anticiapte "There Will Be Blood" by paul thomas anderson

great trailer. i am anticipating

not sure if this will necessarily be a historic role.

Excited about Jonny Greenwood score, not so sure about the rest of the film. I am PTA-neutral, so will go in with an open mind.

Isn't Jonny Greenwood the same dude who did the score to Bodysong? That was a nice film, and a nice score.

Yes, he was. And yes, nice score.

still looking forward to this in spite of what looks like an(other) embarrassingly forced performance from DD Lewis. i predict an oscar win for him.

this does look kinda mallick-y.

im ready, im psyched. i love boogie nights and punch drunk love but hard 8 and magnolia were kinda bleh. tiebreaker!

There Will Be Blood rivals Giant; Day-Lewis brilliant

Essential to the success of the movie is the original score by Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist and BBC composer in residence. In addition to some uniquely haunting orchestral arrangements, there's this insistent string motif that sounds like the buzzing of an insect inside one's head, a sound that grows louder and more unavoidably distressing whenever soulless events are about to occur. Greenwood's astonishing score is sure to be one of the most remarked-on aspects of the movie.

"soulless events"?

As opposed to its soulful events.

"soulless event" = a PTA movie

"soulless event" = a PTA meeting. Anesthetizing, those things are!

Jonny Greenwood’s original score often serves as a dissonant counterpoint to the proceedings, lending a distinct, unsettling edge to many scenes. It’s completely in harmony with the non-romantic aspects of the tale.

http://twitchfilm.net/site/view/fantastic-fest-report-there-will-be-blood-review/

non-romantic aspects AND soulless events! this is my kind of movie

saw the trailer for this at a showing of 3:10 to yuma, the audience started out not paying any attention and by the time it hit THERE...WILL...BE...BLOOD they were practically cheering.

what does practically cheering mean? were they limply waving their arms around and murmuring?

It means they were cheering in a prudent and efficient manner.

the disinterested chatter turned to quiet attention turned to interested murmuring and then appreciative exhortations that almost but not quite rose to a level of enthusiasm i would call cheering.

ANY OTHER QUESTIONS O YE OF LITERAL MINDS?

anyway i'm practically excited to see this.

One time I was in a theatre that showed a preview for Wimbledon, and the girl in front of me said loudly, "Paul Bettany is soooohotttt." And I said I know, he was all naked in A Knight's Tale. And then the whole theatre turned into loud girls swooning over the Bettany until the preview ended.

xpost

So am I, as a confirmed PTA fan that's no surprise. Intrigued to see what he does without his usual supporting cast (Luis Guzman, Phil Seymour-Hoffman etc), especially looking forward to seeing what Paul Dano makes of the preachers role.

a history opus based upon Sinclair's novel "oil!", that will probbaly have symbols about american capatilsm and what it has done to moral values etc..

In a rut? To the Left-Wing Story Well! It probably came down to this or a movie about "the American Dream gone sour."

HBO shows seem very influential don't they. Seems very Deadwood (set a little later) meets Carnivale (minus circus people and magic) from the preview. Still looks very good.

Oooh symbols and capatilism!

Hollywood Reporter

Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a prospector introduced in a wordless sequence showing his progression from heavy-bearded miner to civilized man with prospects: In the entire first reel, the only dialogue we hear is a muttered "there she is" as Plainview finds his buried treasure. The soundtrack is dominated by wilding clouds of strings that bethat bestow on petroleum the mysterious power of Stanley Kubrick's famous obelisk.

That music, by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, is captivating and sometimes intense, greatly contributing to the sense that tectonic forces lie beneath the drama.

Sorry, I can't help it.

i'm stoked as a motherfucker. more for this than for this season's other late 90s indiewood hero comeback film.

which is?

I'll watch it just for Daniel Day-Lewis, because he is a beast who demands watching. Although he went to the same school as my best friend's dad&was a apparently a CRY BABY and left after a while.

uh 'darjeeling company'

xpost

soulless event = daniel day lewis performance.

i'm stoked as a motherfucker. more for this than for this season's other late 90s indiewood hero comeback film.

-- That one guy that hit it and quit it, Saturday, September 29, 2007 8:25 PM

^

"

ANY OTHER QUESTIONS O YE OF LITERAL MINDS?

anyway i'm practically excited to see this.

-- tipsy mothra, Friday, 28 September 2007 20:05

haha. u tell em tipsy.

this looks good

you know who i bet is really excited about this movie based on the title alone?

http://www.ils.unc.edu/dpr/path/horrorfilms/dracula.jpg

Ok, looks pretty sweet . If it clocks in at under 3 hours I'm all about it.

158 minutes.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/11/06/magazine/11magcov395.1.jpg

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/magazine/11daylewis-t2.html

daniel day lewis is the modern day robert newton, and that is a good thing - true of false?

The preview for this was pretty amazing. I am anticipating.

I am seriously excited about this film. I'm a little worried about Paul Dano though.

stoked

The film parallels "Barry Lyndon" more than anything. I def prefer the Kubrick film, but mostly because of the lush cinematography and the decadent setting. TWBB is surprisingly dark, considering P.T.A.'s last few films.

And yeah, Daniel Day-Lewis is gonna win the surprisingly heavy statue next year. His characterization is fascinating. It's all-consuming and oversized, and it's such a "performance" that it blocks you from fully transporting into the story, but it's its own work of art.

IC SIN 1997
Oil! : a novel
Sinclair, Upton, 1878-1968.

No copies currently available. (Estimated wait is 80 days)

;/;
~

Sinclair lived until 1968? Whoa.

top of my list to see next (unless I end up getting to Margot before this opens)

HIPPEEZ KILDT HIM

They're putting it back in print for the movie, but not until a week before it opens. Wah.

I really want to see this now.

i gotta see this again.

Was it good?

It just swept the LA Film Critics awards...

Had seen the trailer online, but having caught the big-screen version ahead of the theatrical release of the Blade Runner final cut this weekend definitely convinced me that this shit is gonna be awesome. DDL really does come off pretty fearsome. Stoked, for sure.

yes it was good.

Could you elaborate a bit? :P

RE: the LA film critics awards, is NY far behind?

sorry i actually cant for stupid reasons xp

Nevermind, googling reveals NYFCC drops their results in early january.

It swept the NYFCO, though. But yeah, NYFCC not happening for a while.

the NAVY NCIS announces its picks tomorrow

At first I wasn't interested in this, but seeing the trailer before No Country For Old Men got me excited. Just from bits in the trailer, I'm interested in this for Jonny Greenwood's score.

I have that, if you want it. Email me.

soulless event = daniel day lewis performance.

-- jed_, Sunday, September 30, 2007 12:42 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Link

this.

but first half = awesome.

time out gave it the rare 6 stars.
reviews are good.
so why do i hate the trailer?

ddl is rad.

i mean come on, "soulless"? you'd get banned from ilm for using that word.

funny,this quote from "time out" about the main charecter:"How he goes from rugged individualist to rotting, soulless millionaire"

and also from time out:

"You can spot references to Days of Heaven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane nestled among the period trappings. But unlike most Netflix auteurs, this artist seems connected to a world outside his DVD collection. Even sprawling works like Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999) never hinted that he had a movie this complex and epic in him"

wow

i don't know if there are "references" to 'citizen kane' or 'sierra madre', but it is similar to 'kane', 'madre', or 'the great gatsby', in a way.

How he goes from rugged individualist to rotting, soulless millionaire—and what that arc says about the dark heart of our nation’s capitalistic obsessions—is the meat of Paul Thomas Anderson’s American masterpiece.

this old story is the least interesting or original thing about the movie. TO calls it 'fearless', but, come on seriously?! fearless? money evacuates the soul -- this has been an established idea in american filmmaking and fiction forever, and PTA isn't a critique of anything 'corporate'. the whole point is that plainview is pretty much his own man (though... he isn't really, he depends on union oil, but by the time this becomes important the movie has gone over to DDL almost completely), not a corporate beast.

i have no fucking idea what a "netflix auteur" is. anyone?

the first half is out-and-out amazing, but i felt PTA lost it in a big way, and what i've heard about the book sounds like more interesting material for a film. the ending of 'TWBB' is actively bad.

that review is poor though.

Even sprawling works like Boogie Nights (1997) and Magnolia (1999) never hinted that he had a movie this complex and epic in him

didn't they? tbh i thought they were both more complex than this -- but they showed obvious promise and (imo) achievement anyway.

i have no fucking idea what a "netflix auteur" is. anyone?

A filmmaker who thinks it more important to cram as many references to his heroes as he can, often in a showy and pointless way. cf. anderson, wes, specifically zissou, steve.

didnt see it yet.cant comment..

A filmmaker who thinks it more important to cram as many references to his heroes as he can, often in a showy and pointless way. cf. anderson, wes, specifically zissou, steve.

-- Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved, Saturday, December 15, 2007 4:52 PM (41 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

ok, but not like truffaut or scorsese or whoever, got it.

Totally can't wait to see this.

DDL could play moustache twirlers for the rest of his life and I'd be ok with that.

you will love this movie then!

What Inland Empire was for me last year, I'm hoping this movie is for me this year (i.e. the movie that keeps me interested in movies at all).

A filmmaker who thinks it more important to cram as many references to his heroes as he can, often in a showy and pointless way. cf. anderson, wes, specifically zissou, steve.

-- Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved, Saturday, December 15, 2007 4:52 PM (41 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

ok, but not like truffaut or scorsese or whoever, got it.

essentially yes. if you listen to the zissou commentary baumbach makes a snooty comment re: the 8 1/2 jump cut reference during the chopper crash scene. the cut itself is just a reference and does nothing to fwd the emotion of the scene, really.

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

^^^^^
also, the apple trailer, which i had not seen.

there are definite references to kane dude!

taking sides: termites vs elephants.

xposts

i didn't like 'zissou', but i think anderson has made more good films than trruffaut (2) so i'll cut him some slack.

there are definite references to kane dude!

i kind of like that i didn't get them... but rly?

reminded me most of stroheim's 'greed' tbh.

i dont mean like exact recreated shots or cuts... but if the cut to the mansion in the 3rd act isn't a specific "xanadu" evocation i'll eat my hat.

It is, still there's more barry lyndon going around than anything else. And the rugged individualist->soulless millionaire in misleading. His character is malicious and misanthropic from the start. He is unchanging.

it's not very 'barry lyndon', which is more... fatalistic, and up-and-down, plot-wise. also plainview is a scary motherfucker. agree he doesn't change over the course of it.

OMG that trailer. Oh shit must I see this? Yes. Yes I must.

the music is pretty bad-ass. the start reminded me most of like... '2001'.

barry lyndon in the director's measured, somewhat detached look at the great rise and quiet fall of this villain who manages to represent the ambitions of entire empires.

Yeah, music is tits. I can hear the 2001 reference, but it's also very modern. Nice to see scores that are pushing the medium forward. I'm thinking this and The New World, offhand.

he does change, but only really in the sense of what he's willing to show of himself to the world.

and that's only really because of circumstance; the more successful he is the less he needs to obscure himself.

fyi, for those who avoid the detrius thread:

http://ballot2007.indiewire.com/ballots/scores

i havent read one bad review about this film yet.
"When the dust settles, we may look back on it as some kind of obsessed classic" ? ! (newsweek)

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/therewillbeblood

i saw the trailer before no country and cracked up at the end, and people gave me wtf looks. i think it was a combination of the music, the title, and the FONT.

Yeah, those Psycho-shower-scene strings at the end of the trailer are really funny.

"one bad review "

well, i did found one from slant,that ruined the 100 score in roteentomatoes..:
"
"Crammed to its oil-slicked rafters with highly stylized forms of art direction, cinematography, performance, dialogue, and music. All that's missing from it is a sense of humanity."

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=3387

Just like 2001! PTA wins again!

yeah, as if there is anything wrong with Kubrik..

there are some people who think that Kubrik is a soulless,sometimes over bombastic director, esp. in the "clockwork orange" period, but if PTA is equally challenging this aesthetic, the world should and probably would appreciate his movie

i think there is humanity in the film, but genuinely think it's overrated. i'll be more interested when it's out in the world and non-crix are talking about it, or not talking about it. i kind of feel that once the Actor daniel day lewis gets his inevitable Acting oscar for Acting, people will start walking away from it.

do any of the positive reviews get into the final scene? i don't see how it isn't a disaster.

The final scene is such a mean-spirited joke, and the problem is that this is what the whole film has been building to. Still, I don't see how anyone can be at all surprised by all the love and accolades TWBB is receiving right now. It LOOKS and FEELS like a masterpiece, and I still haven't discounted that it might actually be one.

http://idolator.com/338531/jonny-greenwood-finds-black-gold-at-the-end-of-his-rainbow

i love the final scene! how could it not end like that? with a title like that? etc etc

i like when movies go OTT.

Still haven't seen the movie, but almost bought the Sinclair book tonight. It was that or "No Country for Old Men."

But then I bought some collection of essays by an Alabama undertaker instead.

Is Oil worth reading?

i am seeing this in an hour and a half. i'm a little sleepy, it better keep me awake.

it kept me awake. really, really good.

The final scene is such a mean-spirited joke, and the problem is that this is what the whole film has been building to.

the whole movie is mean. some people complained about the same thing with dogville, which i also loved, so whatever. maybe i like mean jokes. i think reducing that ending to a mean joke is overdoing it. my only real complaint with it is it comes on too abruptly, the final section could have used another 20 minutes to build before that scene. it was like having to tack godfather ii onto the end of the godfather.

(although for sure the last scene is not as perfectly rigged as the last scene of dogville, which was like a sprung trap. this is messier and doesn't achieve the same sense of inevitability.)

I'm seeing the midnight preview.

^ damn u i have to work graveyard

The more I get away from this, the less I like it. The execution and precision are flawless. It has the patience and tone of a Kubrick film, but comes across more as a cheap imitation, almost hollow. The whole exercise felt kind of pointless when it should have been enlightening, but maybe that's my own projection.

I'll see it again, after the storm has calmed, hopefully to better results.

i disagree about 180 degrees. i don't think it's hollow or pointless at all -- it's full up with point. and with "humanity" too, however you define it. i really don't understand where these critiques are coming from, although i guess every lash needs a backlash.

and it's not a cheap imitation -- or even an imitation -- of anything. there are plenty of influences, but this is the first movie of his that really feels like his own to me. there's a strong, specific, distinctive life to it.

