There Will Be Blud
Posted on | October 5, 2008 at 10:16 am | 9 Comments
Hey, we’re back to Movie Review Sunday!
Last night, I finally got a chance to watch the last of the 2007 Oscar nominated Best Picture candidates that I hadn’t seen, There Will Be Blood. All 2.5+ hours of it, in glorious rented Blu-ray disc form. I’m generally a fan of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s work. I loved Magnolia even though I know a lot of people hated it. So I’ve been looking forward to this one for awhile.
This film does take a lot of concentration. There isn’t even any dialog until 15 minutes into it. Daniel Day Lewis deserved the Best Actor Oscar he got for the role of turn of the century oilman Daniel Plainview, as it was clearly his show. He’s in pretty near every scene and has a mesmerizing screen presence as always. That mustache alone is very distracting. Paul Dano plays his nemesis, self-righteous preacher Eli Sunday, in a role that first seemed one-note, but ended up having some different shades to it. The movie pretty much builds toward their big confrontation at the end (much like the George Clooney/Tilda Swinton throw-down at the end of Michael Clayton), and that’s an extremely captivating scene. In between, there’s a lot of rise-and-fall of Daniel Plainview, and a lot of oil well drilling (although, strangely, not as much as I would’ve liked to have seen). The cinematography and the HiDef presentation really show off the grimy aspects of the profession well. If I never see an oil-bespotted worker again, it will be too soon. The story arc with Daniel and his adopted son H.W. is also very interesting, as the father-son relationship between the two of them takes some twists and turns. There’s pretty much no women in this movie.
Sad to say, I didn’t like the score from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. It just drew attention to itself too much, and I prefer movie music to be unobtrusive. It has to underscore scenes, not draw focus away from them. That was the same problem I had with the score in Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. The Greenwood score was definitely fascinating, but it took me out of the movie too often.
As a Best Picture nominee, I liked it better than Atonement and No Country For Old Men, but less than Juno and maybe a little less than Michael Clayton. I liked it less than Anderson’s Magnolia and Boogie Nights. I look forward to seeing what he does next. I’m hoping for a light children’s fantasy – maybe something where kids get drawn into the suddenly-real world of a board game or something.
Latre.
Pet Peeve of the Day: Jason Sudeikis’ Joe Biden dissin’ on Scranton in last night’s SNL spoof of the Vice Presidential debate. Hey, leave Scranton alone! It’s a nice place.
Comments
9 Responses to “There Will Be Blud”
October 5th, 2008 @ 5:35 pm
Sadly, I haven’t seen any of the Best Picture nominees from last year, but I’d be very surprised if I liked any of them better than the Coens’ entry. That’s based on my long love affair with the Coens (which really does go about as far back as it can: I saw Blood Simple on HBO in 1986 and was instantly converted) and the fact that the two or three Paul Thomas Anderson joints I’ve seen haven’t really connected with me, even though I recognize that the guy has talent. I’d probably need some Anderson re-viewings to say anything more cogent about his stuff, though.
October 5th, 2008 @ 5:40 pm
I like the Coens’ a lot too, but they can be very uneven for me. Ladykillers, for example. Did any Coen fan really love that one? Half of their stuff is good, the other half… meh.
October 5th, 2008 @ 6:45 pm
You really think it’s “meh”? I’d say: half is really great, the other half isn’t really great and so seems half-assed by comparison…but compare it to a whole lot else out there, and suddenly it’s way smarter, cleverer, etc. I wouldn’t say I “loved” Ladykillers…but it was fun, which was all it wanted to be.
October 5th, 2008 @ 7:05 pm
I think the good Coen joints outweigh the misses by a wide margin. For this oversimplified list, I’m going chronologically, with the caveat that Raising Arizona and Lebowski are #1 and #2 for me if I were to rank them.
Blood Simple: hit
Raising Arizona: hit
Miller’s Crossing: hit
Barton Fink: hit
Hudsucker Proxy: hit
Fargo: hit (though I like it least of these first six)
Lebowski: hit
O Brother: hit
Man Who Wasn’t There: hit
Improbable Cruelty: miss, though entertaining
Ladykillers: miss
Haven’t seen the last two, which I need to remedy, but that’s 9 I like and 2 I consider problematic. That’s a great ratio.
October 5th, 2008 @ 7:34 pm
OK, I do know it’s Intolerable Cruelty. And I also like it because it has one of the few non-wuss Mileses (the Clooney character) ever depicted in TV or the movies.
October 5th, 2008 @ 11:08 pm
The ones I thought were misses are: Barton Fink, Man Who Wasn’t There, Ladykillers, and No Country. I haven’t seen Miller’s Crossing, Hudsucker Proxy or Intolerable Cruelty, so I can’t judge on those. So for me, it’s 6 good, 4 meh, and 3 unknown. So I guess that is a pretty good ratio after all.
October 6th, 2008 @ 4:54 am
I think a lot of people’s Coen film list would be easier to understand if you note which ones they WROTE, vs. just produced/directed. Most of the ones y’all mark as “misses” feature screenplays penned by non-Coen writers.
(yes, I actually used the term “penned” – I’m working on some issues)
Oh yeah, and both Fargo & O Brother absolutely rock – I love almost all the C boys’ films but anyone who doesn’t rank those two at or near the top just wasn’t watching.
October 6th, 2008 @ 9:41 am
I guess I only had one eye open since I don’t rank Fargo as highly. I prefer my Coens in full screwball comedy mode, following their highly digressive muse wherever it leads, i.e. Raising Arizona and Lebowski. Fargo is an excellent film too, but by Coen standards, it’s a very straightforward one, and thus it’s less entertaining to me than many of their other ventures. I do think it’s telling that even Fargo was too “weird” and “quirky” for a lot of folks!
October 7th, 2008 @ 4:22 pm
Fargo suffers mainly from the handicap of lacking John Goodman, who steals every Coen movie he’s in (unless Steven Root is there to nick his share). But for quirky characters and dialogue, it’s right up there with the best – which of course is still ‘O Brother’!
It took me awhile to warm up to “Lebowski”, possibly because there were characters in it similar to people I actually know (and don’t much need to see more of). And their non-comedies have to be appreciated on a more artsy-fartsy level, I grant. As for the ones others wrote, like Cruelty and Ladykillers, my expectations for them started out lower so I wasn’t disappointed.