There Will Be Blood (2007)

exhilarating, suspenseful, chilling and beautiful.

i heard once that the reason people stand whenever the 'hallelujah chorus' is performed is because it was first performed for a king, and he was so moved by it, he simply stood up during the song. this movie is just like that.

i'm happy to be alive and at an age where i can appreciate this sort of thing now, because 50 years from now, people will surely say, 'i wonder what it was like to see that movie in theaters when it had just been released.'

when i say, 'you should go see this movie,' i don't mean it's really entertaining, a good way to spend a Saturday night, worth the price of admission or what have you. i mean it in the way that i think everyone should see the sistine chapel, read hemingway, listen to beethoven's 9th symphony and so on. it will certainly be remembered for generations to come as an important work of art.

Fmovies: If Daniel Day-Lewis doesn't win an Oscar for this performance, there is something horribly wrong. His performance and this film were amazing. I don't give this kind of accolade out generously. I was at the screening at the Chelsea West. We waited outside in the cold and rain for a good two hours to get in there and get some good seats and I can honestly say, I would have waited double that amount of time. Enough of my rambling though. In regards to the film itself; it was very well done. The cinematography was amazing as well as the set design. As usual, PTA gives us a flawless script with terrifying, humorous, and compelling dialogue. All of the acting was spot on. Paul Dano played the role of a two-faced, maniacal, and power hungry preacher. The young man who plays H.W. Plainview was also very solid. As PTA stated during the Q&A last night, he seemed to know everything about the story and his character and seemed to be a natural. Daniel Day-Lewis. Need I say more? He was breathtaking in TWBB. Amazing is all i can say. You will need to see the film to see for yourself. Some may become bored with the film at times, which is what i gathered from the people sitting around me. I had no problem with the "slow" scenes, but the general public may have a problem grasping this film. If anything, this will be the reason if it gets snubbed at the Oscars.

What is evil? What is hate? How low can an individual go with one's actions and still be considered human....? These, quite possibly, are the biggest questions raised in There Will Be Blood.

Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis, the tycoons at the helm of this dig for moral oil, tell a story that takes the archetypal anti-heroes of 'Citizen Kane' and Travis Bickle of 'Taxi Driver' to a whole new, 21st-century level. The film, using Lewis's character Daniel Plainview, walks through incredibly dangerous cinematic territory that questions religion, plays with the nature of greed and hate and evil, and with it all, draws terrifying parallels to the world we live in today. The film and its main character claw so deep through the limits of humanity and the landscape of hell, that you'll be thanking the Good Lord for the silver screen that divides you from this horrible world Paul Thomas Anderson has portrayed. But despite how safe you may seem in your cushy seat, you will undoubtedly walk out of the theater with all kinds of new demons and ghosts buzzing in your head and ripping away at your subconscious. In this way, Anderson has abandoned his primary previous influence of Robert Altman to take more of a Stanley Kubrick direction, creating moral allegories that creep into your psyche and don't ever leave. You should be scared. Very Scared.

There Will Be Blood fmovies. Who is Paul Thomas Anderson? There is something about him that does't belong to this earth. That could be a compliment or not, it's all up to us. That's what make his cinema so damn unique. At the end of the day it's all up to us. But the abrasive way in which he visits universes and throws his views to us is so powerful, so arrogant, so enthralling, so infuriating that the experience leaves you baffled and suspicious. but also enchanted, transformed. Here, Daniel's saga could very well be the saga of a Hollywood maverick. So little time for sentimentality. Daniel Day Lewis seems to understand it all and he adds his unmistakable humanity to another monster, after his butcher in Gangs Of New York. His performance goes beyond anything we've seen recently anywhere. From Upton Sinclair to Paul Thomas Anderson via Daniel Day Lewis an unmissable work of art.

This film raises the game for everyone out there. I have loved all of Paul Thomas Anderson's work, including his greatly underrated Punch-Drunk Love, but this is a huge leap from any of the previous movies into a realm, as others have said, inhabited by classics such as Treasure of the Sierra Madre - and then some. Every element of this film is astonishing, from the opening twenty minutes, which feature virtually no dialog, to Jonny Greenwood's score, which I have heard criticized as too imposing but which seems just about perfect to me (and brings to mind the non-Blue Danube elements of 2001 at its most experimental). Daniel Day-Lewis' performance is in a league of its own: his voice, his mannerisms, his physical movement, his stunted emotions, are flesh and blood, and hauntingly so, in a way that even Tommy Lee Jones in In The Valley of Elah (which I thought was a pretty staggering performance) can't quite attain. I will watch this film again and again simply to see something so raw and so moving and so gut-wrenching. This is why I love movies; this is what made me want to make movies when I was fourteen years old.

PT Anderson delivers perhaps his best work with "There Will Be Blood". Unlike "Magnolia", the film's daunting runtime is not very daunting whilst watching it. All acting in the film was solid, even the work of the child actors. Daniel Day-Lewis in particular delivered a truly phenomenal performance, capturing the power of greed, fear, insanity, and comedy simultaneously, at many points throughout the film. At no point does the time period distract from the power of the film. Sometimes period pieces cannot be appreciated because they delve too deep into historical details -- turning the experience into more of a documentary than a narrative set in the past. This is not the case for "There Will Be Blood", as human interactions are the focus of the film. Johnny Greenwood's chilling score is very strong, benefiting from the elegant minimalism that he show's in the band Radiohead. The cinematography is also spectacular. Robert Elswit beautifully captures the essence of the environment and the tension amongst the characters. All in all, this is truly a perfectly crafted film.