The style definitely cops Kubrick, and I've had problems with this film since early November. Hardly a backlash.

can't wait to see this!

i didn't get a kubrick vibe at all with this. it didn't have that clinicality or remove. thought it was much more aggressive filmmaking than anything i associate with kubrick.

(but not aggressive like scorsese or busy like altman, which pta has been in the past)

didn't think it was particularly kubrickian. because of the overpraise, it's hard to hold on to the fact that the first hour+ of this is fucking amazing, but straight up and down, i wish it was more john sayles-y, more political.

Most people loving it like crazy. I'm probably an asshole, and yeah, the "OMG Masterpiece!" before the lights come up isn't doing it any favors.

the guy the opening hour made me think of, if anyone, was leone.

i think there's plenty of politics inherent in the movie, but yeah, it's really a symbolic psychodrama. i think it follows pretty directly from the freudian family-dynamics stuff of his first 3 films (present to a lesser degree in punch-drunk love, in the adam sandler character's oppressive/repressed relationship with his sisters). but with the bigger scope here he's into how those kind of elemental forces play out on bigger stage of politics, business, faith, etc.

or something. i haven't really thought its various angles through.

not sure it's a masterpiece, but it's pretty great. the fact that lots of film critics think it's pretty great is, i think, mostly a reflection of its pretty-greatness.

It still felt dispassioned and mannered to me, like PTA and Lewis were on different pages. PTA wanted Lewis to be the bloody beating heart of the otherwise restrained film, and Daniel Day was too focused on his vocal performance and the art of acting to come across as a human being.

And btw on a technical level this film totally rules. When all was said and done, I just didn't get much out of it.

well not to belabor. but it didn't feel mannered to me. it felt borderline unhinged.

(the two main characters are basically deranged. i didn't get "mannered" from either of them.)

anticipate "There Will Be BLood" by paul w.s. anderson

DDL could play moustache twirlers for the rest of his life and I'd be ok with that.

-- da croupier, Saturday, December 15, 2007 4:58 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Link

otfm

i hope dis nigga twirls HELL OF moustaches in this shit

lol

Some brief thoughts:

Hmm...an angry, vicious oilman with limitless rapacity and an unctuous, insincere religious fundie with more chutzpah than brains (and not even a close call.) Remind you of the two sides of any particular presidents?

Also, easily the best bowling alley scene since The Big Lebowski, and what is sure to be the most speculated-upon inaudible whisper scene since Lost in Translation. A friend of mine who saw it up in Seattle is right, I think - this is a quantum leap for PTA, not least because he concentrates on a few credible, fascinating characters instead of a cast of unlikely thousands. Come to think of it, my 2nd favorite PTA picture, Hard Eight, has the same virtue, although I still haven't seen the one with Sandler. Anyway, I predict a lot of appreciation for it after wide release, and I think Day-Lewis is even better, scarier, and especially more believable here than he was in Gangs of New York. The score is good, too, what there is of it - not that it ever fades into the background when it is there. I'm actually very happy with this recent trend toward less incidental music in TV and movies generally, but it's also past three in the morning and my old ass is outta gas.

Always forget dude did "Hard 8"

ok,it's not "citizen kane" level as some critics said, more close to the work of coppola,malick and "deer hunter.
in terms of directing,photography (the zooms and tilt as metaphoors for oil drill, etc),lightning,acting and score - a masterpiece indeed.
but the script doesnt have enough depth - the "ideas" are too easy to understand,the charecters are kinda bland imo.
the movie IS a must - it is breathtaking,and has the best ideas in directing ive seen for a long while and the 2 and a half hours pass very quickly,but it has a fault.the capitalism vs. religion allegory and the source of evil stuff is self evident.

and the first,wordlesss 20 minutes are a small masterpiece of pure cinematic beauty.

the first,wordlesss 20 minutes

!

"i didn't get a kubrick vibe at all with this"
misanthrope,greedy characters...

also,at least for the last scene,pta is influenced by kubrik.
p.s. the theatre-like dialouges in the movie also contributes to the misanthrope-a-man-to-its-own atmosphere.

than again,when i think about stuff like the baby of ddl's charecter marked by oil stain on the forehead....this bland stuff wouldnt pass kubrik's hand...

yes kubrick was never one for overbearing symbolism.

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/10)%20Kubrick%202001%20(bone%20spaceship%20transition)-thumb.jpg

(fwiw i think that's classic. but subtlety isn't exactly what kubrick brings to mind. anyway i thought the oil baptism was fine, when you're telling a myth it's ok to be mythological.)

I think Day-Lewis is even better, scarier, and especially more believable here than he was in Gangs of New York.

yeah this is maybe the character he had in mind in gangs of new york, but the story didn't really allow it.

but this is the first movie of his that really feels like his own to me.

agree w/ this, other than Malick (the burning derrick scene felt a lot like the end of Days Of Heaven) I couldn't really think of any obvious touchstones and influences (although Kubrick and Citizen Kane make sense too)

the music is great, really adds to the rising dread and the tension .... just throws a general sense of menace over even a static shot of some hills ....

interesting to have a main character so obsessed with being the alpha dog and yet has zero interest in women (I guess if you hate everyone it applies to both sexes)

anyway I really loved it

not to be a total pedant but the first 20 minutes are dialogue-less, not wordless.

It looks like a film that will look beautiful on the big screen. They seem surprisingly rare.

um not really.

so many great monologues and set pieces. Eli's first big sermon was a+

I can see how people think the very end crosses into the absurd but the dialogue leading up to it was so good I didn't mind

"people think the very end crosses into the absurd "

i kinda liked it,it makes the movie more distinctive,and increase the alienation level.felt like a strong theater act.

I can see how people think the very end crosses into the absurd but the dialogue leading up to it was so good I didn't mind

"I JUST DRANK YOUR MILKSHAKE!"

yeah that scene really gets by on the gamesmanship of the actors. i like how even though paul dano is fighting way out of his weight class he just keeps coming at ddl all through the movie. it's a really scrappy performance.

I loved this thing, but I have some reservations/questions:

The score – I loved it in isolation (I've had bootleg MP3s for a while) but I'm not sure that it worked so well in conjunction with the images. I will definitely have to see it again, but it was too … distinctive for me to focus on the film rather than the score.

Paul/Eli – my gf thought that Eli showed up to see DDL as Paul so that he could request DDL's oil exploitation and not have it get back to his parishioners that he was doing so. Paul vanishes from the movie and DDL uses the same language to describe Paul's oil career at the end of the movie as he describes his own at the beginning, down to the number of wells. Is Paul real? It's weird.

DDL's character is so psychotic and nightmarish that it was really hard to see things from his point of view – you just want him to be locked up for the preservation of society. Did Anderson have to go that far?

All things considered, I loved it, and it sure did remind me of Kubrick (specifically The Shining and Clockwork), especially that final scene.

xpost
http://lh6.google.com/rianniello/RxtQMacdmXI/AAAAAAAAAsw/4Yu0OnLnL5I/s400/sick%20angela.jpg

and DDL uses the same language to describe Paul's oil career at the end of the movie as he describes his own at the beginning, down to the number of wells.

I think that's just because he's flat lying

Paul is real but DDL has no idea what happened to him

Eli mentions Paul to their dad at one point

Ditto on Paul Dano's awesomeness, tipsy.

Just rubbing Eli's failure in a little more, dmr? Yeah, I did know that Paul gets mentioned in that 'Paul sold you out, dad!' convo. Paul is one of those plot threads that just confuse me, I guess.

Just rubbing Eli's failure in a little more, dmr?

that's how I took it, another instance where plainview zeroed in on how to humiliate somebody (which seemed to be his true goal even more so than money -- getting to say "I win" and "you're a fool")

DDL and Anderson on Charlie Rose

" but subtlety isn't exactly what kubrick brings to mind. anyway i thought the oil baptism was fine, when you're telling a myth it's ok to be mythological.)"

depends which Kubrik movie/period you think off.

anyway,i think a great artist doesnt make the symbols too obvious to understand, the point of great art piece is to make you think,and dig the "meaning" yrself.
"there will be blood",with all it's greatness,suffers from this particular point.

about Malick: true,of course, that the movie is highly influenced by "days of heaven" but Malick is much more abstract director.

anyway,the cliche "you wont be able to get this film out of yr head for a long time" comes true,again, for this movie.

i think this movie is about 6 times better than days of heaven, but then i don't really like any malick besides badlands.

as for the point of great art, how bout if it just knocks the wind out of you? lots of kinds of great art.

do you think this movie would be better or worse with "milkshake" by kelis over the end credits?

lol, better obviously
milkshake (jonny greenwood rmx)

Nice writeup on Dano

i would like to see a jokey remake of the milkshake video with DDL working behind the counter of the diner.

twirling his moustache

better if they would also include funny outtakes w/ ddl being silly and crew laughing.
xxxp

another thing they could do, is have maroon 5 redo "she will be loved" with "there will be blood" replacing the title of the song

I'm just glad I don't know that song, so I don't have to hate you for getting some mor crapfest stuck in my head.

...or AC/DC's "if you want blood,baby youve got it..."

http://media.canada.com/1785a528-bef3-4f04-af39-9312146bfd98/levinecover.jpg

I don't mind spending everyday
Out on your corner in the pouring rain
Look for the girl with the broken smile
Ask her if she wants to stay a while
and there will be blood
and there will be blood

This probably couldn't be any creepier

!

hahahhahahaha

i literally LOLled at that one. nice.

another thing they could do, is have maroon 5 redo "she will be loved" with "there will be blood" replacing the title of the song

-- s1ocki, Monday, December 31, 2007 10:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

I'm still pissed off that Tesla's version of "Signs" didn't play over the end of Signs.

Your kiss, your kiss is on Schindler's list.

i literally LOLled at that one. nice.

well you thought it up!

i meant your gloss on it made me LOL.

It should be played at the end of From Hell.

and sweeney todd.

fyi to New York area folks, this probably belongs on the music board but some here might be interested

=========================

Wordless Music Presents
The Wordless Music Orchestra
Brad Lubman, conductor

January 16-17, 2008
The Church of St. Paul the Apostle
Columbus Avenue & West 60th Street, NYC
 
Performing:
John Adams: Christian Zeal and Activity
Gavin Bryars: The Sinking of the Titanic
Jonny Greenwood: Popcorn Superhet Receiver
 
7:00 PM doors / 8:00 PM show
$30 general admission
 
(limited ticket availability!)

Next up in the Wordless Music series’ 2007-08 season:
 
Conductor Brad Lubman will lead a 50-piece Wordless Music Orchestra in a program of contemporary music exploring the subjects of religion, technology, and modernity. The concerts will include John Adams’ Christian Zeal and Activity (1973), for chamber ensemble and tape; Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic (1969), for orchestra and tapes; and the U.S. premiere of Radiohead guitarist and composer Jonny Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver (2006) for string orchestra, parts of which can now be heard in the score to Paul Thomas Anderson’s extraordinary new film There Will Be Blood.
 
The Wordless Music Orchestra has been assembled specifically for the occasion of these concerts, and will feature a one-time gathering of 50 of the brightest young talents in New York’s classical- and new-music community. Between them, they represent more than two dozen ensembles that have drawn inspiration from the music of Jonny Greenwood and Radiohead throughout the band’s 15-year history, including such groups as Alarm Will Sound, So Percussion, the FLUX Quartet, the Jack String Quartet, Signal, Zero Gravity, Fireworks, ACME, Newspeak, the NOW Ensemble, and more. The Wordless Music orchestra will be led by conductor Brad Lubman, known for his work with the Steve Reich Ensemble and Ensemble Modern.

Popcorn Superhet Receiver

Scott Seward's comment about Radiohead using the Stereolab songtitle generator seems more apt than ever.

when this shit gets general release or do i have to drag my ass up to lincoln center wtf?

Another reasonably entertaining "dark" film about The Evil That Men Do that I didn't find particularly engrossing or emotionally resonant. I wonder if people would have been praising it as much if had kept its original name. Oil! just doesn't have the foreboding menace of Zodiac or No Country For Old Men. There Will Be Blood, on the other hand, tops them. Citizen Kane Goes West or Beverly Hillbillies: Year One would have been good too.

A Moustache For All Seasons

Beverly Hillbillies: Year One

lol

The people I saw it with thought the last third was off-key but I was happy to watch them whoop it up and duke it out (esp when Dano ran back and forth like a shooting range duck as the pins flew past him - dude's got a real Bud Cort shriek). Wasn't wrecking any mood worth keeping.

oil! would have been a better title, in a way. i think people want it to be the big bush-era statement right? for example this poindexter who doesn't know that 'redundance' isn't a word does. personally i don't think there was *enough* blood. there was blood early on also -- workers be getting killed. ddl killing dano didn't seem that big of a deal. i haven't read it but the book is more 'political' so far as i can tell. this was about a guy isolating himself... ha, it's the bro 'safe'.

So no one has read the book? I'm somewhat intrigued by it.

Overall I was a little disappointed by this - great score, looked great, about half the time I thought DDL was great, and half the time he just seemed mannered. It didn't drag, but it didn't really go anywhere, either - and I agree that the last scene didn't work. Also it felt like DDL was trying out for Krapp's last tape for about half of that scene.

I guess I was extremely psyched for it, thought, so it's possible my disappointment is only relative.

this was about a guy isolating himself... ha, it's the bro 'safe'.

it kinda is, yeah.

i think it lends itself to plenty of political readings, but part of why i think it works on that level is that it doesn't insist on them. i don't think it's explicitly or even intentionally political, exactly. its angle makes sense in the context of pta's fixation on the damages done by human (especially family) relations. all politics is personal etc. i was curious when i first read about the film how upton sinclair was going to fit into pta's view of the world, or vice versa. the answer is maybe about what i might have expected, except better (i.e. pretty great instead of embarrassing).

(also my dictionary has "redundance" as an accepted variation.)

i want this joke datestamped coz i'm sure someone else'll come up with it. ahem.

I DRINK YOUR KOOL-AID! I DRINK IT UP!!!

i'm anticipating all the "there will be..." headlines once this goes wide. the voice "there will be consensus" thing is the only one i've seen. (lame.) surprised it hasn't shown up in the primary coverage yet.

