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randall 
"I like to watch."
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 Posted - 12/12/2007 : 03:00:12
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P. T. Anderson's new one arrives on the tenth anniversary of BOOGIE NIGHTS, and it can't be farther away, nor can Daniel Day-Lewis's performance be from, say, MY LEFT FOOT.
DD-L plays a misbegotten turn-of-the-century silver miner who stumbles upon oil, and as in Upton Sinclair's source piece [another hotshot filmmaker goes literary!], the result is... well...
D-L's growling presence commands this movie, and I will make an easy prediction that his will be one of the five names called for the Best Actor Oscar nom. Paul Dano of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE also kicks ass. Then there is gorgeous Texas scenery and Jack Fisk's incredible art direction. It's as if P.T. mind-melded with John Ford.
Like NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, also one of my favorites of the year, THERE WILL BE BLOOD isn't afraid to show you long passages without a word of dialogue. But when DD-L finally opens his mouth, my God!
I think it's the best work from director and actor since the two films I cited above. And don't take the title lightly: there will be. |
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Ali 
"Those aren't pillows."
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Posted - 12/12/2007 : 13:06:12
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I can't fricking wait for it! (Nor can I wait for No Country...)
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turrell
"Ohhhh Ohhhh Ohhhh Ohhhh "
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Posted - 12/12/2007 : 15:39:54
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| Randall- thanks for the review - in fact TWBB and NCFOM are waiting by my DVD player to be viewed (assuming we can get the kids to bed on time at some point this week), |
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randall
"I like to watch."
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Posted - 12/12/2007 : 23:33:31
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| Turry: it opens in the US on 12/26, and on that date everyone will bow down before it. Maybe even Baffy! [Based on her previous reviews, I judge she will love it!] |
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 12/13/2007 : 00:07:19
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quote:
Originally posted by Randall
Turry: it opens in the US on 12/26, and on that date everyone will bow down before it. Maybe even Baffy! [Based on her previous reviews, I judge she will love it!]
Well those brothers are among my very faves!
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randall
"I like to watch."
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Posted - 12/13/2007 : 00:16:25
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quote:
Originally posted by BaftaBabe
quote:
Originally posted by Randall
Turry: it opens in the US on 12/26, and on that date everyone will bow down before it. Maybe even Baffy! [Based on her previous reviews, I judge she will love it!]
Well those brothers are among my very faves!
? The Paul Dano brothers? [Coens are NO COUNTRY, a different movie...] |
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turrell
"Ohhhh Ohhhh Ohhhh Ohhhh "
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Posted - 12/13/2007 : 02:38:07
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quote:
Originally posted by Randall
Turry: it opens in the US on 12/26, and on that date everyone will bow down before it. Maybe even Baffy! [Based on her previous reviews, I judge she will love it!]
Yes but I have the DVDs because my wife ins on the SAG nominating committee this year - just need to make the time to watch them. |
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Ali
"Those aren't pillows."
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Posted - 12/13/2007 : 07:33:35
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quote:
Originally posted by BaftaBabe
quote:
Originally posted by Randall
Turry: it opens in the US on 12/26, and on that date everyone will bow down before it. Maybe even Baffy! [Based on her previous reviews, I judge she will love it!]
Well those brothers are among my very faves!
The Coens are black?
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 12/13/2007 : 08:08:47
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quote:
Originally posted by Ali
quote:
Originally posted by BaftaBabe
quote:
Originally posted by Randall
Turry: it opens in the US on 12/26, and on that date everyone will bow down before it. Maybe even Baffy! [Based on her previous reviews, I judge she will love it!]
Well those brothers are among my very faves!
The Coens are black?
After all this time you STILL can't tell when I'm smiling? 
OK here are the icons:
Actually, Blood sounds good.
[That should rhyme.]
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 12/13/2007 08:09:50 |
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Ali
"Those aren't pillows."
