There will be more Blood.

"Whether [There Will Be Blood] succeeds in all of its varied, wildly ambitious aims is a matter of debate among critics," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "But there seems to be a consensus that [Paul Thomas] Anderson - a largely self-taught filmmaker, criticized in some quarters for a hyperkinetic style thick with instances of cinematic genuflection - has forged a distinct voice after a decade of sensuous wide-screen searching. That evolution is inscribed in his first four movies: Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love," all four of which'll be screening this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image. Matt takes another look at each.

Updated through 1/9.

"On the heels of Anderson's previous films Boogie Nights and Magnolia, both of which chronicled the recent history and culture of Los Angeles and its environs, Anderson has now joined the ranks of such definitive California writers as Nathanael West and Joan Didion in crafting his own personal and potent version of the state's creation myth," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post. "If There Will Be Blood represents a reach back into time for a filmmaker whose canvas has always been contemporary, it is also unquestionably an ambitious leap forward, proving that Anderson is an artist of virtually unlimited range and confidence."

For Ioannis Mookas, writing in Gay City News, Blood is "a work of sensory astonishment and rich moral ambiguities." That said, "[T]he slant of Anderson's cuts in paring down [Upton] Sinclair's novel is revealing. For the sake of intensifying the collusion between secular avarice and greed robed in sacred virtue, Anderson deletes Sinclair's major contest between capitalism and a viable red alternative... However inadvertent, the wholesale burial of Sinclair's vibrant Maypole... abets the neoconservative myth that there never existed in our country a mass desire and popular movement toward a 'collective commonwealth,' toward an ordering of society beyond that which makes each person their fellow's competitor."

"The first half of There Will Be Blood and especially the film's dialogue-free first 20 minutes rank among the most thrilling moments I've witnessed on film," writes Timothy Noah in Slate. "About midway, though, I felt that There Will Be Blood lost its clarity, for reasons that say something about the impoverished state of political discussion in the movies generally."

"Watching the movie is like viewing a natural disaster that you cannot turn away from," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "By that I do not mean that the movie is bad, any more than it is good. It is a force beyond categories.... Those who hate the ending, and there may be many, might be asked to dictate a different one. Something bittersweet, perhaps? Grandly tragic? Only madness can supply a termination for this story."

"In many ways, this is, in fact, a sociopathic film," writes Shaun Brady. "It's the study of a self-confessed misanthrope that worms its way so deeply into his point of view that it becomes impossible to look upon any other character in the film without an intensely jaundiced eye - and most of them seem to live up to that distrust." Also in the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams meets Paul Dano.

"The key problem of There Will Be Blood is that Anderson takes Plainview to be a hero - personifying everything that's wrong in American character: greed, selfishness, stinginess and unchecked ambition." So argues Armond White in the New York Press.

"There Will Be Blood may not be an outright masterpiece, but it's as close as a film can get," writes Bradley Steinbacher in the Stranger.

Ed Pilkington talks with PTA for the Guardian.

Updates: New Yorkers, and those in the vicinity: Join fellow cinephiles tomorrow evening (Saturday, early, 5:40 pm) for a viewing and informal meet-up afterwards. Filmbrain's got details.

"Anyone who cares about the art of movies will eventually have to see, contend with and make a decision about There Will Be Blood, and that in itself constitutes a kind of recommendation," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle.

A recent entry from Dan Sallitt is entitled, "I Am Not Convinced That PT Anderson Is a Great Director." And: "There will definitely be spoilers," so I haven't read it - yet! - but you might be ready to.

Update, 1/5: Daniel Day-Lewis's is "possibly the Biggest Performance Of All Time," suggests Damon Wise in the Guardian.

Updates, 1/6: Glenn Kenny posts an entry entitled "Father and Son[s]: Daniel Plainview, Patriarch" - and warns of spoilers.

Dan Eisenberg posts a spoiler-free take on the ending - a positive take, too.

"I had the pleasure of attending a DGA event for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood the other night," writes Nathaniel R. "PT said that he rewatched Giant (1956) before filming and found it 'a hundred times better' than he had remembered it being though he'd always liked it."

Update, 1/7: Blood gets DK Holm thinking a lot about Kubrick.

Updates, 1/8: "Inasmuch as the ascendancy of paleoconservatism within our government defines the last decade of American politics, There Will Be Blood is a political American film," writes Reverse Shot's Jeff Reichert. "In a year that's been remarkably good for American movies, There Will Be Blood handily outshines them all.... There Will Be Blood's western historicism has aligned it in many minds with the Coens' No Country for Old Men, but they're actually flipside narratives of the American Dream: Josh Brolin tries to run and scheme his way to a better life but cruel fate catches him along the way, Plainview, on the other hand, is self-actualization (and the self-negation that comes along with it) personified. Blood's closer to a formally sublimated I'm Not There, replacing Haynes's shattered-glass refraction of Bob Dylan with a cool update on classical storytelling that's no less expansively about the great American (self) experiment."

Luc Sante posts a photo dated 1919 and comments:

To properly represent the American experience, there should be as many oil movies as Westerns of the more conventional sort. It could be a genre of its own: the Oiler. There's no lack of color or story or background or character. Our excellent historian again: "One man kept seven railroad cars, paying 'demurrage' fees just for his dance hall 'girls.' Bridgetown had a dance house at one end of the street and a church at the other. By day the area looked like a burnt cut forest; by night a fairyland, with the lights on top and strung along the derricks." And yet the majority of the movies on the subject listed in the film database were made before 1920. Why do you suppose that is?

Paul Dano is a guest on Fresh Air.

Update, 1/9: "This is an opera," Craig Phillips realizes halfway in or so. "From that point on, whatever craziness was laid upon me by the inspired and deranged head (just like his main character) of PT Anderson just slid on by with mild amusement and appreciation."

Posted by dwhudson at January 4, 2008 9:25 AM