There Will Be Huck
http://www.mikehuckabee.com/_images/mike_huckabee_bio.jpg

There Will Bee Movie

There Will Be

http://www.eminemitalia.it/images_news/cover_common_be_big.jpg

There Will Be
http://blogonoco.googlepages.com/IkeTinaTurner-WorkingTogether2.jpg/IkeTinaTurner-WorkingTogether2-full.jpg

There Will Be

http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/120740/2/istockphoto_120740_cannabis_bud.jpg

ysi

a devin mixtape just waiting to happen

i did not like this movie. are there *any* dissenting critics (who are at all interesting)?

Armond's not interesting? Rosenbaum partially dissented and Stephanie Zacharek wasn't impressed either.

well, interesting but not ridiculous. (i'll read the zacharek.)

the only american critics i really like are todd mccarthy, j hoberman, dave kehr, kent jones.... i sometimes enjoy roger ebert (though not recently), jim emerson, manohla dargis, glenn kenny....

yeah zacharek is good. i think she's wrong on some things, or just missing them, but i understand why someone would not like the movie. i just saw more there than that. the subhed is pretty cogent -- "This sprawling, ambitious film strives for boldness yet rings with false humility." it's just that what i think she's calling false humility looked to me deliberate irony. and i'm always defending pta on grounds of not being exactly ironic, and i think here it is not exactly ironic either, it's some kind of mutant hybrid of irony and what anti-irony. knowing about its knowingness. all of his movies are like that, but i think this one does it all the way.

and he did it with no cozy tommy lee voiceover.

which is not a slice at NCFOM but without narration the film would play very differently

the only american critics i really like are todd mccarthy

Now you're putting us on.

also i have come around on the ending as kind of a joint tribute to 2001 and apocalypse now. (and yes ok citizen kane.) it's too insanely memorable to be bad. that's the part of the movie a lot of people will remember most. cue the "in ur kitchin, drinkg ur milkshake" lolcats.

as an averred and bonded PTA hatah, i gotta hand it to the guy for making my fave movie of the year. i thought this was a just plain awesome movie.

this is the best movie in the world ever <3 <3 <3

also paul dano is wonderful

i thought characters made little sense, psychologically, historically, whatever. pta didn't seem to care whether a particular span of the film made sense with regard to the rest (i'm speaking in terms of character). for an historical film it didn't seem too invested in any sense of history, except as a challenge for mise en scene--there were all these other people around plainview and sunday and pta didn't seem to want to do anything with them, even in the background.

i suppose an evident and developing formal pattern might have deflected some of my attention from this but i didn't find the film all that remarkable (except for a few brilliant set pieces) from this standpoint either. i just didn't get it. i'd have to see it again for this to be anything but a tentative assessment, but my experience was such that i'm not sure i want to see it again.

don't get me wrong, it was interesting, and i wasn't bored. but i felt completely emotionally uninvested in it, in part b/c the film never seemed to know what it's attitude toward its characters was.

as for todd mccarthy, he's a wonderful writer!

I hadn't noticed.

As for Blood, I think I'm mostly in the same boat as you. I was left wanting in a lot of ways while still feeling compelled to justify the film's "interesting" qualities.

holy shit this movie was awesome

I loved this movie. And, wow, here's the screenplay, which at least sorts out the Eli/Paul business a little.

As I just said in the Chicago thread, I thought this was much better than No Country for Old Men. No Country is a great hitman movie (except for the climax), but it is nonetheless a familiar story, the psycho matching verbal and physical wits with his prey.

This one, though -- I was expecting a bit of a Days of Heaven ripoff, but it wasn't that at all. I really think Anderson holds his own with his influences and is not in their shadow. The drilling station special effects were realy stunning, if they were special effects or just constructed at all. I would love to know how they created the gushers, fires, etc.

which at least sorts out the Eli/Paul business a little

care to elaborate a little so as we dont have to actually like read that thing

amateurist left wandering the wilderness of his own vast rongness

In the that negotiation scene (which is so perfect word-for-word) he's introduced as "A YOUNG KID (Paul Sunday aged 16)", and Eli is introduced as "...a very skinny man/boy, the son: ELI SUNDAY (aged 18).

But I assume it's meant to be ambiguous, as far as whether the Devil took over Eli or somehow set up that meeting. I just assumed that it was a negotiating tactic on Eli's part, and that Plainview taunts him about it.

but it is nonetheless a familiar story, the psycho matching verbal and physical wits with his prey

but as it turns out, the whole dance between those two characters is kind of a red herring!

any of y'all lovers care to elaborate on why this is so loved and creamed over?
otherwise wake me up when oscar madness endzzzz

But I assume it's meant to be ambiguous, as far as whether the Devil took over Eli or somehow set up that meeting. I just assumed that it was a negotiating tactic on Eli's part, and that Plainview taunts him about it.

-- Eazy, Monday, January 7, 2008 4:34 PM (59 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

ok what the shit are you talking?

oh yow i thought they were twins! and so did plainview w/all that you were the afterbirth taunting.

the final scene really had some of the all time greatest zings in the history of humanity. plainview was really feeling himself there.

J :I'm thinking more of the dance with Chigurh and the old man, etc.

Interesting that PTA talks about how he thought of There Will Be Blood as a horror movie when he was shooting it. In the same way, No Country is a horror movie in the Halloween/Friday The 13th way. Both have unstoppable evil, in a way, I guess, though TWBB doesn't spell it out that way.

TIGTHIAQI: If the oil brings with it a curse, then the Devil would have been the one to broker the deal and bring Plainview to their town. But, again, I just assumed that because Eli was such a good negotiator, that part of his negotiation was to avoid revealing his real name.

Many, many thoughts on Paul/Eli here.

but it didn't follow from the character's earlier development. when did he suddenly get so scorsese-style witty? so bombastic? it seemed like we moved into another movie altogether.

otherwise: why did the churchgoing landowner not seem to mind that plainview killed his associate? why did they not seem to notice or care when he assaults sunday? multiply these sorts of questions x400 and you can see why i felt like pta didn't have a coherent approach to his characters or story.

i've spent a little time searching for possible answers to or explanations for the film's ambiguities, tonal shifts, inconsistencies, etc. but none of them make the experience retrospectively any more satisfying (or unsatisfying) than it was.

xpost

"but it didn't follow from the character's earlier development. " -- i was referring to the final scene, the "showdown."

<I>amateurist left wandering the wilderness of his own vast rongness</i>

that's a pretty obnoxious response, i hope you realize.

but it didn't follow from the character's earlier development. when did he suddenly get so scorsese-style witty? so bombastic? it seemed like we moved into another movie altogether.

are you talking about eli? it's because he grew up.

why did they not seem to notice or care when he assaults sunday?

plainview was bringing bank to town. cash money. making everyone around him not rich, but better off than they were before.

they're brothers. i dunno if they're twins. what is this 'taken over by the devil' shit?

if people are really talking about the devil, and about oil being "cursed" i don't know what to think, really. WALK AWAY mainly.

another scene which i laughed at, but which fits what amst is saying: when plainview threatens to kill the union oil guy. nothing really comes of it. and he still has a serious negosh with standard oil (or have it got it the wrong way round).

the film is all screwy about ecconomics.

I thought that final showdown was the one section that seemed more familiar (in the sense that I'd seen it before). Visually, felt familiar too (derivative of Kubrick). Also felt a little like the inevitable-decline third act of Boogie Nights.

Still, looked great, great dialogue, loved the movie.

One justification for the tonal shifts is that all of PTA's films, except for Hard Eight, are basically mix-tapes with segments lasting 5-15 minutes (Mann does this too, especially w/ Miami Vice).

i see your point. "magnolia" didn't feel that way to me. it felt very unified. "punch-drunk love" felt the closest to "there will be blood," in that it seemed like pta was producing a series of contrarian riffs on some archetypal story that was only dimly visible in the finished product.

are you talking about eli? no, i was talking about plainview in the last scene.

plainview was bringing bank to town. cash money. making everyone around him not rich, but better off than they were before. i suppose i could buy this (it's the obvious answer) but there's nothing in the film, not even an offhand gesture, that might embed this reading in it. there's no real sense of plainview's place in the town. he's drawn into a social canvas at a few moments but then that canvas fades away. we don't even know who his assistant is, or whether plainview provides the services he promises (i guess we can presume not?). we don't know why he sends hw away (because his disability repulses plainview? because he could get a better education elsewhere?) or why he brings him back (is it because his false conversion had him feeling guilty? did he have genuine affection for the boy?). there are contradictory clues, an absence of clues, etc. -- after the 2-hour mark i'd had it with trying to find some emotional coherence in it.

but it didn't follow from the character's earlier development. when did he suddenly get so scorsese-style witty?

im thinking during most of the movie hes just super driven doing his business, which isnt to say he doesnt know how to turn a phase - then when eli shows up hes so happy to have this diversion from his miserable boring life he just really gets into it.

the tonal difference between the final act and the rest of the movie was brilliant. it really emphasized the extreme unique claustrophobia of that time in little boston, the group hysteria no one could see because theyre just in it, the sort of situation that gets all dreamy when you look back on it. that absurd heat animated everything, everyone lost their minds, plainview was ridiculous and terrifying at the same time (which is much closer to real life villains than yr typical filmic archetype).

as for why there werent greater repercussions for plainviews bad behavior - just a guess but id say it was because he was basically the god of lil boston at that point. also there maybe was some weird backwoods morality operating w/the dude who made him go to chuch - ie you can shoot a guy but you sure as fuck better repent asap.

that's a pretty obnoxious response, i hope you realize.

yah obv

Do I download this or does it really benefit from the big screen?

who is "everyone" and how did they lose their minds? b/c, like, they followed a faith healer? but who were they to follow him? why did one of the followers not seem to mind that a man was murdered on his property?

none of the readings of this film i've seen seem entirely sustained by the film itself.

unless it's with recourse to banalities about insanity, misanthropy, capitalism, violence etc. like, they happen. together even.

it seems like yr just complaining that there wasnt more expository

There's the moment when the Standard Oil guys offer to make Plainview a millionaire, and he's like, "So what will I do then?" And the final act bears that out.

Caek: big screen, big sound. (The theme music sounds distractingly like the THX intro, which then reminded me of Chronic 2000).

caek go see it def !!!

no i'm complaining that character actions didn't make any sense, individually or in aggregate. i haven't read anything that convincingly makes sense of them on the basis of stuff that's actually in the movie, even on a small scale.

i loved plainview's transformation--basically shooting up his mansion, waited on hand and foot, rich as hell, chain smoking, probably (i assume so, since he was sleeping in the gutter) drunk a lot of the time.

we don't know why he sends hw away

i don't know, with this comment and some of your others. i think you're looking for something in the movie that PTA has no interest in?? there's lots of ambiguous stuff in real life. Also Plainview wasn't exactly a chatty guy. he barely talked about stuff with his fake brother. that was the only time we really got to hear his thoughts until the end. i don't think plainview would ever have explained his inner thoughts to people, even if he'd been married or something.

time passes=people change

seemed fairly obvious that he sent away the kid because his disability was too much trouble and he thought he had a new right-hand man, his brother from another mother

brother gone, kid comes back

the score is the one thing that didnt really do it for me - radiohead dude seemed like he was trying to get all jodorowsky - but didnt really have the chops to make it happen

seemed fairly obvious that he sent away the kid because his disability was too much trouble and he thought he had a new right-hand man, his brother from another mother

brother gone, kid comes back

yah and the kid was freaking out trying to burn him up and shit

Plus, l'il dude tried to burn down the house. -xpost

i like dmr's reasoning as to why the kid came back. and yeah the screechy music was annoying but i tuned it out.

i loved that scene on the beach where you saw plainview start to suspect his brother wasn't his brother

there's lots of ambiguous stuff in real life.

this is the default argument for art films. it's real life, we don't always know why people do what they do. ok, sure. this can justify any omission in range and depth of information. but there still should be some satisfying sense of formal patterning in the narration w/r/t how this information is revealed or suppressed. instead the film seemed to go about it in a very haphazard way. at the very least, a sense of how others might react to his mercurial and contradictory actions, how they fit into a context.

we can argue forever and not get anywhere, i'll admit it. i struggled with the film, watching it, and little i've thought about or read since has made it fall into place. although the argument about hw been replaced and then replacing the fake brother makes some sense.

did you guys think plainview was gay. at first i was thinking he was just to driven and emotional guarded to fuck w/the ladies. bu then didnt it seem like maybe him and the fay butler had more than a professional relationship.

amateurist, - eh yah theres been some pretty good explanations to yr particular questions and then you just go all - buuut the patterns or whatever

but there still should be some satisfying sense of formal patterning in the narration w/r/t how this information is revealed or suppressed.

well, not every movie (or every book) has to draw everything out for the reader/viewer. some things are best suggested, i think. and we all kinda knew why plainview sent the kid away, or we all had the same collective guess, articulated by dmr above. i get your point, but i'm really not looking for the stuff you are in a movie like this.

jhøsh:

i didn't think plainview was gay, but it occured to me that paul might be.

It occured to me that PTA could be.

but anyway enough w/the critics let us celebrate this great great film!

this is my son and business partner h.w.

slayed me everytime!

(POTENTIAL SPOILER)

I have to admit, I wasn't ready for the Mr. Holland's Opus deef son subplot.

but it didn't follow from the character's earlier development. when did he suddenly get so scorsese-style witty? so bombastic? it seemed like we moved into another movie altogether.

yes obviously. i said godfather ii up above, but also apocalypse now and 2001 (both of which have endings that you could say feel like another movie altogether). plainview is corleone/kurtz/kane hiding out in the black monolith. the joke being that instead of the starchild you get cain and abel all over again. i still think that section needs to be a longer, it needs to really establish the tonal shift instead of rushing into the payoff. but as standalone over-the-top theater the payoff scene is pretty awesome.

besides other reasons for sending the kid away is one more kane reference.

another scene which i laughed at, but which fits what amst is saying: when plainview threatens to kill the union oil guy. nothing really comes of it. and he still has a serious negosh with standard oil (or have it got it the wrong way round).

yeah other way round. the difference is that the standard guy is telling him, "you can't do this, just sell out to us" -- being patronizing. with the union people, plainview is providing the oil direct to them and keeping ownership of the field. but the key point was really plainview's baffled "what would i do then" question. it's part of the psychological profile of the Self-Made Man, the mythological rugged individualist.

none of the readings of this film i've seen seem entirely sustained by the film itself.

also all this art stuff looks like squiggles.