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Posted - 12/13/2007 : 08:57:32
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quote:
After all this time you STILL can't tell when I'm smiling?
Neither can you, it seems.
Incidentally, this is yet another example of how emoticons are destroying that most beautiful of languages.
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RockGolf
"1500+ reviews. 1 joke."
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Posted - 12/13/2007 : 17:26:26
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| l33t? |
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randall
"I like to watch."
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Posted - 12/15/2007 : 21:49:06
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quote:
Originally posted by turrell
Randall- thanks for the review - in fact TWBB and NCFOM are waiting by my DVD player to be viewed (assuming we can get the kids to bed on time at some point this week),
You're very lucky to have Academy screeners, but I gotta say this to those who don't: for maximum enjoyment, try hard to see THERE WILL BE BLOOD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN on the biggest screens you can possibly manage. For those who aren't David Geffen, that probably means a movie theater. The former flick will particularly blossom in an overpowering space, the latter just slightly less so... |
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 12/19/2007 : 21:19:08
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Okay, sports fans!! I've just seen this and need a bit of time to process it, but firstly may I just say
WOW!
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ChocolateLady 
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 12/20/2007 : 07:06:15
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That said, I now know I'll have to see it - no matter what your review says.
(Anything that leaves Bafta speechless has gotta be good! [insert appropriate winky thing here])
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BaftaBaby
"Always entranced by cinema."
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Posted - 12/20/2007 : 10:33:44
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What raises this film above the crowd is more about what happens between the viewer and the screen. That it tells a powerful story is undeniable, and that it's told so expertly is there for all to see in the superb performances from Daniel Day-Lewis and the ensemble cast who are essentially means to his ends. The production itself adds to the story with every shot.
Writer/Director Paul Thomas Anderson and his meticulous cameraman Robert Elswit [Michael Clayton, Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck] play with chiaruscuro to great effect, not only visually but as a constant reminder that this is a tale of telling the way of the dark from the way of the light.
Far from being a dramatization of its source material, Upton Sinclair's novel Oil, it's Anderson's focus on the anti-hero to an almost obsessive extent. Yet if you step back a bit you can see all the socio-economic implications of this oil man's tale.
Without giving too much away, there a long-shot that holds and after a while develops into a series of mid-shots which you expect to pay off in a close-up which never comes. That sequence encapsulates the emotional dynamic of the film, takes its emotional temperature and, in a sense, makes you complicit in the ambiguity played out in plain view, all pun intended. It's a scene well into the film. Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview - a self-man made whose wealth has come from scrabbling about underground and bringing up minerals like gold and oil - has raised a boy with generosity and affection, given him every advantage, and then sent him away when his presence interfered with business. The scene I refer to puts Daniel just off-center as the boy returns home to his father's embrace. It's a very long shot and it depicts eloquently the distance that has widened between them, between what was the only close relationship we ever get to see Plainview enjoy. In the mid-shot scenes that follow we see Daniel enclose the boy again, but this time we can see that although he allows the hug, he doesn't hug back.
People will talk about Day Lewis's modelling his accent on John Huston, and it's an uncanny but an apt choice, evoking the authority of the great director.
They'll talk about the protracted wordless opening fifteen minutes - and they are magnificent, fully the equal of Leone's Once Upon A Time In America.
They'll try to tell you this is a story of one man's greed. Don't buy that, not even if it's on a two-for-one sale! Daniel Plainview is no Gordon Gecko, and considering the source material for the film, if greed comes into it, it's the greed that nurtures capitalism - which is the real theme.
These people who speak are unlikely to deal with the Sinclair novel, to see how Anderson weaves it into a story devoid of the didacticism that peppered the book, yet without sacrificing the message.
Sinclair published Oil in 1927, when Anderson's film ends. He was a novelist and political campaigner of such conviction that the revelations in his book The Jungle led to legislative changes to the way the Chicago stockyards were run [though he always insisted his main interest was the effect of the abuses on the people who lived in the vicinity].
