#40 There Will Be Blood - verdict - PTA brilliant but still crazy

2007. dir. P.T. Anderson, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, Kevin O'Connor.

Seen it before? Yes, kind of...I fell asleep the first two tries watching this film.

Daniel Day-Lewis is a phenomenal actor but he creeps me out much like Christopher Walken and the others I mentioned in an earlier post on this blog. I think the brilliance of this movie is not just the story but the fact that you are constantly in turmoil whether you like the characters, Daniel, Eli, etc or if you hate them. I believe the term for this is that the characters were flawed.

How could you not like Daniel when he took the young H.W. in as his own son when H.W.'s father died in a well while digging? He took care of the boy and raised him. Yeah, sure, he was essentially using the kid to project a "family-man" image, but he did care for the boy and make sure he was fed, and when he lost his hearing, Daniel got an interpreter for his son - after he sent him off to a special school by leaving him on a train...but his right hand man was there with H.W. and then reported back that the room he was in, while sharing it with another student, was actually pretty spacious. Daniel is greedy but good at what he does. He doesn't have a crew rebellion so you get the feeling that he is an okay boss too. As with a lot of greedy people he ends up alone...figures.

As for Eli...a preacher of a church, a dutiful son, but really an a--hole who, like Daniel, is actually quite greedy...but with a pretense that he is a messenger of God and therefore his greed is justified - to the point that he doesn't consider it greed. The church must be bigger and better and more people should come and join the cause of the Church of the Third Revelation. My least favorite scenes in this movie involve Eli...especially when he baptizes Daniel and when he "removes" the arthritis 'ghost' from the old ladies hands...It was great to see Daniel knock him down when he couldn't cure H.W.'s deafness. Eli is WEAK...he even proves it when he says, "I am a false prophet! God is a superstition!"

Would I watch it again? I would over some other PTA movies I've seen...
Would I own it? No
How did I manage to stay up for it? I was playing Bejewelled on Facebook.
Hilarious (and expensive) movie trivia -

While on location in Marfa, Texas, No Country for Old Men (2007) was the neighboring film production. One day, director Paul Thomas Anderson and his crew tested the pyrotechnical effects of the oil derrick fire, causing an enormous billowing of smoke, intruding the shot that Joel Coen and Ethan Coen were shooting. This caused them to put off filming until the next day when the smoke dissipated from view. Both this film and No Country for Old Men (2007) would eventually become the leading contenders at the Academy Awards a year and a half later. -IMDB

#40 There Will Be Blood: Drained dry, you boy

2007. dir. P.T. Anderson, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier, Kevin O'Connor.

Seen it before? Yes.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a turn-of-the-century prospector. The opening of the movie is ten minutes long and virtually wordless as we see Daniel unsuccessfully dig for gold, and then successfully dig for oil. Daniel has men working for him, and he is forced to adopt one of their sons where the man dies in the well. The movie jumps forward 11 years...

The main part of the movie concerns Plainview's attempt to drill the "ocean of oil" underneath Little Boston, and his dealings with Eli Sunday, the local preacher. Eli is one of those charismatic cast-out-demons sort of preachers. Daniel refuses to take him seriously. The movie becomes a duel between them, and it builds to a jaw-dropping finale.

Daniel Day-Lewis got Best Actor for this movie, and it's richly deserved. Daniel Plainview is one of the most memorable and complex movie characters ever created. There are some scenes where you see his humanity and vulnerability, and others where he seems like a devil or a vampire.

My three favorite scenes:

• The scene where the oil well bursts into flames. Johnny Greenwood, the guy from Radiohead, did the score for the movie, and it's particularly memorable here.
• The conversion scene in the church.
• The infamous "milkshake" scene.

Check out the extras on the Blu-Ray. There is a montage of old photographs from the era, and a film from 1926 about the process of drilling for oil. A lot of the scenes of prospecting and surveying seem to be directly lifted from this material. Some of these scenes go on too long, contributing to the excessive length of the movie. P.T. Anderson needs to hire an editor.

Position on the list: 129
Meaning of the title: I'm not quite sure. This isn't a particularly violent movie (one scene excepted) but there are references to blood in a few other senses. Daniel says he drinks "blood of the lamb" from Bandy's tract, referring to oil, and Eli makes Daniel beg for the blood of Jesus during the conversion scene. Another recurring motif is water - there's the water that is the only thing the Sundays can extract from the land and that Daniel says can bring irrigation to the town, there's the ocean that Daniel is trying to pipe the oil to, there's the baptism scene, and there's the huge bottle of it that Daniel guzzles during the finale. Maybe it's something to do with blood being thicker than water? We only see two relatives of Daniel in the movie, and (spoiler) both turn out not to be any blood relation at all. I don't know.