(i mean, you can say that about any arts criticism or interpretation ever.)

It occured to me that PTA could be (gay).

-- Eric H., Monday, January 7, 2008 5:20 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

really don't think so.

it's part of the psychological profile of the Self-Made Man, the mythological rugged individualist.

thing with this is that it's traditionally (?) tied up with protestantism, no? so odd that he's contemptuous of the xtians. the final scene was so bad on this score -- just felt like a very gauche series of zings @ religion from pta really.

plainview is an impossible character, but is he really mythic? does he really represent some important truth about oil and capitalism and whatnot? i think people want him to.

I meant gay perjoratively.

as far which oil deal he chose to pursue - he went w/the higher risk higher reward option and won - which he had already decided to do before those dudes tried to buy him out. sure they insulted him - but he wasnt going to fuck w/them anyway - so no skin off his neck (except for losing the minor deal for his other well). and he already was holding a grudge abt the freight prices they were charging him.

the scene in the restaurant was so fucking hilarious and weird. lol putting the napkin over his face so h.w. cant read his lips.

plainview is an impossible character, but is he really mythic? does he really represent some important truth about oil and capitalism and whatnot? i think people want him to.

I like that this movie is so much about this thing that the world revolves around but that in our daily lives we don't see -- and that it isn't about Bush and Iraq and all, but still focuses on the Texas tea.

http://www.thecityreview.com/f99scont2.gifhttp://www.nydailynews.com/img/2007/12/23/alg_blood.jpg

i call it "self-made man contemplates the infinite"

the final scene was so bad on this score -- just felt like a very gauche series of zings @ religion from pta really.

maybe if you dont take into account whos doing the zinging

I like that this movie is so much about this thing that the world revolves around but that in our daily lives we don't see -- and that it isn't about Bush and Iraq and all, but still focuses on the Texas tea.

-- Eazy, Monday, January 7, 2008 5:46 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

it isn't all about oil at all -- where are the politics in the film? shitloada workers die, it's set during the biggest labour battles in US history, but there don't seem to be any socialists or even union organizers.

it's about this sociopathic dude.

xpost

dude i *like* pta usually. i was stoked for the film.

That's what I liked about it -- that it was about oil not as a metaphor but just about the practicalities of the stuff that basically effects our economic, politics, and security.

THE THIRD REVELATION IS DOING THE ZINGING JUST LIKE THE FROGS DID THE ZINGING

it was about oil not as a metaphor but just about the practicalities of the stuff that basically effects our economic, politics, and security.

no it wasn't! unless you think little boston is a microcosm of modern america...? the economics of the industry were pretty opaque really -- as i say, no unions, no government. i'm not seeing it.

no i meant plainview not pta - those zings had a huge context in the film

both plainview and eli think their views are superior - really theyre just two miserable fucks

xp

the movie was about moustaches and what happens when they corrupt the soul of one man who is trying to save his boy from a screaming preacher

QUE ALWAYS TRYING TO BLAME THE STACHE

thing with this is that it's traditionally (?) tied up with protestantism, no? so odd that he's contemptuous of the xtians. the final scene was so bad on this score -- just felt like a very gauche series of zings @ religion from pta really.

i think the plainview character is all that american frontierist self-invention, daniel boone via ayn rand. he's not interested in religion except as a power system and has contempt for the idea of it as anything else. (in a way the last scene could be grover norquist vs. mike huckabee.) but of course eli mostly sees religion as a means to power too, so they're not really at odds, which is the point of plainview's humiliation of him.

jhøsh correct: both plainview and eli are men who thrive on self-determination (yeah, that old saw 'rugged individualism') but succeed to the point that they are slaved to their investments and become miserable vestigial functionary meat-sacks in decaying bodies.

it was about oil not as a metaphor but just about the practicalities of the stuff that basically effects our economic, politics, and security.

no it wasn't!

I mean it's about oil in that it's about derricks and shale and prospecting and stuff, not about the meaning of oil or oil as metaphor.

xposts

yeah eli is just a capitalist who tries to hide it

not exactly an original critique of religion (see every anti-televangelist rant ever) but there it is

the final plainview/h.w. scene really epitomizes the entrapment of plainview by the end: h.w. can leave and 'make' himself again while plainview is trapped in his gilt beverly hills cage.

i liked how he fell asleep in the bowling ally

unless you think little boston is a microcosm of modern america...?

i think "microcosm" isn't right. it's more like a creation myth.

i call brooklyn heights lil boston

whatever our stance on the movie, can we all agree on the awesomeness of the first eli sermon?

I mean it's about oil in that it's about derricks and shale and prospecting and stuff, not about the meaning of oil or oil as metaphor.

yeah. oil represents a lot of things in the movie, but "oil" is sort of the least important one. in the opening scene it's not even oil at all, it's silver, but the gist is the same, plainview ravaging/raging against the earth.

i love how his flock is just a few old ladies at the beginning xp

in the opening scene it's not even oil at all, it's silver

i was wondering abt this - are you sure?

The screenplay (linked above) says that it is.

can we all agree on the awesomeness of the first eli sermon?

so great

has anyone read Oil!?

he gets a receipt for silver and gold (xp)

wow silver and gold not too shabby

i guess the narrative on the film is pta leavin' his comfort zone, but that was kind of the narrative for the last film, and 'hard eight' is pretty unlike the others too... i liked the comfort zone and wish he had spent more time in it, because i think he understands miserable los angelenos and coked-up young idiots better than he does turn-of-the-century oilmen.

my hunch is he researched the shit out of it but then thought it more important to focus in. like i doubt ciaran hinds would have taken the role if he'd known there was going to be so little to it. reminds me of 'thin red line' quite a bit in that way.

he actually says on the 'boogie nights' commentary 'if i did a film about the turn of the century it'd still be all about me'. lol daddy issues amirite guys?

itd still be all abt his daddy?

well that's what his first three films are about so yeah that's what i read into it.

i cant remember what happen in magnolia except that i didnt like it

The world is a vast desert of unshaven guys after you've split with Fiona Apple.

^^^

next Fiona Apple album title.

lol

haha

lol daddy issues amirite guys?

yeah except punch-drunk love where the family dynamic is all about his sisters and mom. i don't even remember if there's a father character in that film. this one, for sure. (which of course citizen kane is all daddy issues too.)

(oh you said first three films. yeah.)

his daddy issues are often about absent/weak fathers -- taken to extreme with PDL.

i think he understands miserable los angelenos and coked-up young idiots better than he does turn-of-the-century oilmen.

that's a weird thing to say though. like this is some literal portrait. he's going for universal, not specific. the period details are fine, but they're hardly the point.

the pta dad-a-log:

hard eight: real father dead, killed by surrogate father.
boogie nights: real father a jellyfish dominated by unstable spouse; surrogate father offers porno film deal.
magnolia: bad fathers everywhere! molesting, abandoning, exploiting. paternal horroshow.
punch-drunk love: father is ???. adam sandler left to cope with stifling house of women.
there will be blood: fathers are bad news, on earth as in heaven, etc. (brothers are PROBLEM too.)

magnolia: bad fathers everywhere!

the thing about this film is: why two????? why have two shitty fathers-who-work-in-tv?

the thing about this film is: why?????

three shitty fathers in magnolia: the little kid's dad is fucking him up. (hence climactic scene where kid goes to him in the middle of the night and says "you have to be nicer to me" -- the cycle may be broken, tiny tim won't die, god bless us every one.)

This film is basically Daniel Day-Lewis' descent into Daniel Day-Lewis.

the score is the one thing that didnt really do it for me - radiohead dude seemed like he was trying to get all jodorowsky - but didnt really have the chops to make it happen

-- jhøshea, Monday, 7 January 2008 17:06 (2 hours ago) Link

Really, I fail to see a similarity between Don Cherry's work and Jonny Greenwood's score. DC's arrangements for Jodorowsky's films were (great, but) generally much more sparse & the compositions markedly less lush & melodic than this. Jonny's going for a more Penderecki / Bernard Herrmann sort of thing, and imo, he succeeded beautifully at it. His compositions are undeniably impressive and he clearly knows his stuff, and I really don't see how you could put your opinion down to him lacking "chops". I mean, this is clearly a personal taste thing and not an issue of his incompetence or failure in any way. Obviously, though, you don't have to like it. Just wanted to get the compositional perspective in.

I mean, this is clearly a personal taste thing and not an issue of his incompetence or failure in any way.

FU RAIDIOHED FAN

i liked the music too

FU RAIDIOHED FAN

how much u pay for a rainbowz

srsly tho the score was way to invasive - i found it really distracting throughout. see my point abt jodorowsky was he could have some crazy loud screeching sounds in his movies and it'd be just so awesome - in this case not so much. but thats a hard thing to pull off - hence the no chops comment. not sure why they had to be so ambitious here.

would have been so much better with john williams amirite

FU RADIOHED FAN

i liked the score in places. the shrieking parts. the other parts of it i don't really remember.

(and i don't even have in rainbows in any form so dere)

but u luv teh bends dont u radiohead fan

hahaha bernard herrmann. keep dreaming.

the score wasnt that bad, and was certainly as much a PTA choice as a jonny-greenwood-is-a-hack thing

the sound for PDL was SUPER SUPER invasive, although maybe that was a closer fit with the hustle and flow of that movie?

yah i had beef w/the pdl score too

but u luv teh bends dont u radiohead fan

ohno busted.

jonny greenwood'll get the oscar right? they love to give them to rock stars.

(is it too early to start the over/under on twbb oscars? i'm guessing 10 nominations, minimum of 4 awards.)

i lieked the score just wtf @ herrmann, sounded nothing like it. pdl was a pretty loud score, yuh. i think the concept was it got more harmonious as the film went on.

it alternated jonny greenwood and brahms no?

the 1st time brahms came along to signify important events, epic scope. the second time was just to signify the ending, but considering the ending we got, it seemed like cheap irony. just part of why i thought the ending seemed to come out of some other, less weird and less interesting movie.

but the use of brahms (if it truly be brahms) was odd too because it didn't use a passage that was conventionally coded as epic or cathartic or romantic. it used a kind of indeterminate passage--almost as though the markers of "classical music" sufficed to give it a certain valence that the actual music undermined a bit. i liked this, or at least it was, as they say, new.

I agree that the music was great but invasive/annoying during certain scenes (and occasionally just too loud in the mix).

Certainly the first hour and a half is the best thing PTA has done (no, I'm not a fan). That said, I think I was only thrilled by the 2 big oilstrike scenes, and the DDL/Kevin J O'Connor fireside talk (the way Plainview snorts about people, then laughs).

And what is "the Third Revelation," biblically? cuz in terms of this films it might be:

THE LAST SCENE SUCKS!!!

Is Paul Dano this awful in other things? PTA has bad judgment casting alleged mesmerists (Cruise in Magnolia too).

Did anyone mention the Huston Factor? One of several on-target points by J. Rosenbaum:

a striking piece of American self-loathing

The cynical shallowness of both the characters and the overall conception can't quite sustain the film's visionary airs

Day-Lewis, borrowing heavily from Walter and John Huston

Kevin J. O'Connor in a slimmer part offers a much more interesting and suggestive character

I haven't read Upton Sinclair (Oil! waiting at the library) or much Faulkner, but besides all the Bible-style 'family' hysterics (Daniel, Paul, Abel) I was reminded of Steinbeck's frequently silly East of Eden (which at least had a couple women who mattered).

Did you dislike the first Paul Dano chapel scene? And why?

Maybe that's what I didn't like about the movie, that it reminded me of John Huston, who I hate outside of his performance in Chinatown.

I thought Dano's performance, tho, was a great deal braver and more interesting than Day-Lewis's.

a striking piece of American self-loathing

i think this is only half-right, and the half he misses is sort of important.

(i.e. there's a reason the movie -- including the last scene -- is a lot of fun, and it's not because of "self-loathing")

Treasure of the Sierra Madre?
Man Who Would Be King?
Asphalt Jungle?
Maltese Falcon?
Beat the Devil?
African Queen?
Night of the Iguana?
Misfits?
Moby Dick?

Haven't seen 'em all, but lol at that admirable range.

I will say The African Queen is maybe the most overrated TCM/AFI American CLASSIC movie I've ever seen.

xp: I don't find him a plausible evangelist (lousy voice. is the character named for Billy Sunday?). Anything btwn him and DDL with slapping (3 scenes, right?) played like an SCTV sketch.

The first 10 minutes suggest it'd work best as a silent film. As most good talkies would.

I'll have to read all the posts, but since Plainview and Eli are the twin hypocrites of Capital and Church, what's J-Ro missing, tipsy?

ho, a dePalma fan griping about range! (my fav Hustons: Falcon, MWWBKing, Prizzi's Honor) I don't like African Queen much either.

Anyway, Anjelica shd accept DDL's Oscar on behalf of Noah Cross. I think hemost channels WALTER Huston from The Furies (helluva film).

Anything btwn him and DDL with slapping (3 scenes, right?) played like an SCTV sketch.

Which is a good thing, regardless of how many people are trying to sell the movie as a humorless masterpiece.

PS: I no longer think it was the best movie of the year (I make it a point never to tamp my after-theater enthusiasm, and later retract my accolades), but I still think it was a great movie with a strange and interesting last third.

I agree that it's occasionally sposed to be kinda funny; the finale doesn't work on that basis tho. Dano running behind bowling pins looked like Whack-a-Mole.

(also re range, dredge up semitruthful axiom that many great artists make the same work over and over)

No wonder "I DRINK YR MILKSHAKE" was the only line I'd scene on the internets going in. Oh, the kids luv to fetishize the stinko stuff.

since Plainview and Eli are the twin hypocrites of Capital and Church, what's J-Ro missing, tipsy?

how much pleasure they get from power, and how much fun it is to watch them, for a start. which is part of the point, if not the whole point.

lol, remy has seen multiple "great" films this year? I wonder if one other is real bloody and made by hyped American auteur(s), hmmmmm?

well, I didn't have fun watching Eli.

Yes, range isn't it all, but when an artist works in an area I couldn't care less about (which isn't actually even fair to Huston -- he did, after all, strike out with Reflections in a Golden Eye), I guess that's when I long for it.

