I just watched There Will Be Blood. Began promisingly, lost its way in the middle, ended very badly. This is another movie, like Magnolia, that the critics loved and I thought was lame. As far as I’m concerned, Hard Eight was the first and last decent movie made by PT Anderson. Mick LaSalle got this bit right:

“Anderson doesn’t take the religious mind seriously enough to understand it, leaving Paul Dano [as the Reverend Eli Sunday] to play a generalized character who is somewhere between a freak and a phony. The scenes between Day-Lewis and Dano ultimately degenerate into a ridiculous burlesque.”

and…

“There should be no need to pretend ‘There Will Be Blood’ is a masterpiece just because Anderson sincerely tried to make it one.”

And the wonderful Stephanie Zacharek (one of the best movie reviewers out there, meaning I consistently agree with her) nails it:

“Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood’ is an austere folly, a picture so ambitious, so filled with filmmaking, that its very scale almost obscures its blankness. … The movie only pretends to be elemental and raw: It’s really tempered and wrought, to the point of dullness. … An epic has to expand as it proceeds; this one narrows. The movie has eloquence but no guts. Its vigor is the arty kind, and over and over again it raises questions and then acts as if the answers — or even the questions those initial questions lead to — are unimportant. … Over and over again, ‘There Will Be Blood’ drops hints about what its big ideas are supposed to be and then neatly skirts them.”

Well said, and it makes for a very unsatisfying movie.

It’s been ages since I’ve watched a movie, but I did recently see No Country for Old Men and really enjoyed it. (I hadn’t even heard of it until it won the Oscar for Best Movie.) It may even be better than Blood Simple, which I thought was brilliant.

From the Sight & Sound review:

“Anton Chigurh - a sociopathic [sic. psychopathic] hitman hired by the drug cartel to hunt down the cash - fits satisfyingly into the Coens’ ongoing interrogation of American manhood, which they present as always problematic and often absurd, gleefully suggesting here that its most successful incarnation might be a serial killer. Patient, implacable and ultra-capable, Chigurh is also alien, even supernatural in his presumptive superiority. The model of consummate self-sufficiency, he seems to lampoon the frontier ethos of the Reaganite Cowboy Man: to Chigurh humans are a form of livestock, occasionally diverting but ultimately disposable; his favoured method of execution is a hydraulic cattle-gun. Plainly though non-specifically foreign, he takes a Martian’s-eye view of American life.”

One of my favorite things about the Coens is their attention to language and love of regional dialects … “I’m fixin’ to do somethin’ dumber ‘n’ hell, but I’m goin’ anyways,” “You don’t want to lie with-out what it’s absolutely necessary,” etc. I recommend you see it, assuming you’re a guy — this is not a movie to take a date to.