Berlinale. There Will Be Blood.

Even though There Will Be Blood finally opens in Germany next week, I wasn't going to pass up on the very first chance I'd have to see it, even if it meant missing one of the umpteen other Berlinale screenings going on at the same time. For months now, I've been watching the reviews come in and, keeping an eye and ear on who's said what, I could hardly stand the wait any longer.

After a first viewing, I can't add much to what's already been written in the entries listed at the bottom of this one other than a hearty yes to those who've declared it some sort of masterpiece. Further viewings are surely in store. In the meantime, Blood has opened in the UK; stateside viewers are still sorting through their thoughts; and the German papers are going wild.

"This is a dark, uncompromising film, thrillingly original and distinctive, with a visionary passion," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It is a movie against which all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves. Paul Thomas Anderson is doing something new with cinema, and you can hardly ask for more than that."

"There may be scepticism about the full-bodied Method style favored by [Daniel] Day-Lewis, where a role is worth playing only if it requires you to translate Proust into semaphore, or survive in the Himalayas for a year on nothing but yak droppings," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "But whatever he undertook to play Daniel Plainview..., it was worth it. His performance can be summed up as long, overcast periods interrupted occasionally by all hell breaking loose. He doesn't make us like Plainview, or even understand his emotional cruelty, but we absolutely believe in him."

"Is he a great actor - or is he a bit of a ham?" a friend of David Gritten asks. "The answer, surely, is both." Also in the Telegraph, Sukhdev Sandhu finds Blood, "in its imaginative scope and its delirious, almost demented ambition, as bold a film as has been made in recent years."

Back in the States, Rob Humanick's just seen it for the fifth time: "What amazes me so much at this point with Blood... is its endless emotional reflexivity, which seems to somehow flourish amidst Anderson's rigid and perfectionist style."

David Lowery has problems with it, but that's fine: "I'm not out to make apologies for a film that's at least a little flawed anyway you half it, and yet all the more fascinating for being so frustrating."

In German: Thomas Groh; and film-zeit.de gathers several angles from the papers.

Online listening tip. PTA was a guest on The Treatment on January 30.

Online viewing tip. From Dan Eisenberg, with comments.

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

Posted by dwhudson at February 9, 2008 10:48 AM