I didn't have fun watching Eli.

you didn't have fun at southland tales either. i am suspect of your fun-o-meter!

i thought twbb was tons of fun. (as opposed to no country, which i thought was almost no fun at all.)

Guys, Hot Fuzz was fun.

haha, I guess I'm enough of an angry lefty that I resist having fun watching rapacious thieves get rich, too. And not to sound too much like Armond, the usual trashing of religion scores it some critical points.

Kane refs besides kid being dragged away kicking on train? And 1927 DDL being a deadlier Welles.

tipsy, I am enjoying yr book, we shd drink sometime.

haha, I guess I'm enough of an angry lefty that I resist having fun watching rapacious thieves get rich, too.

What was that about Citizen Kane?

we shd drink sometime.

affirmative.

i think the biggest kane echo is thematic, the whole magnate-unsuccessfully-filling-a-gnawing-emptiness-with-wealth-and-power thing (not unique to kane obviously but made iconic by it). although plainview as a character is maybe more like kane's absent father (or like george hearst on deadwood).

anyway,if I'm unclear, I liked this on balance. It made me think how silly the 1991/2003 chant "No blood for oil" was. WHY CHANGE NOW?

heh, Eric I am anticipating yr zings! CF Kane inherited his wealth. He only stole jounalists (fairgame) and couldn't even steal an election!

HBO shows seem very influential don't they.

-- Alex in SF, Friday, September 28, 2007 9:52 PM (3 months ago)

I don't see it in this instance, but yes, part of the Death of Cinema!

who played the crevice-faced Bandy? it wasn't Richard Crenna, was it?(dead?)

I thought KJ O'Connor was James LeGros til the credits.

Oh OK then, I forgot Kane was a saint.

And, if it's unclear, I'm ambivalent on this one on the whole, but haven't ruled out one of those Thin Red Line second-viewing miracles.

bandy is colton woodward, it says. maybe another local? what a face.

xp: It wasn't meant to be a rational judgment on robber barons, just my personal peccadillo. (like you finding No Country "not that bloody," tho that might be...generational) However, Kane IS more fun than Plainview - he dances!

you upgraded TRL? how so? my fav Malick film

the score (esp the pizzicato thing) oft put me in mind of Bugs v Fudd.

You're not talking about me not finding NCfOM not that bloody right? I thought it was fantastically bloody.

I upgraded Thin Red Line massively from my first, unbemused reaction. I should also note I haven't subjected The New World to the same test.

oh OK, but i think before you saw NCFOM you wrote u 'heard' it wasnt that bloody (or less so than Sweeney Todd).

watch Man Who Wd Be King, dude.

lol, remy has seen multiple "great" films this year? I wonder if one other is real bloody and made by hyped American auteur(s), hmmmmm?

don't be condescending, morbs.

great movies i saw last year:

killer of sheep (yeah, yeah, i know...)
there will be blood
king of kong
chris and don: a love story
in the shadow of the moon
who is this nilsson and why is everybody talking about him?
wind that shakes the barley
4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days

etc.

i haven't seen diving bell, bamako, into the wild, or east of bucharest

watch Man Who Wd Be King, dude.

I'll make it a double feature with King of Comedy.

those lord of the rings movies would have been awes if only they'd been directed by huston in Man Who Wd Be King mode.

boy, was I mistaken in watching Atonement last night instead.

I'm in flyover territory and this hasn't even opened yet. But I'll defintely see it despite the bordering-on-hideous trailer.

I'm almost 100% certain that I saw Kevin J. O'Connor at the theatre I saw the movie at tonight. Which is weird and random because I saw it out in some random theatre in Orland Park, but if it wasn't him, it was his twin brother.

Great film, BTW.

After a little googling, discovered he went to high school about 15 minutes away from the movie theatre. So I guess it really was him.

sorry remy, i keep forgettin yr in LA where "everything's great" ;)

^insufficiently precise Shampoo reference^

also re J Huston's range: Fat City, The Red Badge of Courage and The Dead are pretty different.

God I loved this. Going to ruin new movies for me for at least two months. All shot for 25 million! I think Dodgeball cost more to make.

i think 'dodgeball' cost less than £25m, though what this has to do with anything i don't know. i guess stiller's character is comparable with day lewis's.

But I assume it's meant to be ambiguous, as far as whether the Devil took over Eli or somehow set up that meeting. I just assumed that it was a negotiating tactic on Eli's part, and that Plainview taunts him about it.

-- Eazy, Monday, January 7, 2008 4:34 PM (59 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

Fwiw, I assumed the same.

One of my (and Eric's) favored bloggers chimes in:

feel as though Anderson were really sure of how he wanted to say something meaningful but spent less time on the meaning that supplied that ... meaningfulness. To be clear: I'm not lodging a "style over substance" complaint, exactly, but rather suggesting that PTA knows only partly what he wants to say, and knows perhaps way too well how he wants to say it....

In the case of There Will Be Blood, the bland message probably has to do with the violent symbiosis and competition between religious communities and brute primitive accumulation as the crux of American society. Or, to put it more obliquely, the two major power-entitities in American history and their dialectical co-existence. I don't want to be rhetorical when I suggest that, for me, the film's substance is nevertheless too facile, too underdeveloped, to sustain the sureness of its elocution. Where are the roots of Daniel Plainview's entrepreneurial spirit? The roots of Eli Sunday's evangelism? How can one depict a major social and historical clashing without really depicting them socially or historically?

http://elusivelucidity.blogspot.com/2008/01/there-will-be-blood.html

interesting but i think he's missing it. for one thing, the "roots" of both plainview and eli's anger/ambition/etc -- like the roots of lots of things in pta's movies -- are emotional disconnectedness borne of, more or less, bad childhoods. which isn't as simpleminded as it sounds, because you have to consider the things that go into making a "bad" childhood. you can call it reductive psychobabble, but you can't say it's not provided in the narrative. (and of course you could reduce kane to sort of the same terms, although that narrative is deeper and more detailed.) and for another thing, you can't talk about the force of the filmmaking as if it's somehow separate from the substance of the movie. the force of the filmmaking is a product of the same kind of conflicted drives, and the same kind of gnawing american ambition, that the story revolves around. to some extent the "how" of what he says is the "what" of it. medium and message, and all that.

also of course i think calling days of heaven "smarter" than much of anything is pretty funny, but that's just me.

To be clear: I'm not lodging a "style over substance" complaint, exactly... I don't want to be rhetorical when I suggest that, for me...

whateves dude ur doing those things blah blah blah

If you don't understand the roots of acquisitiveness or the desire for religious certainties in this world, you really havn't been paying much attention to history. The very 'blandness' of the 'message' stems from the fact that when Sinclair wrote 'Oil' and Norris wrote 'McTeague' there was something groundbreaking in their depictions that became so much a part of the canon that their capacity to shock and stir us dissipated. However, as part of the canon for so many years, they also tend to be overlooked and their simple stories power to appall has returned somewhat. This precisely the kind of film I thought should be required viewing California High Schools and I'm not trying to sound glib, either.

I also saw Eli as a very Aimee Simple McPherson character with a whiff of more than just financial scandal 'round him when he confronts Plainview at the end.

The very 'blandness' of the 'message' stems from the fact that when Sinclair wrote 'Oil' and Norris wrote 'McTeague' there was something

Do you mean The Octopus instead of Mcteague?

xp: no, I don't find Days very smart either... Well, the roots are provided on the surface, but that might not be very 'rooty.' Both Plainview and Eli (tho in the first case, bolstered by a generally fascinating performance) are more concepts with legs than people, to me.

That is, i'm kind of at the midpoint between
these two. ("grand stateliness" and "ridiculous coda")

Just picked up Oil!, and by a skim it looks like a mighty loose adap.

As far as bad childhoods go, I think both Andersons, PT and Wes, need to forgive Daddy and move on. What was Ghoulardi like at home?

you can call it reductive psychobabble, but you can't say it's not provided in the narrative.

well, yes you can! why were there no women in plainview's life? the film maybe literalizes the fantasy (or i suppose 'certainty') that very rich people are scociopathic to the point of... psychopathy.

pta makes the religious people look ridiculous, but the acquisitive drive of ddl is treated almost with awe. which i get, but eli's ability to sway a congregation is impressive! the film was with ddl, humiliating him. but what i really mean is that the confrontation of capitalized Religion and Capitalism was fluffed.

i get that he's stripped political content from the novel: did he add the murder of eli?

many very rich people are sociopathic to the point of... psychopathy

bret easton ellis over here.

pta makes the religious people look ridiculous, but the acquisitive drive of ddl is treated almost with awe

this is eighty-six types of projection. both eli and plainview are ruthless fucks, but plainview recognizes this. i don't think pta was interested in making some sort of overall statement about religious people, except for those bastards who use others' faith as a means to expand their own power.

all I've gleaned from the skim is that there's a murder in the (middle of) novel, but that Plainview is either a PTA-originated character or an amalgam.

wikipedia (loose indeed):

Oil! is a novel by Upton Sinclair published in 1927. It is a third person narrative, with its main character being "Bunny" Arnold Ross Jr., son of an oil tycoon. Bunny's sympathetic feelings towards oilfield workers and socialists provoke arguments with his father throughout the story. The book was written in the context of the Harding administration's Teapot Dome Scandal and takes place in southern California.

i've googled a bit more and am trying to work up a "aaaah look, pta excluded the politics" angle bit by bit.

I did mean 'McTeague', which of course leads to 'Greed'. The film also has quite transparent references to 'Chinatown' and 'Citizen Kane'.

some of the good things about those films are that they had women, some social/political context, and effective antagonists.

xp: well, it sure looks like he dropped much of the book's politics (Stuart Klawans says so in a positive review in The Nation). Sinclairish ideas are seriously out of fashion since ca.1980 among all but scorned "Naderites" (see any ILE politics thread).

hay guys i just visited w/a friend who worked on boogie nights/magnolia/punch drunk love and who has been known to pal around w/pta.

her take on the movie: omg the final scene in the bowling alley ddl is paul in that scene - i dont know how he did it but thats impressive that is him lololololol!

so everyone can take that and tweak yr daddy theories or whatever.

pta killed a guy.

after he drank his m_lksh*ke.

As far as bad childhoods go, I think both Andersons, PT and Wes, need to forgive Daddy and move on.

yeah i largely agree, but i think both of their '07 movies are sort of attempts to do that. otoh i like blood a lot more than darjeeling even though it's the one with the character who doesn't at all break free of his nested demons. (h.w. does break free though, so i guess there's your hope for the future or whatever.)

why were there no women in plainview's life? the film maybe literalizes the fantasy (or i suppose 'certainty') that very rich people are scociopathic to the point of... psychopathy.

i think there are no women in his life because his relationships are almost entirely mercenary. he can't relate on an intimate level (even though there are scenes where he obviously knows and regrets that, or at least resents it). why? you can imagine whatever domestic scenario you want to explain it, i'm not sure it needs to be sketched out. plus also sketching it out would make him more specific and less mythic -- i think the characters in the movie are deliberately drawn in stark lines, which is a narrative strategy, not some kind of mistake. (whether it's a strategy that works or that you like is another matter, but it's not like he just forgot to put the details in.)

and i don't think it's really about "rich people," i think it's about a strain of american individualism and ambition -- and is very self-consciously a product of the same thing. but to credit that you have to suppose that pta actually knows what he's doing, which i'm willing to grant.

well, it sure looks like he dropped much of the book's politics (Stuart Klawans says so in a positive review in The Nation). Sinclairish ideas are seriously out of fashion since ca.1980 among all but scorned "Naderites" (see any ILE politics thread).

All the better reason to avoid politicking and just go for art. Yeah, there are no women, but that was often true in frontier stories. Anyway, maybe this isn't a story about oppression and political resistance, maybe it's just an old-fashioned story about the corrosive effects on a single-minded individual of too much envy, greed, and misanthropy. Win the whole world and lose your soul, etc.

what i liked best about the movie was in its first half -- the details!! when people compare it with soviet film i think that's what they mean. i just liked seeing him trying to dig up bits of silver and stuff.

xpost

and that's what i liked least -- the Big Statements you could get from 'mrs doubtfire' or that one nic cage film.

I think some reviewers are confusing really strong technical filmmaking and historical content for an attempt at a "grandiose" or "epic" movie. I don't think PTA set out to make many statements at all with this one (nor did he with his other movies).

Also seen two articles reference Citizen Kane without a Rosebud. It's the kid, obviously.

michael white and call all dest OTM; there were lots of ambient THEMES, but there was no big thesis. it was a story!

I can't believe it was meant to be a "statementless" story.

Win the whole world and lose your soul, etc.

speaking of! the ending comes off as Pacino Scarface...

I was expecting some kind of third-act twist with the whole Paul/Eli thing that never materialized ...

I was expecting some kind of third-act twist with the whole Paul/Eli thing that never materialized ...

^^^ this is very true

but that loose end is way more productive/provacative as a loose end, right? i think so

the whole third act never really materialized, it was just gestured at. what i can't really tell is if that's just mostly some sort of pomo statement or mostly because he had to keep it under 3 hours.

(either way it comes across kinda pomo -- you know how these stories end, cut to the big lonely mansion, cut to the big confrontations)

i thought his son would come back as communiss union organizer and fuck his shit up :/

all u were promised was blood! i think thats important

I can't believe it was meant to be a "statementless" story.

i think it's arguably statementless, in the sense of not having exactly a social or political agenda or whatever (although it lends itself to easy sociopolitical parallels). but i don't think it's meaningless, like that elusive lucidity post sort of claims.

Yeah I mean it's not "statementless" but it doesn't have a unified thesis and doesn't really recommend a point of view. PTA is too smart to try that stuff. If I had to summarize the "statement" I'd say it's about the costs of modernization, which consumed even those who were pushing the hardest for it. I mean, the electric lights outside the mansion when they move to 1927 tell that part of the story as well as anything, once you see what kind of shape the guy INSIDE the mansion is in.

