More on There Will Be Blood.

"There Will Be Blood is very much a personal endeavor for [Paul Thomas] Anderson; it feels like an act of possession," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"Yet it is also directly engaged with our cinematically constructed history, specifically with films - Greed and Chinatown, but also Citizen Kane - that have dismantled the mythologies of American success and, in doing so, replaced one utopian ideal for another, namely that of the movies themselves.... But the film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself."

Updated through 1/1.

For Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, Blood "is an austere folly, a picture so ambitious, so filled with filmmaking, that its very scale almost obscures its blankness.... An epic stands or falls on the strength of its emotional details, and by that measure, There Will Be Blood, sprawling and grand as it tries to be, fails. There Will Be Blood only pretends to be elemental and raw: It's really tempered and wrought, to the point of dullness. It rings with false humility, something I never thought I'd see in an Anderson picture."

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth confesses that Blood "has pretty much slain me.... I feel like the first step to defining what this film is, and why it's had such an impact on me, is to figure out what it isn't. So, I'll now proceed to blatantly rip off Filmbrain, and review TWBB in more-or-less list form." She offers an "analysis of five common misconceptions about this film."

"It's important to remember that [Upton] Sinclair was as much a committed socialist as a novelist, someone who probably wrote for political purpose more than for dramatic effect," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "So while [Daniel] Day-Lewis's gorgeous acting largely disguises it, the people in Blood tend to be schematic and the film as a whole has a weakness for the didactic. In its willingness to push everything, even personality, to extremes, this is a film with the defects of its virtues, so it's fortunate that those virtues are very great indeed."

"Now that Brando is gone, no other actor can match Day-Lewis for sheer wacko mystique," writes Mike D'Angelo in Esquire. "There Will Be Blood only serves to confirm him as the screen's most gifted ham."

Earlier: Reviews and such in entries launched on 12/19, 12/10, 12/5 and 11/9.

Updates: "It is the genius (and I use that word advisedly) of Daniel Day-Lewis's performance to slowly, patiently, show the madness replacing his former rationalism, to prepare us for the film's astonishing ending, an ending one dare not reveal, but that contains what I - resistant as I am to superlatives - consider to be the most explosive and unforgettable 10 or 15 minutes of screen acting I have ever witnessed." And overall, for Time's Richard Schickel, this is "one of the most wholly original American movies ever made."

"The past few months have hardly lacked for audacious exercises in cine-hubris - The Assassination of Jesse James, Southland Tales and I'm Not There, to name three excellent examples - but, as bizarre as it often is, There Will Be Blood is the one that packs the strongest movie-movie wallop. This is truly a work of symphonic aspirations and masterful execution," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The last 20 minutes are as shocking in their way as the plague that rains from the sky in Magnolia's finale. By the time the closing words 'There Will Be Blood' appear (with a burst of Brahms) inscribed in heavy gothic letters on the screen, Anderson's movie has come to seem an Old Testament story of cosmic comeuppance and filicidal madness - American history glimpsed through the smoke and fire that the lightning left behind."

Updates, 12/27: "For all its measured pacing, exquisitely framed long takes and parched period beauty, There Will Be Blood finally cannot contain the reservoirs of Day-Lewis's intense melancholy," writes Michael Koresky in one of the longest pieces Stop Smiling's ever run on a single film. "Not so much a slow burn as a damning accumulation of moments, unforgiving in their spareness, the film seems structured like a two-and-a-half-hour self-denial capped by a horribly therapeutic self-actualization."

"If the style of There Will Be Blood is decidedly naturalistic, its resonances are distinctly mythopoeic," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "The story feels less invented than divined, as if it were lying there all along, like the oil in the ground, waiting for Anderson to discover it.... It is hard to overstate the case for this movie.... With There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has taken a stab at making The Great American Movie - and I daresay he's made one of them."

For Matt Zoller Seitz, Blood "isn't perfect or entirely satisfying, but it's so singular in its conception and execution that one can no more dismiss it than one can dismiss a volcanic eruption occurring in one's backyard. It cannot be diminished - as Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia could, and to my mind, rightly were diminished - as another instance of a facile, energetic director hurling homage at the audience." Spoilers follow, just so you know.

Also at the House Next Door, NP Thompson declares it a "debacle" and "a bomb, and an overwrought one at that."

"There's a biblical simplicity to these events, as brother turns against brother, father betrays son, and son strikes back at father," writes Jeffrey Overstreet of this "masterpiece" for Christianity Today. "If there were categories in the video stores called 'The Wages of Sin' or 'The Nature of Evil,' this film could fit perfectly in either section."

Ray Pride's got a link to the screenplay and steaming audio of selections from Jonny Greenwood's soundtrack. And he adds: "Highly recommended: don't read the script until you've seen the film."

Updates, 12/28: "More than anything, There Will Be Blood is a breathtakingly well-made film," writes Bilge Ebiri for Nerve. "Dramatic, suspenseful, and with real sweep, for most of its running time it's the kind of film you'll want to take your grandparents to; just hustle them out of the theater before it comes to its stark conclusion."

"Part of the reason I am less enamored of There Will Be Blood than most of my colleagues is that I'm not sure there is any central anything here," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "For roughly two and a half hours, we watch things happen - incidents that are generally interesting, but which seem of more or less equal dramatic weight.... The throughline seems to be the souring of Daniel's soul, but whatever transformation takes place is (if you'll pardon me) hiding in Plainview."

Blood is "what Scorsese's Gangs of New York should have been," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "As long as money retains the power to poison men's souls, Anderson's uncompromising masterpiece will continue to resonate as a harrowing cautionary warning to a country with oil pumping through its veins, clouding its judgment and coarsening its soul."

Update, 12/29: "Me, I agree with Anderson himself who once said something to the effect that Magnolia was the best film he ever made or ever would be capable of making," writes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark. "I admire There Will Be Blood, but like it somewhat less than the ensemble films, finding it to be a flawed but compelling work by one of America's most singularly talented filmmakers."

Update, 1/1: "What Blood doesn't have is much in the way of politics - so much for social justice," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "Instead, Anderson offers up sophomoric satire, but with a redeeming, anarchic mirth."

Posted by dwhudson at December 26, 2007 7:43 AM