, they seem to have less direct emotional connection to their respective scenes than to his efforts to explore the boundaries of conventional cinematography.) The first 10 to 15 minutes of the film, for example, are virtually dialogue-free, but it's only upon reflection after the fact that audiences will notice -- all of which is due to a series of dynamic but completely clear shots within and around Plainview's first oil derrick. Later, the film's biggest set piece involves an accident at Eli's claim, and Anderson follows the action -- both physically and emotionally -- from start to finish, revealing character as director of photography Robert Elswit (Michael Clayton, Magnolia) expertly navigates the literal landscape.

Of course, it seems as if I've spent the majority of this review defending Paul Thomas Anderson against a criticism that some viewers may not even notice, much less put forth. And personally, I'm not sure yet how I feel about the film's ending, which is at once a coda and catharsis for Plainview's story, but also a destructive departure from even the faintest hint of sympathy or identification with the character -- which, suffice it to say, is a no-no for most audiences. But there is a larger defense of Anderson's work that, as far as I'm concerned, answers just about any response one might have. Specifically, how many other filmmakers -- if any -- do moviegoers and critics find themselves deconstructing in the way that we do him? The answer is not many, and whether you love or hate him, think he's a singular visionary or standing on the shoulders of giants, that's an important distinction to note. In any case, There Will Be Blood is a brilliant film, a real, important work in a world that looks at art as a four-letter word, and another entry in a filmography that stands among the most important -- and yes, distinctive -- in modern movies.


Rating Info 4.5 out of 5 Stars | 9/10

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'There Will Be Blood': Bible Stories
The movie has problems, but Daniel Day-Lewis' seismic performance is reason enough to see it.
By Kurt Loder; MTV

**SPOILERS**

Paul Thomas Anderson's strange and feverish "There Will Be Blood" is so wonderful in parts — Daniel Day-Lewis' sensational lead performance, Jonny Greenwood's brilliantly counter-intuitive score and the bare-bones-and-boards production design of Jack Fisk — that watching it collapse in calamitous miscalculation at the end is singularly distressing.

The picture is set amid the California oil boom at the turn of the last century. Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, an iron-willed prospector who strikes it rich and then, with his young adopted son (Dillon Freasier) in tow, sets out to build an empire by buying up land from under the spreading tentacles of the similarly rapacious Standard Oil Company. Plainview is a master of the honey-dripping business proposition (Day-Lewis appears to have modeled his vocal inflections on those of John Huston in 1974's "Chinatown," another California origin story). But in attempting to snooker the impoverished Sunday family out of its oil-rich ranch, he earns the enmity of young Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a teen evangelist and budding fraud, who sees in Plainview a heaven-sent opportunity to finance the building of his own spiritual empire.

The movie resonates with our memories of old films like "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," "Elmer Gantry" and, especially, "Citizen Kane." Unlike "Kane," though, it tells us nothing about what turned Daniel Plainview into the heartless sociopath that he is. He cheats and schemes and has only contempt for other people — even, in the end, his son, who has been his sole companion. (Has Plainview ever had a relationship with a woman? One brief scene suggests a brittle misogyny; but there are no significant female characters in the movie, and the subject is never probed.) Anderson's script — which is drawn very approximately from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel, "Oil!" — presents Plainview as a Biblical force of nature, uncomplicated by human dimensions. This becomes problematic, though, when we are asked to contemplate the character's loss of his soul — we've been given no reason to suspect he had one in the first place.

Thus deprived of the possibility of plumbing any human emotional depths, Day-Lewis nevertheless barrels past the story's structural deficiencies with the hair-raising intensity of his performance. He conjures up Plainview's utter despicability — a cold-blooded predator cloaking himself in seductive moral homilies — with electrifying verve. Bestriding the picture's parched scrublands and primitive oil rigs in his high-button suits and patriarchal mustache, he's hypnotically persuasive as a vintage monster of avarice and duplicity. In comparison, Paul Dano, as his wheedling nemesis, Eli, is overmatched — with his unformed features and sometimes recessive delivery, he never quite comes into focus. But Dano plunges boldly into Eli's messianic rants, and his shifty watchfulness is memorable on a smaller scale.

You might expect a picture like this — a tale of late-frontier times — to be scored with banjos and pennywhistles. But Anderson made an audacious decision to have Jonny Greenwood, the classically trained Radiohead guitarist, write and record the film's soundtrack themes. The music is an orchestral wash of beautifully harmonized melodies spiked with thoroughly modern dissonance, and while it's a jarring accompaniment for some of the imagery, it stands on its own as a series of superbly astringent compositions. (The soundtrack is available on CD.)