People looking for a capitalism/religion binary or whatever are crazy too. Daniel and Eli are both forces of modernization and they both pay the price for that. Remember when Eli mentions that he's doing radio? He's been looking for a mass audience ever since he got that first church built. Also telling: HW wants to drill in Mexico and says that he misses the fields and working outside. He's trying to avoid what Daniel has been forced to become (an administrator). I don't think the film is specifically anti-modern but just pointing out some of the cost.

guys it's a movie, not a manifesto. it changed the way i will think about bowling forever. i want nothing more in a movie.

lol

xp: well, I like/am more receptive to the psychopathic rich angle way more than that CAD's.

and man, am I old-fashioned, I don't mind theses at all (ie, Towne/Polanski's in Chinatown)

guys it's a movie, not a manifesto.

um. because...movies are never about anything?

the important question is whether you liked it, Morbs.

i like theses too. i just think this awesome movie doesnt really have one!

whatever, i dont mean to cop out on productive discussion by saying i think the film is meant to be open or ambiguous. the things i took away from it were mostly visceral, though. i loved the level playing fields (level wrt to morality and wrt to the community, if not quite financially) of oil and religion as empires, and the sacrifice of family/health in both of those endeavors. but the oil fire and the sermons and the way the oil looked, and the chemistry of DDL and dano are the things i remember fondest. is that style over substance?? maybe?

maybe, but i agree. and i think some of the reviews sort of complaining about how "yeah it's a great visceral experience but where's the IDEAS man" are weird because i think a great visceral experience IS an idea. its form, the way it's made and how it feels, it feels that way for a reason. (and also because i think there are plenty of "ideas" in it anyway.)

(just like i think no country for old men feels the way it does -- flat, mostly -- for a reason. i think its flatness is deliberate and true to the material, but i think the material is basically flimsy. it's balsa wood. whereas the material in twbb might be sort of incompletely processed, but is definitely not flimsy.)

the chemistry of DDL and dano

truly oil and water for me!

So no one's linked Armond's pan ? I'm kinda surprised to find that he approves of DDL (Norbit!) while hating the film... and the score put him in mind of Carl Stalling, too.

Plainview is the most remarkable movie performance since Eddie Murphy’s Norbit trifecta. One must recognize that Day Lewis’ is also a postmodern comic turn. He gives Plainview the insinuating growl of John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown—-a Biblical allusion already tied to both Hollywood dynastic history and the corrupt pioneer spirit... The way Plainview shames his son by calling him an “Oooorphan” combines cruelty and self-dramatization in a way that recalls the hammy grandeur of Olivier and Charles Laughton at their best....

Yet, Anderson’s story becomes stupidly fashionable in its stacked contest of Plainview vs. Eli, capitalist ruthlessness vs. religious fanaticism. The shabby set-up of Plainview and Eli’s ultimate confrontation in a bowling alley is so confusing and slapdash that their symbolic clash-—where one forces the other to confess his shallowness and deny his beliefs-—comes across as just secular-progressive prejudice and loopy, unconvincing drama. Each man is a thesis position, not a character.

people reading anti-religious bigotry into this are making the kind of huge mistake of thinking eli's "religious" in any serious way to begin with. not that there isn't some sideswipe at the way churches organize power and punishment, but i don't think that's what the story's after at all. but i guess being snippy about "secular-progressive prejudice" is a handy way to show what a great big contrarian you are, mr. noo-york alt-weekly writer.

well, no, he's not "religious" in any serious way -- that's how you can tell he (along with his duped congregants) is a contemporary American film character.

Fundie fraudulence vs robber baron is a mismatch of power though. John D Rockefeller lasted a lot longer than Aimee McPherson.

the congregants aren't duped, that's too simplistic (more simplistic than the movie). the church is the organizing principle of the community. the community doesn't exist without it. it's the only available power structure, and so it's the one eli ascends. (and uses as a launchpad to elsewhere.)

Fundie fraudulence vs robber baron is a mismatch of power though.

more like dano vs. ddl is a mismatch of power. but that's on purpose, they're hardly supposed to be equals.

I agree, but if Plainview is the domineering 'bully' (except for the baptism-humiliation sequence), why were the Lincoln Square UWS crowd so giddily enjoying the last scene? (Those who weren't shaking their heads at it, at least.)

because it's funny!

Fundie fraudulence vs robber baron is a mismatch of power though. John D Rockefeller lasted a lot longer than Aimee McPherson.

-- Dr Morbius, Tuesday, January 15, 2008 10:57 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

this is right. but -- and maybe this is off, but over here anyway -- christianity has been capitalism's best friend. it makes teh workers believe in the value of thrift, hard work, and not breaking the moral order etc etc; meanwhile for the big dogs it makes them feel part of the 'elect'.

how was paul f tompkins?

(also on that armond white thing, contrarians in liberal cities bitching about "secular-progressive prejudice" have clearly not spent enough time living places where much of the population a.) actually believes in hell; b.) thinks secular progressives are going there; and c.) thinks that's a swell arrangement.)(a point of view that somehow never gets called "elitist".)

As with most Armond pans, that one was too retarded to link. He's hilarious.

I think Tipsy's statement that a visceral experience IS an idea best states what I thought of this one. There isn't really time to think about the movie while the movie is happening because most of the individual scenes are so good. You can do plenty of thinking later and come up with some suggestions/themes/connections/etc, but I think PTA was mostly interested in giving a fairly simple story a kind of presence and life that most American movies don't even try for anymore.

Not to get all OTM but that's another excellent point Tipsy.

Seconded

christianity has been capitalism's best friend

I just rewatched Pasolini's Gospel Acc to St. Matthew last night, funnily enough, so I guess that depends how you separate Christianity from an anarcho-socialist hippie like Christ.

Anyway, I think 2 out of 7 Oscars might be a better forecast, re tipsy's post last week.

saw this last night. thought it was magnificent & terrible.

the score was tremendous, and at least as classic and DDL's performance. (that said, i think i preferred Paul D's acting [with the exception of the last scene, maybe] - there was something more reckless in it. but i'm not sure it will be as remembered.)

i think it's a mistake to try to break the film down into an allegory. at the same time, i don't think it's a plain, modest character piece. clearly it's big themes writ in fierce colours (mostly shades of black and red), but these questions and answers are made as messy as the real world around them. there's no simple message to decode, just a groping for truth or insight, and that fumbling feels like a powerful sort of movement - like trying to find your way through the smoke.

also i was certainly left wondering wtf happened in PT Anderson's life between Punch-Drunk and this... all that optimism, cracked right fucking open.

he got married, had a kid.

ah, the hetero life.

maybe not married, but he had a kid w. maya rudolph.

saw this on tuesday (probably at the screening before you, sean!). I thought it was magnificently well-made, but I think I need another screening to properly wrap my head around the tone of the film - parts of it were seriously funny, others sad, others frightening. tonally it had nothing at all in common with No Country which it so often shares sentences with. this was a v. different beast.

I thought the ending was wonderful - at turns hilarious and horrific, kind of like cramming the entirety of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest into 10 minutes.

oh and this has probably been pointed out elsewhere, but the religion vs. capitalism thing does. not. work. at all as an allegory in this film. I don't think they were aiming for it.

not versus, so much as a general dynamic between them? or just as two common vessels for exploitation.

I don't understand why actors like Ciaran Hinds are cast in films where they get nearly nothing to do (cutting room casualty, maybe).

I thought it was really about two men trying to achieve the same ascent in power/wealth, and how ultimately the crueller force will prevail. I guess you could see those characters as allegorical for those two forces but the characters (especially Dano's) seemed too multifaceted for that allegory to hold much water.

DDL, Method Nutcase:

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2007/11/daniel-day-lewis-intimidates-there-wll.html

I don't understand why actors like Ciaran Hinds are cast in films where they get nearly nothing to do (cutting room casualty, maybe).

-- Dr Morbius, Thursday, January 17, 2008 4:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

^^ seriously. he's great, and it's hard to imagine him signing up for a walk-on.

Has this gotten wide release yet???

no, 129 N. American theaters last weekend. Presumably big expansion next Friday.

I wonder if Ciaran Hinds is trying to increase his exposure in the U.S. or something 'cause my reaction was similar to Morbs': 'What's he doing in this little part?'

granted I know it comes from a book, but Daniel Plainview has to be one of the biggest cinematic cocksuckers in the history of movies. Love it!

"you're afterbirth!"

one of my problems was that Eli is just not that compelling a character..he's a truly small town, v. naive huckster (who happens to believe his own shit, mostly) and Plainview just treats him as the stupid fuckin yokel healer doof he is, rightly.

i thought the one scene we see of the brother Paul is far more engaging than any Eli/Plainview interaction. Paul comes off as a possible worthy foil of Daniel, at least has the ability to get exactly what he wants out of him...the quick cash to GET AWAY from l. boston and the satisfaction that Plainview will go and fuckin destroy Eli, probably.

by the end scene (20 years later!) Eli's not really changed or figured anything out AT ALL...he mentions sermonizing on radio, clearly failing w/ a bigger audience cuz HE SUCKS AND IS STILL AN IDIOT. and Plainview imo is finally fed up (& drunk & bonkers & puffed up by being waited on, etc.) that he goes to the extreme that his character prob wanted to 20 yrs ago.

"im finished" is a pretty great final line tho. bookend to the first dialogue we hear which is his "ladies and gentlemen" spiel.

why would ciaran hinds NOT take this part?

are you kidding me??

and why would PTA not want to cast a terrific actor in a role?

he got gypped, no? would he have taken it on knowing how little would remain?

The theme music sounds distractingly like the THX intro

ha, it really does!

great movie, though. fiiiinally saw it after waiting for it to get to my area.

the print was scratched as fuck

he got gypped, no? would he have taken it on knowing how little would remain?

-- That one guy that hit it and quit it, Sunday, January 20, 2008 8:05 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Link

i'm sure he would. are you joking? really this whole line of thought is quite fuckin insane.

really this whole line of thought is quite fuckin insane.

^^
every film thread on ilx

all hinds does is make stuff happen for DDL. at this point i'll throw anything against the film, so in this case it's underuse of a fine actor (and implicitly indulgence of a bafflingly overrated one).

i thought hinds was great. small role with almost no dialogue but he does it all with his performance. why anyone would have a problem with casting a good actor in a small but challenging role, or any role at all, as i have said, baffles me.

do you think PTA should have expanded the part because he got a good actor to play it?

my hunch is he *contracted* the part after writing the thing, or that the guy was a bigger deal in the novel, something like that.

i think expanding the part -- e.g. giving plainview a deece antagonist -- would have been a good idea. he kind of disappears -- couldn't he have opened his own stereo store/become a magician/gone back to school or something?

but that's PTA's MO throughout the whole movie. he's obsessively focused on plainview alone, really, to the point of not even bothering to include the expository material amateurist was asking about. it's a very strange but imo effective approach.

and i think the key thing about plainview's character is his total alone-ness. the important line for me was "i want to make enough money to get away from everyone."

yeah totes, i get that; just don't like it. i wanted the expository shit too.

Saw it today. Liked it very much, am liking it even more now the more I'm thinking about it.

there will be ned

There will, there will. Probably some blog thoughts later.

Saw it today also and think it's the best thing I've seen all year. It's California history by way of Sergio Leone - civilization the last generation of frontier manic/obsessives who end up in command of an ephemeral empire with none of the visceral command they subsist on.

Somewhat surprised to learn this (from LA Weekly interview with PTA])

There Will Be Blood becomes more loquacious as it progresses, however, culminating in a histrionic monologue in which Plainview explains the concept of "drainage"— the way oil under a given piece of land can be drawn out by the wells on surrounding lots — by likening it to two milk shakes connected by a single long straw. There are lines in that sequence so instantly quotable that I suggest to Anderson it's not long before they start appearing on T-shirts for sale in those Hollywood Boulevard novelty shops.

"I must admit to you where that came from," Anderson says giddily, noting that the eccentric metaphor comes straight from the congressional transcripts of the 1920s "Teapot Dome" scandal, in which New Mexico Republican Senator Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes for the oil-drilling rights to public lands in California and Wyoming from several oil-industry fat cats (including Edward Doheny).

"I think it was Albert Fall, who was asked to describe drainage before Congress," Anderson continues. "And his way of describing it was, 'If you have a milk shake and I have a milk shake, and my straw reaches across the room...' I'm sure I embellished it and changed it around and made it more Plainview. But Fall used the word 'milk shake,' and I thought it was so great. It was mad to see that word among all this official testimony and terminology — a fucking milk shake. I get so happy every time I hear that word."

I want to read this ASAP

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/images/8124.jpg

Somewhat surprised to learn this

haha that's awesome.

It's California history by way of Sergio Leone

otm.

"a fucking milk shake. I get so happy every time I hear that word."

<3

eli getting beaten up in the mud was one of the funniest things i've seen in a while

ditto for the climactic scene

The final scene really made the movie for me. I'd consider it perfect.

yeah totes, i get that; just don't like it. i wanted the expository shit too.

-- That one guy that hit it and quit it, Monday, January 21, 2008 12:03 AM (19 hours ago) Bookmark Link

i guess to expand on what i'm saying tho what i really found interesting was how it on the surface is so "epic" but at the same time is so wilfully limited.

yeah very underpopulated. which was something else that made me think leone. his movies sometimes feel like there are about 6 people in the whole west.

and so the epicness comes from heightened drama between a couple of characters, rather than grand historical or chronological sweep.

im glad someone mentioned Leone above. honestly, the other movie that I kept thinking about was Aguirre!

It's California history by way of Sergio Leone

by way of peckinpah, or reaching for that level of fatalism anyway? Bring me the head of capitalism. Oh, wait... don't, it's too ugly. Religion, then! Oh wait... even worse. Well just bring me whatever you find. Thing is, I'm not sure PTA finds much here, except DDL, who fortunately is in every scene. I'm with Ebert -- a best actor Oscar will go to DDL, who had nothing to compete against and nothing to do in this movie but act his everlovin' ass off. Man, it's fun to watch. I don't think it's much bigger than that, though. I so wish it was.

by way of peckinpah, or reaching for that level of fatalism anyway?

Peckinpah isn't symbolic in that sense in the way that Leone is. If Peckinpah was writing this story, Plainview and Eli would be two loser scam artists competing against each other for what they can get out of the town - oil or souls - and would end with a dry well.

Also, I think that Polanski is a sizable influence on this.

You mean because DDL is doing a vocal impression from a Polanski film?

s1ocki, Hinds' is a nothing part!

