There Will Be Blood

[Horn89]

Thanks for the explanation, guys.

I still think it's a pretty stupid oversight for a multi-million dollar epic. It's obvious that there were a whole bunch of people who weren't sure if there were actually two brothers, or if Eli and "Paul" were the same guy. They could have shot one scene with the two of them (use a double, shoot one from behind, do it with computer graphics. . .) and we wouldn't have spent 2 hours wondering if we were missing something.

 

[3_yard-out]

In reply to:

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[DeluxeHorn16]

DDL is known for staying in character on and off camera. this could've creeped the other acter out i'm sure, but i'm betting there was something more than just DDL creeping him out...

 

[FAST FRED]

I saw it a while ago.

I think the casting and acting were good and Daniel Day-Lewis deserved the 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 also.

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 an even more 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 by merit 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, yet still completely convincing, way and that so was Humphrey Bogart’s classic 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.

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.

 

[afat]

I thought the confusion was clear on DDL face in the scene when Eli first walked up and they were hunting quail. He thought it was Paul too...thus he looked awkward and didn't introduce himself until Eli introduced him self.