"There Will Be Blood" may be Anderson's most ambitious movie, but it's not his best. Its most impressive element — the astonishing vitality of Day-Lewis' performance — appears to have led the director astray at crucial points. In two key scenes — an over-the-top church baptism and an off-the-rails confrontation between Plainview and Eli that ends the picture (and almost sinks it) — Anderson seems to have been so overawed by the actor's mastery that he abandoned control of the action and let Day-Lewis have free rein. The result is that rare dramatic flaw: too much of a good thing.

[©brad]

here's a pretty bad review from salon.com.

READ AT OWN RISK

"There Will Be Blood"

This sprawling, ambitious film strives for boldness yet rings with false humility.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Dec. 26, 2007 | Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" is an austere folly, a picture so ambitious, so filled with filmmaking, that its very scale almost obscures its blankness. The source for Anderson's fifth picture is Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil!" which details how oil interests transformed the landscape of turn-of-the-century California. According to the movie's press notes, Anderson, homesick for the state in which he was born, found a copy of the novel in a London bookstore and was attracted first by its cover image and then by the story inside.

That's a lovely bit of lore, a poetic scrap of evidence of the way a book can seduce us with something as basic (and as superficial) as a cover and then draw us inside toward something deeper. Anderson -- who adapted the story himself -- may have loved "Oil!" But his love for the book doesn't burn in the picture he's made. "There Will Be Blood" is set in a suitably bleak landscape: It was shot in Marfa, Texas (the same town where "Giant" was filmed), as a stand-in for the young California, by the gifted cinematographer Robert Elswit, and his near success in turning this world of scrubby, modest bushes and blandly egotistical manmade oil derricks into something visually vital is testament to his devotion. The story -- which pits a ruthless, supposedly complex oilman named Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) against an equally megalomaniacal man of the cloth, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) -- has the bare bones of a potentially compelling story about the nature of greed and of faith, or about how single-minded any man can be in the pursuit of his goals. As always, the power of even a great story depends on how you tell it.

And the telling is where Anderson and his actors fail. I wanted to love "There Will Be Blood," and I tried to, twice: Of all the young, or youngish, filmmakers working today, Anderson isn't the one who's shown the most promise -- he's the one who's delivered on promises he never even had to make. When he was just starting out as a filmmaker, Anderson dispensed with the usual coughing preamble; the assured understatement of his first picture, "Hard Eight," was enough to make you take notice. Instead of beginning his career by making a flawed movie or two that made you murmur, "Someday, this guy could be something," he burst through the gate as a filmmaker who valued emotional directness over mere flash. His movies haven't been perfect, but for the most part, they've been perfectly open. Echoing the stammering-confident boast of Warren Beatty's John McCabe in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," the greatest film made by Anderson's spiritual predecessor, Robert Altman, Anderson said from the start, "I got poetry in me," and wasted no time proving it.

Some early reviews of "There Will Be Blood" have compared Anderson to Ford and Griffith, comparisons that are extremely flattering to a young director. But it's a bad idea to drape Anderson with the heavy mantle of that kind of greatness so early in his career, when his energy, his extraordinary rapport with actors, his willingness to take chances (even to the point of adapting long-forgotten American novels) are the strengths he should be grooving on. Anderson has already made a real epic with emotion, rather than might, on its side, in "Magnolia." An epic stands or falls on the strength of its emotional details, and by that measure, "There Will Be Blood," sprawling and grand as it tries to be, fails. "There Will Be Blood" only pretends to be elemental and raw: It's really tempered and wrought, to the point of dullness. It rings with false humility, something I never thought I'd see in an Anderson picture.

Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview is a man whose unknowability is the point, which Anderson telegraphs in the movie's opening, a nearly wordless sequence showing us how Plainview, the future oil tycoon, began extracting his riches from the earth the hard way. The sequence is beautifully shot -- parts of it are boldly underlit so we're able to catch only glimpses of a character's movement in soft arcs of bluish light, a striking effect -- and it tells us more about the persistence and hardiness of Plainview's character than the movie's remaining two and a half hours do. We see him first as a young man, scrabbling inside a rocky hole in pursuit of a single rock speckled with silver; later, he seeks a more valuable commodity, oil, and the day he strikes it is also the day he becomes a father. With his son, H.W. (played by a marvelous child actor named Dillon Freasier, whose face offers more unvarnished expressiveness than anything else in the movie), as mascot and business partner, Plainview goes about building his empire, well by well. One day a stranger whose face has the bland flatness of a china plate steps into his office with a hot tip. The young man's name is Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), and he wants to alert Plainview, for a price, to a tract of land that he knows is rich with oil, his father's ranch.

