There Will Be Blood

I just finished seeing it. My initial reaction is that I have not seen a movie that good in a long, long time. It may be the greatest movie of my lifetime (it should be noted that I drank a lot at the Alamo Drafthouse, so I may be exaggerating a bit).
I could have walked away after the first 15 minutes thinking it should win Best Picture.

Daniel Day-Lewis was amazing. I have not seen a more complex character in a long time. I went from admiration, to sadness, to revulsion, to anger, to pity during the course of the film.
The kid and the preacher both deserve Supporting Actor awards.
 
I just saw it. DDL was just mesmerizing, the film-making and score were incredible, the scenes with the first gusher and with his son at the end were just jaw-dropping, but...

Wait till the What-Was-The-Point? people from the 17-page NCFOM thread see it. Because I'll be in their corner on this one.

Plainview was great; I was never bored for a second, but doesn't there have to be a punchline at some point? I would guess that anyone who didn't like NCFOM's ending would absolutely despise this ending.
 
I loved everything about NCFOM, esp the ending.

The ending of TWBB is what I liked least about it...and while I think DDL was amazing, and the first 1:45 were amazing also, I found myself waiting for "the point of it all", like you. I didn't really feel like it ever quite got there.
 
I just watched it. It could have been a hell of a lot better. I thought it tripped over itself a lot. While DDL did well, his character seemed a whole lot like the Butcher in Gangs of New York. I didn't see it as groundbreaking.

The real problem I had with it was that every single character was ridiculously weird. Nobody acted normal. Everyone's social interactions were awkward and strange.
 
Another problem I had was the whole Eli-and-Paul thing. I spent a good chunk of the movie trying to figure out if Eli had multiple personalities or what, and then very casually it comes out that they're brothers who just happen to be identical twins.

Then I read that Paul Dano had only been hired to just play Paul, and that Anderson fired the actor who was playing Eli two months into shooting and had to re-shoot a few of the scenes between Eli and Plainview.

Along with the ending, that makes we wonder if Anderson spent more time dealing with the "look" of the movie (which was absolutely spectacular) at the expense of the script.
 
i saw it a few days ago, and have some real issues with the story. as it's been said, the filmmaking and acting are fantastic. i've always been a pta fan, although i think he can be a little self important and pretentious in his films. but as a character study of daniel plainview, i felt it left a lot to be desired.

plainview obviously had his faults, but up until the last fast forward, did nothing that made him the devil. he said to his brother that he was really competitive, and wanted no one else to succeed, but through his actions i never really got that it was out of hand. i would assume, and know stories, of other business men from that era that were 50 times worse.

yeah, he wanted the pipeline land, so he bullshitted his way through that church puppet show, but that place was so over the top and weird, that i would barely consider that underhanded.

he reacted how most would react after his son was injured, and you could feel the pain he had when he sent him away, but a deaf child needs special attention, and it was a pretty legit move. like it's been said on this thread, he was a good father for the most part, during the majority of his film. (they never got into why he was allowed to lay in an area that could cripple him if oil was found, which is the obvious point of drilling in the first place, but i digress.)

yeah, he killed the guy pretending to be his brother, and killing is bad, but the guy was basically conning him, and it's pretty low to act like family to someone who clearly needed someone around like a brother.

but my biggest issue with it all, was the standard oil meeting. this meeting is supposed to tell us how cut throat and competitive he is i suppose, besides him just telling his "brother" how he's that way. but in the meeting he brings up a totally legit point. he's told he can become a millionaire right then and there, to which he replies, "but then what do i do?"

i wish they had touched more on this issue. it's true. he loved making the money way more than having or even spending the money. he only really made the money to spend it on more wells, derricks, equipment, leases, and whatever. yeah yeah, he talked about a big house he once wanted, but i think he had a legit point about "what then." but they didn't explore it.

all they did was take us 20 years later, when he's become some isolated howard hughes type of crazy dude shooting up his house. then paul dano comes in, basically trying to hold him up, and he goes crazy. yeah, 1927 plainview, disowning his son, and killing people with bowling pins is evil. i agree with that. but that wasn't what the movie should've been. it takes more for me than telling his son "i only used you because you had an honest face" years after the fact. i guess i just needed something more from it. gordon gekko had more depth as a business villain to me.
 
