Will there be more Blood? You bet.

"John Ford taught us to regard every Western as an allegorical comment on America," writes C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark. "And most of them are in some way. But Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is so abstract, primal, and fundamentally ambiguous that it lends itself to any number of readings. Which is maybe why cinebloggers can't stop writing about it. If it doesn't work for you as a Western, try looking at it as a horror film."

"There Will Be Blood seems headed for the Mount Rushmore of Ecstatic Overreaction," writes Godfrey Cheshire. "Though I've regarded Anderson as something of a fraudulent striver from the first, I go into every new film hoping to be won over. And I must stress that in the first half of There Will Be Blood, I was - completely." But then: "I'll tell you exactly where he loses it." And he does. "Ultimately, I think Anderson has nothing to say other than that he wants to make movies like the great ones of yore. And critics, seeing no new Altmans or Kubricks on the horizon, are all too ready to mistake his pretensions for the real thing."

Updated through 1/25.

As if in reply, Neil Morris writes, also in the Independent Weekly, "The itch to remonstrate any Paul Thomas Anderson film as pretentious is not without justification." But: "No film in the past year has haunted me longer after departing the theater. Within Anderson and cinematographer Robert Elswit's panoramic stereogram is a Faustian fever dream that deconstructs both the Horatio Alger myth and the American ethos of success through diligent, pious striving."

For the Vue Weekly's Josef Braun, Blood "is something fiery and looming, controlled and eccentric, and fully deserving of the superlatives it continues to attract."

Earlier: 12/5, 12/10, 12/19, 12/26, 1/4 and 1/11.

Updates, 1/21: "I can see it approaching, like a dark cloud in a blue sky: the Daniel Day-Lewis backlash," sighs Peter Bradshaw, recalling a recent email "from a very good friend: 'Perhaps next time we see each other you can explain to me what is so brilliant about Daniel Day-Lewis essentially performing like a crazed panto pirate in his last two big movies....' Is Day-Lewis overpraised? I don't think so, no. But I have to confess there is a strange whispering-in-church tone that comes over journalists when writing about him."

"To paraphrase Bob Dylan's 'Maggie's Farm,' Anderson has a head full of ideas that may be drivin' him insane," writes Edward Copeland. "Now many great films have been made that toiled in the soil of the ambiguous, but they aren't all as goddamn boring as There Will Be Blood."

Update, 1/24: "If this film is a character piece - and I think it's more that than anything else - then Anderson needs to give us a person to work with," writes Darren Hughes. "What a fascinating mess of a movie."

Updates, 1/25: "Truly, the first step in measuring Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood is to note the underplaying, the restraint and the terrible repression in the man - for this is a cannibal who is trying with all his might to think vegetarian thoughts," argues David Thomson in a post to the Guardian's film blog. "Another step in describing this great performance is to ask, who is honestly surprised? After all, an actor with Brando's zest and skill is working with Paul Thomas Anderson. What did anyone expect? Don't you remember what Anderson did with Tom Cruise, Philip Baker Hall and Jason Robards in Magnolia? Can't you see that this is a director always going to go farther than others?"

Jim Emerson examines "Three kinds of violence: Zodiac, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood."

Posted by dwhudson at January 19, 2008 4:21 PM