Plainview investigates the site and moves in on it quickly: The father, Abel Sunday (David Willis), is no obstacle. But his other son, Eli (also played by Paul Dano), is a wanna-be preacher with grand plans to build his own church. He wants to squeeze as much money as possible out of Plainview -- the better to do God's work, of course -- and the two engage in a wary, tortured dance that's supposed to lead us to an understanding of their similarities, their differences, and the ways in which the pursuit of their respective goals is part of this flawed but remarkable entity we call the American character.

Those are grand intentions, and the movie that's banked around them never lets us forget how grand they are. There are epic impulses everywhere you look in "There Will Be Blood"; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama. An epic has to expand as it proceeds; this one narrows. The movie has eloquence but no guts. Its vigor is the arty kind, and over and over again it raises questions and then acts as if the answers -- or even the questions those initial questions lead to -- are unimportant: When we first see Eli -- who of course looks like Paul, because the two are played by the same actor -- we wonder if maybe they're the same person, a split personality. Later, we find out the truth, but it's revealed as if it were an afterthought, a magic wand that's waved vaguely in front of us to get us to think about the dual nature of good and evil and all that rot.

The tragedy of "There Will Be Blood" is that Anderson knows exactly what he's doing: His skill hasn't disappeared or been submerged. There are a few scenes that are so economical and yet so filled with feeling that they point a way to the wholly different movie Anderson might have made: In one of these scenes, H.W. tells his father, with a directness that's deeply touching, that the youngest girl in the Sunday family, Mary, whom he's befriended (she's played by Sydney McCallister), is beaten by her father when she doesn't pray. This clearly distresses the boy, and in the terse shorthand that Plainview and H.W. use to express their love for each other -- the kind of private language that often springs up between family members -- Plainview asks him, "Mary, she's the smaller one?" to which he responds plainly, "Yes, she is."

That scene has so much dignity that it dwarfs the flashier scenes -- particularly the overplayed, near-screwball ending -- that come later. Over and over again, I found myself respecting Anderson's choices and yet not really responding to them. The movie's weird, insistent, fascinating score is by Johnny Greenwood, of Radiohead (it sounds as if it were written to be played not by violins but by a field of anxious cicadas), and Anderson uses it intelligently in some places and rashly in others.

But the greatest disappointment of "There Will Be Blood" is the way its actors seem to matter less than its themes. This is the first Paul Thomas Anderson movie that feels woefully underpopulated. There are no women in "There Will Be Blood" -- Plainview is apparently so fixated on oil he has zero interest in sex -- and that's fine. But their absence is never addressed; the understanding is that a world of power-hungry men is interesting by itself (which it isn't). Anderson has cast a terrific performer, the Irish actor Ciarán Hinds, as Plainview's right-hand man, yet he barely shows us Hinds' face. That's so uncharacteristic of Anderson's generosity toward actors that it's almost unfathomable. Dano (who played the disaffected brother in "Little Miss Sunshine") is allowed to overact in a way that drains power out of the movie instead of charging it.

But Day-Lewis, holder of that most dangerous title "Great Actor," is the worst offender. Day-Lewis is a great actor, as he's proved in movies like "In the Name of the Father" and "My Left Foot." But his greatness is an impediment here. It seems he's decided that naturalism is boring and that big roles demand some kind of novelty. In "There Will Be Blood," he's chosen to channel John Huston, which makes for some tortured, oddball line readings that are clearly supposed to strike us as brilliant.

In "There Will Be Blood," Day-Lewis' body language tells us more about his character than any of his line readings do: His elbows are locked at an awkward angle, and his gait is stiff and belabored, thanks to old mining injuries -- this is a man who's achieved success in defiance of his body. Late in the movie, Plainview has a telling line of dialogue: "There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking." I don't see that as a cynic's line, but as a jumping-off point for exploring the more elusive qualities of what it means to be human: I'm of the school that believes disappointment in humankind is a greater sign of love for it than bland acceptance. But Day-Lewis' performance doesn't tread into that territory. Over and over again, "There Will Be Blood" drops hints about what its big ideas are supposed to be and then neatly skirts them. (The movie is based on only the first 150 pages of Sinclair's book; its ending demands that we fill in the missing chunks of the story for ourselves.) This isn't a cynical picture, just a maddeningly incomplete one. And it's too emotionally constrained to be worthy of Anderson's considerable gifts. "There Will Be Blood" strives for boldness, instead of just being bold. It doesn't cut, and it doesn't bleed.