I got the impression that the bowling alley was largely used to be symbolic of his "success" and how it ultimately was what killed everything around him. that my be a bit basic, but at some level, I'm sure that went into their thinking.

i'd be interested to get other's impressions of that last scene. It was actually the only one that really seemed like it was a quintessential PTA scene (and I mean that as a compliment, though i love his other films as well)
 
***Spoilers***



I thought it was a good movie with DDL doing one of the best acting jobs that I have ever seen. With that being said, I had many of the same objections as HG. I thought the jump forward at the end left a lot to be desired. Up to that point, I liked it a lot more than I did after I left the theater.

I have to disagree that H.W. was only a tool. I know that's what he said at the end, but that's not what he showed throughout the movie. You could tell that every time someone said something about how he was raising his child, or that he abandoned his child, he was truly upset. I guess that's why I didn't really like the ending. His character digressed from complex to simple. From a realistic portrayal of a disturbed human to a caricature of one.

Overall, it was a pretty good movie but could have been great, had a couple of things been done differently.
 
IMO, truly evil people exhibit no compassion or remorse whatsoever. When HW was injured in the well explosion, Plainview's instinct was to check on his boy. Gradually his greed overcame that natural parental instinct and all he could think about was the oil. That was a great scene and it spoke volumes to his internal struggle.
 
I loved the movie. I especially liked the ending. I thought Plainview's character was perfectly done, both acting-wise and script-wise. He's a character who values honest sacrifice above all else, and has no tolerance for anything else. It's why he hates himself by the end of the movie--he can't accept his son, because he already abandoned him and when his son returns, he's the disingenuous alcoholic that has to make a jackass of himself in front of the railroad men.
 
I can't think of a movie that I've wanted to see more, and then been so disappointed. I love movies that tell the story of a person as opposed to some lame situation they find themselves in. I was bored by all of the characters.

Daniel Day Lewis should win best Actor but the story itself was horrible. I think many people are falling over each other saying what an awesome movie it is, because they don't want to be the only one who disliked it. Eli and HW were 2-dimensional and the only real characters besides Plainview. And why waste the actor from Rome as Plainview's right hand man. Handful of scenes and few words for him.

The only thing I got from the movie is that I would never want to be the guy at the bottom of the oil derrick.
 
Saw it last week, and I really enjoyed it aside from the guys in the theater who decided to be the living embodiment of Statler and Waldorf. Seriously, I know you're old and ****, and you get the benefit of the doubt, but SHUT THE **** UP DURING THE MOVIE, ********!

The finale seemed really overdetermined - there wasn't much in the way to thrust DDL's character from generally kind of bitter guy to utter, abject loserdom in the finale. Same can be said for Paul Dano's preacher guy. He mentioned getting caught up in what I presume to be the onset of the Depression, but the screen said 1927, which would have placed the action two years prior to the Panic. That doesn't disregard the run-up to the depression, of course.

It felt like a very artificial movie - in that no one really acted in a particularly organic manner. DDL's character was especially kind of capricious, and not in a good way. On the other hand, I thought movie was pretty honest in not demonizing miners/prospectors, or even businesmen. Its not hyperbole to say our lives would be utterly different (for better or worse) if we didn't have people like DDL's character dive in for cash and renown.

The performances, the cinematography, editing, etc. were pretty superb. I recommend seeing it in a theater to really appreciate the landscapes.

Oh, also: I drink your milkshake.
 
****SPOILERS****

I didn't take away that it was the story of a man's greed and corruption as I did the story of one man's complete isolation from his fellow man. Plainview was always a loner - we first see him digging by himself, dragging himself to safety with a broken leg with no one around, and even when he is working/digging with others at the outset there's no dialogue whatsoever. I saw him as enduring a largely self-imposed isolation - he saw other people as foolish, failed creatures with whom he wanted as little association as possible.

He got one chance for redemption/connection when his son came along, but the accident robbed him of his chance to connect and communicate with H.W. With that taken away, there is nothing to prevent him from eventually slipping into madness.

I didn't take away from the film that he was a potentially good man corrupted by greed so much as I did that his empire-building was simply a focus for his life - a focus that couldn't have any human components because he couldn't/didn't want to connect to others. He went mad not from greed, but from loneliness.

I've heard others who viewed his 'conversion' scene with Eli in the church as an actual spiritual struggle within Daniel - that some innate goodness was warring with his greed, and that somewhere in him there was a desire for spiritual salvation. I didn't see it that way - his performance seemed to indicate that all the entreaties to the Lord were completely dripping with irony, and that this 'superstition' was solely something he had to endure in order to get what he wanted. The humiliation of putting him through this charade was what ultimately led him to gleefully murder Eli.

