There will be, yes, even more Blood.

"[I]n the aptly titled There Will Be Blood, [Paul Thomas] Anderson tells the familiar story not as he's received it from earlier films (much as he's studied them) or even from his putative source, Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, but as a kind of social realist peyote vision," writes Stuart Klawans in the Nation. "Utterly fluid yet coming at you in flashes, based on events of a century ago yet intensely present, the film seems as tangible as its desert hills and steam-powered machines but as unfathomable as Daniel Plainview: a rumbling abyss of a man, who will tell you he doesn't like to explain himself."

Updated through 1/16.

"Rather than the mutual diminishing that adaptations share with their source texts, Oil! and There Will Be Blood provide a unique sort of dialectical insight," writes David Lowery. "Neither one sheds light on the other, but in concert they expose something of the inner process by which Anderson created such a formidable, unwieldy and wholly original piece of work."

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy on Daniel Day-Lewis: "Spewing palaver and rage, sucking the vitality out of friends and strangers alike, forcing the Earth itself to do his bidding, he's larger than life (and maybe even death) and absolutely unforgettable. It's the most memorably gigantic screen acting since Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs and maybe since the heyday of De Niro, Pacino, Nicholson and Hoffman in the go-go 70s."

At Bright Lights After Dark, Erich Kuersten revisits DDL's performance in Gangs of New York.

Update, 1/12: Craig Keller "did not care for the motion picture."

Update, 1/13: A snippet from Peter Stanford long interview with Daniel Day-Lewis for the Observer: "It sounds so presumptuous to talk about it but I had a strong sense of the power of Paul's unconscious in his script and in his work. And it appealed very much to something in mine, and I never chose to define it or analyse it in any way whatsoever. He honestly told unblinkingly the story of one man's life from the first scene to this outrageous conclusion. I couldn't begin to imagine where some of that had come from because it didn't always appear to have a logic, and yet it appeared to me to have its own innate logic."

Updates, 1/14: James Ponsoldt talks with PTA for Filmmaker.

"It's the kind of film that Pauline Kael surely would have written an almost-rave for, pointing out its 'excesses' and 'shortcomings' and loving it all the more for not having so hedged its bets," writes Zach Campbell. "Still. I'm not convinced the film is more than half-baked, conceptually and thematically, and I feel as though Anderson were really sure of how he wanted to say something meaningful but spent less time on the meaning that supplied that... meaningfulness."

Plainview is "just there, a fact of life, a veritable American landscape all to himself, and like the landscape (which Anderson also views with a majestic but never merely pictorial eye), he has to simply be taken for what he is. What this all amounts to is a character study that rigorously denies the psychological dimension in favor of the sheer physical facts of the character's existence." Ed Howard also revisits PTA's Hard Eight.

"'What's it about?' may be the wrong question to ask about There Will Be Blood, which pulls Oil! inside out: while the film traces the growing mental and moral corruption of its two antagonists, it is never 'about' exposing capitalism or religious hucksterism," writes Miriam Elizabeth Burstein. Via Chuck Tryon.

"With There Will be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has made a self-conscious bid to join the ranks of the Great American Filmmakers," writes Dave McDougall, but the film "seems largely like a series of ideas rather than a set of interwoven ones. Anderson's focus on visuality and tableau dims his characters' psychology."

"Anderson's film is like a vision of notes he took on a Great American Epic, ideas and angles introduced but rarely followed through," agrees Daniel Kasman. "It is not that the film moves at a montage-like clip as does much of Anderson's two mega movies [Boogie Nights and Magnolia], but rather the narrative touches down at telling details, small and large, to suggest something of Daniel Plainview and the world he represents, and then moves on to another idea, rarely finishing the first."

Update, 1/16: For Stop Smiling, Patrick Z McGavin talks with cinematographer Robert Elswit and production designer and art director Jack Fisk.

Posted by dwhudson at January 11, 2008 9:15 AM