[Pozer]

STEPHANIE ZACHAREK FROM SALON.COM IS THE WORST THING EVER!!!  HER REVIEWS ARE ALWAYS GOD AWFUL, AND SHE IS NOT A FILM CRITIC CUZ SHE HAAAATES FILM.  SHE IS ON THE CRITIC MASS THING IN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY AND ALWAYS RUINS THE GRADES FOR THE GOOD FILMS - IT KILLS ME EVERY TIME!!!  'Oh, lemme See here... No Country For Old Men - A, A, A, A, A, A, A, C-?  I'm at the end of the critics here which means it's.. sonuvabitch, Zacha-fucking-rek!'   I WISH TESTICULAR CANCER ON STEPHANIE ZACHARKEK!!!!! !

[tpfkabi]

 I WISH TESTICULAR CANCER ON STEPHANIE ZACHARKEK!!!!! !

[B.C. Long]

OBVIOUS ADMIN EDIT: SPOILERS

the astonishing vitality of Day-Lewis' performance — appears to have led the director astray at crucial points. In two key scenes — an over-the-top church baptism and an off-the-rails confrontation between Plainview and Eli that ends the picture (and almost sinks it) — Anderson seems to have been so overawed by the actor's mastery that he abandoned control of the action and let Day-Lewis have free rein. The result is that rare dramatic flaw: too much of a good thing.

....what? He just described the best two scenes in the movie.

[MacGuffin]

Daniel Day-Lewis may be foolhardy, but don't laugh
By Bob Tourtellotte; Reuters

In movies from "My Left Foot" to current drama "There Will Be Blood," Daniel Day-Lewis has been called many things: bold, hypnotic, gripping, among them. But foolhardy is a description he may like better.

The English-born actor does not want to look like a fool -- far from it. Yet, the Oscar winner said that one of his biggest motivating forces over the years has been his desire to push limits in ways that might possibly be panned by audiences.

Fortunately for him, that rarely, if ever, happens.

"I don't want to look like an idiot," he said with a laugh. "But you know what the truth is. Having said that, you can't do this work without making a fool of yourself."

Acting with his focus solely on characters and performance with little regard for what critics think is the main lesson Day-Lewis said he learned while studying drama at the Bristol Old Vic School in Britain.

It stayed with him through the 1980s as he rose into the ranks of top actors with "My Beautiful Laundrette," "A Room With a View and "My Left Foot," the story of a man who overcame cerebral palsy to learn to write and paint with his foot.

At age 30, Day-Lewis won the best actor Oscar for "Left Foot." Since then, the son of British poet Cecil Day-Lewis and husband of filmmaker Rebecca Miller (daughter of playwright Arthur Miller) has worked with top directors in top movies.

Day-Lewis, now 50, also has been Oscar-nominated for his role in 1993's "In the Name of the Father," playing a man wrongly accused of a bombing, and in 2002's "Gangs of New York," portraying gang leader Bill "The Butcher" Cutting.

PASSION PROJECTS

Since the late 1990s, his roles have become fewer and farther in between -- "There Will Be Blood" is only his fourth movie in a decade -- because Day-Lewis accepts only roles and projects about which he is passionate.

For the part of oil prospector Daniel Plainview in "Blood," Day-Lewis worked for nearly four years with writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson to hone the character.

"I could spend 10 years making a movie if it was a subject that interests me," Day-Lewis said. "You have to limit shooting because you can only mine so much out of yourself. But during preparation, that is a period of (mental) nourishment."

"Blood" revolves around Plainview, an angry and competitive man who is driven to become wealthy during California's oil boom in the early 1900s. The movie plays out like a cautionary tale of the corrupting power of money.

Day-Lewis is well-known for intense preparation, but he finds it hard to explain his way of working.

"Each piece of work requires that you imagine a world, and then you try to understand that world through the eyes and experience of a human being that isn't yourself," he said.

While words like bold, intense and focused are often used to describe him, Day-Lewis is rather soft-spoken and quick-witted in person.

He has three sons, one with French actress Isabelle Adjani, and two boys with Miller, who wrote and directed 2005's "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" starring Day-Lewis.

Tattoos of his children's hands are inked onto his arms, and when asked what they are, Day-Lewis laughs.

"This is thing one, my 12-year-old. He's got the smallest hand," he said, pointing. "Then, this is 9 and 5."

[modage]

saw Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono at the 10:35 Blood tonite.  that was crazy.