For it's social justice and welfare that drove Sinclair. His analysis of the ways of capitalism and how it flourishes - not only by exploiting the workforce but by hiding that fact, denying at all costs that it exists, and buying its way out of legislation passed to stop the exploitation - these are the rotten edifices he wants to topple with his docu-fiction.
And, if you extrapolate Anderson's focus on Plainview, many of Sinclair's concerns also drive his film. We don't have to look beyond the title to know this isn't a Disney tale of The Romance of Oil. Blood punctuates the film from the first glimpses of it as Plainview falls back into the pit where he's been chipping away at solid rocks to find gold. The following series of such accidents tells us much about the determination of the man, a self-confessed plain speaker, an avowed misanthrope who disguises his digust with charm, the easy generosity of the rich, and a willingness to conform to the principles of his rivals to get what he wants. Ends in this film always justify means for the main characters.
And it's not only Plainview whose principles are for sale. His main antagonist is a young preacher called Eli Sunday, son of a landowner whom Plainview duped to get access to the oil he knew was there. The scene again reminds us of the ways of this man's world, somehow bridging the gap between the silly-money bonuses of corporate head honchos and the human face of how business gets to that point. Both Sinclair and Anderson are concerned with that process. Plainview takes his pre-teen son HW [a performance of poise and quiet power by Dillon Freasier] to Sunday's place loaded down with hunting gear and claiming to want just to camp on the man's land so he can teach his boy to hunt quail.
Old Sunday offers as much hospitality as Plainview will take - water, goat's milk, firewood. On the alleged hunt HW kicks away some dirt and discovers oil on his shoe, confirming what his father has already paid money to know - the land is covering a sea of oil. And it's in a place that Plainview's main mineral development rivals Standard Oil haven't yet learned about. His informant, as it turns out, was Eli's brother Paul - both played by Paul Dano. Just a side-bar here - Dano does a lovely acting job in both roles, but I can't figure out why he's the only character who doesn't age as the decades pass. There's also, despite both brothers being listed in the cast list, the possibility that Eli and Paul are the same person. I'll leave that to you to decide. Anyhoo --
Eli witnesses how Plainview underpays his father for the land, trying his best to reason logically that it's worth more. He also reveals that his main interest is in getting a church built for his mission. Thus begins a fierce rivallry between the men that bubbles up occasionally, but is mostly contained under the niceties of social etiquette. And the incongruity isn't lost - the lace doily mind-set of the new century is constantly at odds with the relatively lawless industrialization that divides people even as it brings them physically closer together. We also learn later that Daddy Sunday's hiding some dark family secrets of his own, which ironically are dealt with by Plainview.
What both Sinclair and Anderson are intrigued by is the hypocrisy on both sides. The light and the dark. The good and the bad. Not as simplistic as God versus Mammon, but an acknowledgment that any concept of the spiritual that exists within - and because of - the fruits of exploitation that define capitalism, makes them obverse sides of the same coin.
It's that which leads to the powerful end of the piece. The book, which has more room to develop than this already epic 2� hour movie, concentrates on HW as a grown up rejecting his father's approach and striking out on his own. What the film does is to pull back again into the degeneration of the man Plainview. He's now able to live as he's wanted to, without help from anyone. In mad isolation. And, amid all the opulence, to find yet one more way to win which puts finality to what has essentially been a meaningless life.
So, yes, I'm saying if you don't take all that into consideration you may be very impressed by the elements of the film, the power of its components, but the underlying story will likely puzzle you. The film's structural flaws are those plaguing any from such a literary source. But it's one of the most important films of the year.
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Edited by - BaftaBaby on 12/20/2007 10:40:18 |
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ChocolateLady
"500 Chocolate Delights"
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Posted - 12/20/2007 : 12:38:20
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Um... yes, WOW does certainly seem like an understatement now.
Thanks!
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There Will Be Blood