THERE'S NO SMALL PARTS ONLY SMALL ACTORS.

riiiight. also, not the size of boat, rather the motion of ocean.

hee hee, little penises

save it for WDYLL

The opening strings reminded me of LOST.
The brother reminded me of Will Oldham.
The movie ruled me.

this:

the final section could have used another 20 minutes to build before that scene. it was like having to tack godfather ii onto the end of the godfather.

I won't add much. PTA's best film but immensely unsatisfying like all the rest.

Has no one remarked how beautifully DDL moves in character. The Noah Cross/Foghorn Leghorn voice faded before my memory of him shambling across the desert, or just listening to H.W. or the Standard Oil guys. DDL's grandiosity is much better served here than in Gangs of New York, but PTA lets him down. There isn't enough space for Plainview's megalomania to develop, or to allow the conclusion's ironies to resonate; the film's drama is foreshortened and stretched.

As for the Eli vs Plainview matchup: having read a little of Upton Sinclair, I expected more juice, more zip -- more sensationalism.

PTA's ambitions are more George Stevens (Giant) than Leone.

Throwing bowling pins counts as "zip," I guess, but the movie turns what sounds like a good if predictable dissection of the ways in which a plutocrat and religious fundie understand each other into an awkwardly staged laugh. The audience loved it, of course.

I'd love to hear Jonny Greenwood's score at home, just never, never, never again in the theatre.

STILL hasn't opened in Tupelo, which means it probably won't at all. I hate this fucking backwater.

the third revelation:

When he broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature shout, 'Come!' Immediately I saw a black horse appear, and its rider was holding a pair of sclaes; and I seemed to hear a voice shout from a mong the four living creatures and say 'A day's wages for a quart of corn, and a day's wages for three quarts of barley, but do not tamper with the oil, or the wine.
-Rev 6:5, New Jerusalem Bible tr., emphasis added by J0hn for graet justice

I saw the movie last night and thought it was pretty good for the most part - I remain unclear as to why "people are beasts to one another" is such a huge motivator for so many good filmmakers

visually though this thing was fucking awesome

nb my favorite movie is "Silent Night, Deadly Night IV" so I am not able to defend any of my positions on cinema

I remain unclear as to why "people are beasts to one another" is such a huge motivator for so many good filmmakers

see also "man on mission deals with ununderstanding spouse" and "absent dad proves self through magical experience" for stories and themes that probably resonate more for people who have sacrificed much of their home life in order to interact with people like Harvey Weinstein.

I don't get it

then again, I have no idea who Harvey Weinstein is

ok I get it now, good call A

we must remind Harvey at the sacrifices actors have made for him.

the dream I had last night involved watching the movie again with a friend who, on seeing Paul Dano, cracked, "I swear to god this kid was an altar boy at the Mass I attended last week."

Finally saw this. Nothing to add to this thread, other than I liked it a lot. I need to get the score.

Nice to see a film that has the balls to be unabashedly, unapologetically nuts.

ultimately, balls of stupidity

my only beef is that this seemed pretty anti-climatic. at the end i was kind of wondering what the point was.
Everything about Pailfield was awsome tho and totally made the film.

Picture Rupert Murdoch bashing in Mike Huckabee's head with a bowling pin.

TUESDAY NIGHT

I remain unclear as to why "people are beasts to one another" is such a huge motivator for so many good filmmakers

i'd shorten that to just "people are beasts," it's a sort of anthropological view, i think, moralistic anthropology. when i was describing this movie to my dad i said it was mythological and he started pressing me on that, like, what kind of myth, what was being represented. so i kinda stammered around my ideas about it, the wounded childhoods and how the different characters dealt with them (one by abandonment, one by insurgency, one by independence) and the force of anger ddl represents. my dad said, "uh-huh. like a resentful spirit furious at the earth for its own existence." which i thought was right.

(i think my dad decided not to go see it. thought it sounded like kind of a bummer.)

uh-huh. like a resentful spirit furious at the earth for its own existence

OTM

I thought the final scene made perfect sense. Maybe I was expecting it to be weird and out of nowhere, as that's what the general consensus was in the reviews. But from a story and character standpoint, I thought it was sound.

Saw this yesterday afternoon and thought it was truly, truly great. Film's editor and cinematographer were there after the screening for a Q&A and had some interesting things to add:

*PTA went for a "classic" long take sort of shoot until final bowling alley scene, where he reverted to "regular" PTA shooting style

*DDL would often move wherever he felt like it in a scene - without warning - and cinematographer was lucky enough to capture him (i.e. getting up and berating oil co. guy in restaurant)

* Lots of Kubrick influenced shots in the film (I caught the Barry Lyndon-ish "signing of checks with butler at your side" scene)- most of it supposedly unconscious until film was being edited, when it was decided by PTA to keep the newly discovered Kubricisms

I thought the final scene made perfect sense.

yeah i just think it ran out of time. i predict a 3 1/2 hour cut at some point. which some people will think makes it better, and some people won't.

i can't help thinking of the ending as an embedded apocalypse now joke. like, we know the absurd third act, we've seen it before, here we go into nutso. but i agree it makes sense in terms of the story. and it's really funny.

xpost: that's funny about the kubrickisms

PTA went for a "classic" long take sort of shoot until final bowling alley scene, where he reverted to "regular" PTA shooting style

whatever this means. he used long takes (by 'classical' standards) in his other big films.

i hope he comes back with something unexpected.

That's it, this is the official Emperor's New Clothes film of 2007 for me. And I didn't even hate it until the last 12 minutes.

I listened to this January 28 radio show w/ Kent Jones and Geoffrey O'Brien discussing '07 film, and one of them thought TWBB got way less interesting when DDL became a homicidal maniac (some folx seem to have forgotten all about the murder of the Kevin J O'Connor character, maybe because it doesn't resonate much at all). And the mention of the mansion finale being like The Shining is spot-on: That's what it turns into, shitty Kubrick and shitty Nicholson.

Jospeh Conrad wrote an absurd third act?

dr morbs OTM

I don't buy his transformation either.

And the mention of the mansion finale being like The Shining is spot-on: That's what it turns into, shitty Kubrick and shitty Nicholson.

A discussion on Nathaniel's Oscar blog:

I know some who believe (DDL) overacts. I don’t agree and I don’t think it’s that simple. And it reminds me of yet another anecdote (from the Eyes Wide Shut DVD -- and apologies if I don’t have it down exactly) but it was when after Spielberg had told Kubrick that he thought Nicholson was too “Kabuki” in The Shining (I am so sick of writers using the term “Kabuki,” by the way). Anyway, Kubrick asked Spielberg who his favorite actor was and Spielberg replied Henry Fonda. Kubrick then said his favorite actor was James Cagney and then something to the affect of-- so that’s where we differ....that’s why you don’t get it.

I love Henry Fonda, and I love the powerful subtly of Josh Brolin in No Country (again, WHY not nominated?) but obviously we need the ones who can holler “Top of the World Ma!” In the case of Lewis (who is superior to Nicholson in The Shining) he can rage and holler and boom or he can simply stare quietly at the screen – in either case he’s riveting. In There Will Be Blood Lewis goes above and beyond the call of duty, he takes it to the edge, he’s not easily likable, he’s totally unique. Going against what Olivier said, this isn’t easier. How many actors could play this part? I can’t think of anyone. He deserves to win.

Jospeh Conrad wrote an absurd third act?

no but coppola thought he needed one.

(some folx seem to have forgotten all about the murder of the Kevin J O'Connor character,

that doesn't make him a homicidal maniac. just homicidal. but there isn't really any doubt from the beginning that plainview is capable of that kind of thing, is there? he kills the guy because he's deceived him by playing on all these unfulfilled longings for attachment that plainview can barely admit to himself that he even has.

this is the official Emperor's New Clothes film of 2007 for me.

well mine's ncfom, which is lots dumber and reactionary on top of it. so that's where we differ.

(has anyone written about the racial aspect of ncfom? surely the old-school voice by now would have had at least one article called "no country for white men.")

reading artistic intent is always a tricky business but in this case especially so. coppola wasn't able to settle on a final act. he did not want to make a deliberately bad one, as pta seems to have.

but i think the end of 'apocalypse now' is pretty good really. a lot better than 'twbb'.

i will be glad to get past the oscars and have people (including me) stop talking about this overrated film. it's the 'american beauty' of 2007-08.

I have still avoided NCfOM thus far, so TWBB could be dethroned!

No, American Beauty can't touch this movie, that's just sheer TV-style ineptitude (and I'm glad Alan Ball has figured out he belongs on cable).

I like the last scene for the most part, and I don't think there was much of a "transformation" involved. Dude's raison d'etre is competition, he gets off on humiliating others (and man, contrast the last scene to the one in the fancy restaurant with the oil guys, where you got the sense that they were laughing at DDL and not scared or taking him seriously at all, which is probably his worst nightmare), and now that he's old and successful he doesn't have an outlet for that (so he's drinking and bowling himself to death).

The final seconds of the movie have such a weird tone, though. It's comedic but in a different way from anything else in the movie. I think it's probably the music that makes it feel so awkward, the happy chamber music really goes against what just happened and the score doesn't work like that in the rest of the movie.

That said, I loved the rest of the score, esp. the percussion phasing trick during the well-drilling/fire scene. Was that track on Bodysong, or is it just really similar?

The last scene was brilliant, especially the happy chamber music. The post-1927 scenes function as a coda. (It shares this structure with NCFOM, by the way.)

Saw this yesterday. It was decent until the end. Sort of a missed opportunity.

I kind of ... hated this. It gave me a headache for the rest of the day.

I didn't know what to do with a character as unknowable, almost inhuman as Daniel Plainview's. This did mean I had no problem with the 1927 version of him. He was always potentially that nakedly monstrous, because I never had any sense of who he was anyway. This is all making it sound more interesting than I found it. The final section was actually the bit where it picked up a bit for me, moving out of being wholly depressing (very much like the 80s stage of Boogie Nights) to actively brutal, and I guess I like brutality more than depression.

Other problems:

The score. I know PTA seems to want music to do this (God, those horrible bells tolling in Boogie Nights) and I thought it totally worked with Jon Brion in the skittish Punch Drunk Love, but here, I just found it horrible and intrusive.

Paul Dano, who just wasn't up to the job at all.

Maybe I'll risk seeing it again in the hope it will all suddenly click.

exposing yourself to Greenwood score again will get you cancer.

I really didn't find any of this depressing at all.

I didn't find the score intrusive!

good job, alba!

Alba, sounds to me like you got it about right (except all those things except Dano bothered me less, but I see the points).

"depressing" is about the weirdest word i can think of to describe this movie.

i thought it was crazy fun.

Depressing in truest sense, loveless, shut off from the world, torpid, with a horrible forboding noise throbbing around your head that is probably much like Jonny Greenwood's score.

Again, that makes it sound more interesting than I remember it, and reinforces the idea that perhaps I'll rewatch it in a different mood and embrace all this.

yeah i dunno. i thought it was sort of a monster truck rally. which i guess you could find monster truck rallies depressing too. my own feeling about it from the first scene on was, yee-haw. one reason the last scene does actually connect with the rest of the movie (despite its awkwardness) is that ddl and dano finally really externalize the sheer basic excitement of filmmaking that the whole movie revels in.

Hmm... I'm not sure I understand what you mean. How does this excitement reveal itself without being externalized?

I thought this movie was a riot, but I can see where alba is coming from. It's sometimes a kind of bleak, joyless, (cynically overwritten?) riot.

I really enjoyed the final scene but as others have said, the epilogue could have afforded to be a couple of scenes longer. tipsy otm re: "externalize the sheer basic excitement of filmmaking that the whole movie revels in."

I'd really like to see it again, but I don't think it will knock Michael Clayton off my Oscar pick, should the Academy offer me a vote.

xp, I guess the whole movie has this slightly playful, silly tone bubbling under the surface, but the last scene is where it finally bursts out?

yeah. i thought there was a kind of slyness all the way through and in the last scene they can both sort of barely keep a straight face.

I like the idea for the ending in the script, but I guess it would have been hard to film without making the whole epilogue ridiculous:

http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/1283/picture1mb3.png

uh, spoilers. sorry.

His eyes are out of breath from the struggle.

i love how it goes into all caps there. exactly what the scene feels like.

xp, it's unusually ungrammatical and illiterate, even for a screenplay.

he was writing with his fists.

A+ would watch again:

http://img235.imageshack.us/img235/161/picture2cg9.png

The opening is completely different in the screenplay. He has a mule that dies in the heat so he has to pull the cart full of silver across the desert with both legs broken.

what are you guys even saying? the scene is misjudged and is tacked on like a coda when it is meant to be the climax of the thing... it just plays badly, and... IT'S NOT VERY GOOD!!!!!!!! i guess that's what i'm reduced to shouting now.

xpost

well, let's be thankful sense (the studio?) prevailed there, that sounds bad also.

saw this last night. not much to add other than I enjoyed it somewhat uncomfortably - the monster truck rally analogy is apt. and I didn't find Greenwood's score intrusive either, just perfect. It's a visually beautiful movie - I love that scene right after his kid goes deaf and he's carrying him back to the mess hall in this looooooong single take, with the oil gushing out in the background and moving across the screen. That said, as with all PTA movies I've seen, I have no desire to ever see this again.

IT'S NOT VERY GOOD!!!!!!!! i guess that's what i'm reduced to shouting now.

i left the theater sort of thinking that -- i mean, i enjoyed the scene but it felt ludicrous too and i sort of thought, well, that didn't work. but the thing is i enjoyed it while it was happening -- it's very enteretaining -- and it's also one of the two or three scenes from the movie people talk about the most (and not just snidely). so something obviously works in it.

i kind of need to hold my tongue there because my instinct as to why people talk about the scene is not attractive. i saw it before the mega-hype really kicked in; although there was already some buzz, i wasn't aware of that scene before i went in, and though i liked some of the film, i thought that scene was poor: the 'milkshake' line did not make an impression.

there's a possible argument that the film should all have been that ott.

iirc eisenstein considered adapting the story too.

my instinct as to why people talk about the scene is not attractive

my instinct is that it's because it's big and loud and funny and memorable. and it comes right at the end. i'm not sure it needs a lot of parsing, although if i were looking to make one of those "people like this for the wrong reasons" type arguments i suppose i could invent something. but i hate "people like this for the wrong reasons" arguments.

i think people like it simply because it's the "talking point".

it's not that funny, or even that memorable (i can't remember anything except it being stupid).

it's nowhere near as good as the drug dealer scene in 'boogie nights', nor as funny.

i agree with at least the 3rd point. i love the nightranger scene. (it's also better than everything else in the movie, even though i like the movie.)