Anyway, that was my take on it - on the whole, a truly unique and great film. Of course, my take on it was probably shaped by the fact that I saw it with a girl I've been interested in for months and who, at the very start of the evening, I finally accepted wasn't interested in me in the same way. Sitting through that movie under those circumstances for two and a half hours will definitely get you thinking about isolation and being cut off from people. Given the things I'd done for her over the last 9 months and her responses, I will admit to a certain guilty pleasure at the look on her face when I told her the movie inspired me to invite her out bowling next weekend
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This movie sucked. The title was There Will be Blood. Then, there was hardly any blood. I left the theater so unfulfilled.
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Saw it last night.

Not as good as I expected. The way the music was used was terrible in my opinion. The acting was good, DDL was great as expected, but I also thought some of the script just wasn't that good.
 
***** Spoiler ******



I need some help on this movie...

When did you know Eli and Paul were twins? I thought I remembered the Sunday brother introducing himself as Eli Sunday when he first told Plainview about the oil near the Sunday Ranch. Throughout the movie I never recalled seeing what I thought was Paul instead of Eli.

It wasn't until the end, the credits even, when I saw they were twins.

Any thoughts and opinions would be appreciated. Thanks!

compUTer guy
 
ok, this is bothering me. the trailers on tv now show parts from the church scene. the "i've abandoned my boy!" scene. i love the acting in this scene, but to show this in trailers is wrong.

he is full on mocking the "church" in this scene to get the land he wants. they only show a small part, like he is really coming to grips with something. but he isn't. this bothers me.
 
In the church scene he is coming to grips with the fact that he needs to patch things up with the preacher boy he had humiliated earlier. He does. He puts on a show for the benefit of the congregation to get Eli's blessing but lets Eli know he knows Eli's show is just a show, albeit a very impressive one.

Near the end he says to Eli that "I will drink your milkshake." Was that anything besides a nice metaphor or simile for slant well drilling?

And was the bowling imagery an homage to the big lebowski?
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I saw it today.

The casting and acting were good and Daniel Day-Lewis may indeed win an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role, as voted on by his fellow actors in the Academy.

The Screen Actors Guild awarded him their comparable award last week.

Because, his fine performance was memorable and I thought, by far, the most interesting thing to be found in this film.

His excellent portrayal was theatrical as befitted the showman he was playing and it was nuanced and multi-faceted like the complex, driven man his character was.

Imagine a really over the top and darker Burt Lancaster as “Elmer Gantry,” if he had been an oilman as his first calling in addition to a showboating evangelist.

However, IMHO, to use an evaluation system that Timothy Olyphant’s character explained in “The Girl Next Door,” the juice just wasn’t worth the squeeze.

I simply didn’t think the story this film told was worthy of the two hours and thirty-eight minutes these moviemakers took to tell it.

I thought Tom Hanks’ portrayal of a comparably complex, somewhat similarly driven character in “The Road to Perdition” was certainly done in a more economical, but still completely convincing, way and that so was Humphrey Bogart’s portrait of Fred C. Dobbs in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

To be fair, those movie stories each involved a much, much, much shorter time period than the four decades or so covered in “There Will Be Blood.”

So maybe the movie they wanted to make had to be that long.

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I enjoyed it, but a film two hours and thirty-eight minutes long needs a better story for me to be able to recommend to moviegoers that may not be big Daniel Day-Lewis fans.

That’s a pretty long squeeze and I was looking for more juice.

:

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Here's what I liked about it:

Daniel Plainview was batshit crazy, but he was driven. He didn't let anything get in the way of his goals. Death surrounds his character, but he soldiers on with single minded purpose. First you have the silver mining accident. Then H.W.'s dad dying on his first oil well. Then H.W. getting ****** up when the New Boston well comes in. Then his "brother" appearing and trying to dupe him (the allusions between him mining silver alone in the opening scene and then him digging the grave alone after he kills his "brother" was my favorite part of the movie). Then the baptism. And his son starting a rival company. Nothing got in his way. There were no redeeming qualities about Daniel Plainview, and that's what made him interesting.

That, and the little things, little idiosyncrasies that defined the character, like his genuine concern for family (even though he has none), or the way he always sleeps on the ground, or how his limp gets more pronounced but in a way becomes less of a handicap. That kind of **** really just made me appreciate how well the movie was made, and how great of an actor DDL was.

And the score was ridiculously well done. My God, it was haunting.
 
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