{"id":950,"date":"2008-01-07T01:21:18","date_gmt":"2008-01-07T06:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/womantalk.wordpress.com\/2008\/01\/07\/there-will-be-blood-review\/"},"modified":"2008-01-07T01:21:18","modified_gmt":"2008-01-07T06:21:18","slug":"there-will-be-blood-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/?p=950","title":{"rendered":"There Will Be Blood Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday Chad and I went to the theaters by UCI to watch the first showing of There Will Be Blood<\/b><\/i> (9.0\/10.0 IMDb<\/a>) and had we seen it in 2007, it would have made the 2007 top ten list for both Chad and I. (Which reminds me – I need to add Last King of Scotland<\/i> to my top ten list; although it was considered for last year’s Oscar’s we did see that movie in 2007. Violence aside, that movie was excellent and bone-chilling.)<\/p>\n

There was something strange about There Will Be Blood<\/i>, in the same way there was something strange about No Country for Old Men<\/i>. I want to say that both movies felt anti-cinematic to me, yet I know that the Coen brothers\u00c2\u00a0 story board the hell out of their screenplays in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock – and who’s more cinematic than Alfred Hitchcock? Perhaps I mean to say that both movies are so cinematic that they become nearly non-narratives; driven forward by inexorable tragic hubris rather than a plot.<\/p>\n

Because what the hell was There Will Be Blood<\/i> about anyway?! I know that I felt an undercurrent of danger and menace from the first musical screeches of the eerie score. I know that Henry Plainview’s life was hard against hard: the movie began with man alone in the dark wielding a pick against an implacable earth – and later, losing his tools and the health of his leg, alone in the desert, is not an insurmountable obstacle, but merely another day to to endure: one of many burdens Plainview will carry with him to mercenary success. I know that Daniel Day Lewis acted the hell out of Plainview’s character, so much so that I can hardly remember what any other character looked like or said (save the dark beseeching eyes of his son). I know I kept looking for Plainview’s enemy; was it God? Or just that man of God?<\/p>\n

I watched Ebert and Roper out of the corner of my eye this evening; both men loved the movie, but what they said about it hasn’t yet made sense to me. They flashed Upton Sinclair’s name about and I caught somebody saying that Plainview represented capitalism at the turn of the century. Capitalism?<\/p>\n

Well, perhaps. In that way I can understand that Plainview’s only enemy was himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday Chad and I went to the theaters by UCI to watch the first showing of There Will Be Blood (9.0\/10.0 IMDb) and had we seen it in 2007, it would have made the 2007 top ten list for both … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.womantalk.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}