(although also that scene felt very tarantino at the time. not as much as the donut store shootout, but still.)

tipsy OTM. Actually, that scene reminded me of Scorsese, and BN might be the most amiable of the Scorsese-inspired films.

scorsese too. (i guess "very tarantino" is almost de facto scorsese.)

no, the number of Scorsese films where he's trying to be hip every second falls off after Mean Streets -- and he may not even be trying there.

Given the success of the opening minutes, I'd still insist on a silent version of TWBB on DVD.

btw, if yer thinking of reading Oil!, good luck. The first 12 pages use speeding on the motorway circa 1912 as a metaphor for voracious capitalism.

And btw on a technical level this film totally rules. When all was said and done, I just didn't get much out of it.

-- Cosmo Vitelli, Saturday, 29 December 2007 23:26 (1 month ago) Link

i'm in this camp

also in the one who thinks the last scene sucked. the zings were great but idk it just seemed way too abrupt to me.

i don't think i've ever felt the way about a character as i do about plainview/DDL, that being a totally epic and great performance, yet i was totally unmoved, and much prefer both bardem's and brolin's performances

also, dunno if this got cleared up in this thread, but i was told that dano got hired to play paul, and the dude who was playing eli quit because he was intimidated and unhappy w/ day lewis, so they just moved dano into that role but never refilmed (or didn't bother recasting) the scene w/ paul.

the guy originally cast as Eli was pretty good in Redacted but its a totally different, much less showy kind of role and I have no problem believing DDL reduced him to cinder.

yeah. that's the lore.

i totally love ddl in this, but i think for reasons a little different than i usually love a performance. it's almost athletic, like watching guys at the top of their game playing as well as they can and having fun doing it. like watching federer of a year or two ago, except if federer was the world's greatest lumberjack. that kind of grace, but a huge amount of power too. like john bonham. i felt like it was an open performance, like he wanted people to see what he was doing, but what he was doing was itself very closed off. until the end when he lets it out.

god the uk reviews dropped today. i guess in a few weeks it'll all be over, after the oscars. i hope it bombs.

lol at the Guardian describing today as the best weekend for cinema in forever based on this, Juno and the Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I still think this is awesome and don't really get what you don't like about it though!

i'm sorta dreading 'juno' on the basis of it probably sucks, and 'diving bell' on account of the director being a walking cock.

this is bradshaw's biggest weekend since 'magnolia'/'being john malkovich', iirc.

i don't like it because it's facile nihilism dressed up as -- well here we are, what do people think it is? -- some kind of foundation myth of american greed. and because ddl's performance is hammy, dano is callow, and the last scene is shit.

You have to love all those rave film reviews which unostensibly try to sneak in "despite the disappointing ending," "the ending is bad BUT"...NO BUTS! I'm not going to pay £8.50 and waste two hours of valuble time to watch something which they couldn't be arsed to finish properly! Go back to school and get 1 x CRASH COURSE in writing!

xpost, I think what a lot of people are enjoying about TWBB is the spectacle. It's completely over the top and preposterous. Personally I got very little of the mythic Americana stuff out of it, which, such as it is, I agree is weak. But I got a lot of "this pleases the reptile part of my brain" bits because it's so saturated with, uh, kabuki. "Kabuki" was Spielberg's criticism of The Shining though, so who knows.

Could you say a bit more about what you didn't like about the final scene? Esp. what you meant by "i kind of need to hold my tongue there because my instinct as to why people talk about the scene is not attractive."

And Juno does suck.

"valuable" even (self xp).

Interesting maleness about this supposed glorious new golden wave of American cinema.

crix are really invested in this film. i don't really know why. but yeah time out gave it six stars and said the ending was "pleasing and irritating". what now?

Interesting maleness about this supposed glorious new golden wave of American cinema.

-- Dingbod Kesterson, Friday, February 8, 2008 12:31 PM (27 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

i know right.

caek -- when are we allowed to like "spectacle"? bradshaw says other (he means lesser) directors would have more business going on, cast of thousands, that kind of thing. but the film is mostly unspectacular. it's mostly close-ups!!!! i would have been happier with it being epic, with other people -- union dudes, pinkertons, females, shit like that -- getting involved.

i don't know how to explain why the ending is terrible. i'm all naysayered out. the "main plot", ie this recalcitrant property he failed to buy blah blah blah, is so inconsequential that the revelation he stoled oil from dano is just SO WHAT. we don't find out about what else has gone on in the intervening 15 years, but plainview is breaking even. he has killed and got away with it before to. BFD.

I don't think I mean spectacle in the epic, cinematic sense. I mean spectacle in the completely OTT, telegraphed theatrical sense. I guess I see where that Time Out comment is coming from. I found the whole film utterly compelling and completely retarded and ridiculous at the same time.

Thanks for trying again with the ending. I need to see this film again, I think.

the "main plot", ie this recalcitrant property he failed to buy blah blah blah, is so inconsequential that the revelation he stoled oil from dano is just SO WHAT.

how is that the main plot? and he didn't steal oil from dano, dano's offering to broker a deal with the landowner. that's not supposed to be any kind of revelation, it just gives plainview a chance to rant at eli. it's not like a plot twist or anything.

and i don't think the movie is nihilistic at all. (i don't even think ncfom is nihilistic, even though people keep saying that too.) (and neither is dogville, for that matter. "nihilistic" seems like one of those words people use as a catchall about movies they just don't like.)

the main plot is:

-discovers oil
-buys up territory... except one bit
-exploits oil
-decides to build pipeline
-doh forgot to buy that one bit of land
-drinks milkshake

15 YEARS LATER

-something to do with that li'l plot of land he seemed to be doing okay without.
-says lol religious people r morans
-killed a man

xpost

those films are all facile-nihilism at work. NCFOM is easily the best of them. has filmmaking chops for one thing.

Do you particularly dislike the milkshake line or are you mentioning it as a proxy for that scence?

scene

You forgot all the stuff with the fake brother.

no milkshake in there is proxy for him stealing the oil.

not a fake brother. there are two brothers played by the same actor. bradshaw says something ridiculous about why this demonstrates PTA's mastery. i didn't forget it. it's part of 'discovers oil'.

those films are all facile-nihilism at work.

um no. none of them are nihilistic. that's just facile-criticism at work.

NCFOM is easily the best of them.

haha no....

i'm curious, what movies do you like? i'm trying to figure out if i actually disagree with you about everything.

i like 'zodiac', 'i'm not there', 'superbad', from last year.

if you don't think these films are nihilistic i just don't think you're watching them right, really.

maybe i'm watching them upside down. i wondered why ddl was always standing on his head.

i mean really calling those movies nihilistic is like calling aesop nihilistic. just cuz BAD THINGS HAPPEN doesn't make something nihilistic. these are all moral stories, for better or worse. (i'm not against nihilism, i just think people tend to see it lurking in every bleak ending.)

but i liked zodiac and i'm not there. haven't seen superbad.

John Waters in his audience-friendly, post-Polyester period is far more 'nihilistic' than TWBB.

TWBB is, as i said, 'facile-nihilist', so maybe we agree there.

it's nihilistic in that it paints a world of unredeemed greed, cruelty, stupidity, etc, with no possible redress escape or chance of improvement. this is partly because it has taken a political theme and turned it onto a metaphysical one.

the picture's drawn in bland colors, isn't it?

i dunno, not really.

It's pretty thin gruel. DDL's Oscar-ready monologue is the only indication of titanic greed.

we're projecting far too much on this film.

yeah i agree it is thin in a way -- just by being focussed on this one lazy actor's mug the whole way through. no worthy adversaries, no women... i should stop posting really.

yes, stop talking about it so much and go see Persepolis.

well, no, I don't blame DDL; he does what he can.

I liked this movie.

yes, stop talking about it so much and go see Persepolis.

-- Dr Morbius, Friday, 8 February 2008 15:20 (10 minutes ago) Link

haha, i thought you didn't like comic books, morbius?

(incidentally persepolis just opened here, finally, and i'm looking forward to seeing it)

I like some film adaps of comic books, apparently -- Persepolis and Ghost World. TWBB wd be a lousy comic book.

it paints a world of unredeemed greed, cruelty, stupidity, etc, with no possible redress escape or chance of improvement.

i think its world is more one in which power tends to be sought and accumulated by damaged people trying to fill some psychic/emotional void via the assertion of dominance over other people (and lo the very earth itself, etc). it's not that there's no hope or redress, it's that people can be damaged in ways that permanently scar them (persistent theme in pta movies). and then it plays with that idea as a foundational force in capitalism, america, civilization as we know it, and so forth. sort of freudian i guess. way more freudian than nihilistic, anyway. and reductionist, but moral stories tend to be reductionist in one way or another.

and anyway all of that is the framework. for me the movie works a lot more as visceral experience than narrative or philosophy.

ddl is a gaping maw of emotional need all the way through the film. that he doesn't change even when given the chance -- even when he kind of/sort of tries to -- i think has to do with the ferocity of his individualism. he's like an ayn rand hero as a sociopath. (i.e. like a more honest version of an ayn rand hero.)

(in that sense it's much more a critique of americanism than dogville -- because dogville's real target is the hypocrisy of collective moral systems that rationalize the exploitation of the weak. but collective moral systems are much less an american idea than the kind one-against-all self-determination of plainview.)

for me the movie works a lot more as visceral experience than narrative or philosophy.

yes.

I've now seen this.

I preferred the other version with Al Pacino and Moe Greene.

http://defamer.com/assets/resources/2008/02/milkshakeblood.jpg

i think its world is more one in which power tends to be sought and accumulated by damaged people trying to fill some psychic/emotional void via the assertion of dominance over other people (and lo the very earth itself, etc). it's not that there's no hope or redress, it's that people can be damaged in ways that permanently scar them (persistent theme in pta movies). and then it plays with that idea as a foundational force in capitalism, america, civilization as we know it, and so forth. sort of freudian i guess. way more freudian than nihilistic, anyway. and reductionist, but moral stories tend to be reductionist in one way or another.

and anyway all of that is the framework. for me the movie works a lot more as visceral experience than narrative or philosophy.

-- tipsy mothra, Friday, February 8, 2008 3:41 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Link

ddl is a gaping maw of emotional need all the way through the film. that he doesn't change even when given the chance -- even when he kind of/sort of tries to -- i think has to do with the ferocity of his individualism. he's like an ayn rand hero as a sociopath. (i.e. like a more honest version of an ayn rand hero.)

-- tipsy mothra, Friday, February 8, 2008 3:43 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Link

otm.

BTW, did I misunderstand, or did Plainview never give Eli Wotsit's church even the £5000 he promised?

Nope, the blighter. In the final scene Eli asked for $150,000 finders fee, plus the original $5000, with interest.

Okay, so I promised s1ocki some time back I'd write some thoughts on the movie and voila.

my friend who i saw this with is convinced that plainview had a boner for his fake brother and eli was gay too. i can see the latter although it seems kind of too obvious? but the former makes no sense right

A great film, I should say first and foremost, both despite and because of the fact it’s so incredibly self-consciously aiming to be a Great Film!

Oh, SUCH rot. This self-conscious importance is almost always an instant disqualification from ascending to the pantheon. (Kubrick pulled it off once or twice.)

DDL's Oscar-ready monologue is the only indication of titanic greed.

It kinda felt like the movie didn't feel the need to show that he was driven by misanthropy until he announced that he was driven by misanthropy.

You could say, "show don't tell, PTA!" but then how do you show such a ridiculous, hammy character trait without telling.

Well well well...

This self-conscious importance is almost always an instant disqualification from ascending to the pantheon.

http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/image4.jpg

http://blogs.commercialappeal.com/beifuss/seventhseal.web.jpg

http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/photos/brando_cp_2920257.jpg

(actually morbz i think yr guy spielberg is sort of the worst contemporary offender in the Self-Conscious Importance category)

tipsy otm

not that it'll help, but I've often said the only great film MY Spielberg has made in the last 20 years is Munich.

still tipsy, nice cherrypicking, and The Godfather isn't great. :)

I'll say one thing, before I say anything else, the photography was amazing, as was the sound, and Paul Dano was out of his depth. He sounded like Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka when he was scrambling around before he died.

Take it this has been mentioned already, another of Armond White's lovely little nuggets: Plainview is the most remarkable movie performance since Eddie Murphy’s Norbit trifecta.

Definite echoes and nods, if not references, to Citizen Kane in the ending.

I srsly have to see it again to decide whether Paul Dano was surprisingly good or So Bad because I'm still not sure. Armond rules

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=1944

I thought Paul Dano captured that smug Youth Group type very well.

I don't get the antipathy to Dano either -- he hits the notes that the role and PTA required, no more no less.

I will rep once again for the wonderfulness of his first sermon.

It's damn well done. One of my favorite scenes.

oh shit! Dano played the kid in L.I.A.R. I'd no idea.

Yeah - Dano was pretty dead-on as a person who realized, early on, the power and authority that being "religious" gives you, and he in turn capitalized on that, against everyone - including his family.

Plainview, on the other hand, was not swayed.

I loved the scene when they first start drilling, and Plainview "usurps" Eli's right to spiritually bless the drilling.

Seriously great.

I started off really impressed by Dano, but was dissatisfied with the one-noteness of the character. Didn't give Dano enough room, I thought.

good catch bordwell. i noticed that shot as particularly mannered (not in a very bad way, but a little awkward and film studenty) when i was watching it. he makes the wes anderson comparison only to drop it, but it seems pretty sound to me.

i'm not sure if the shot is 'good', or even if bordwell thinks it is. he's so reticent about the scene's content that it's hard to know. he says he's just about 'diversity': why is he afraid to make a value judgment on this. it seems implictly 'there' anyway.

from the article linked upthread

according to some potentially specious reports, Dano was originally scheduled to play a lesser role, but then PTA expanded his role. We'll leave that one be for now.

could this mean that Dano was originally playing just Paul? that would eliminate all of the Paul/Eli ambiguity.