There Will Be Blood

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🎙️ EPISODE 424: 03.17.22 With only one more PTA film left to complete his filmography review (Inherent Vice), I find myself at odds with how to assess/critique/analyze this work. Having seen all the work now multiple times, my go-to seems to be to just let the movies wash over me. It isn't that I'm not interesting in picking apart the thematic elements, it's that the thematic elements seem either clear and mammoth or so murky that they barely reveal themselves against the tapestry of the scene. And this is praise, not a knock. This seems like a very rare kind of genius: creating worlds that are so immersive and feel so real, that they can take even the best and smartest and handsomest film critics (like myself) and render them fully passive, like so many of the sheep I imagine trot out every few months to check out the latest Spiderman or Badger Boy installment in the various endless and gross man-child franchises.

But not ole MovieJeff.com. Nope, not me. This shit is my Marvel. So when I watch There Will Be Blood, I don't necessarily wanna pick apart how this turn of the (previous) century story is an anti-capitalist microcosm of the entire story of America, and how Daniel Plainview is the pure embodiment of that evil. And don't get me started on the duality of man concept: How Paul Sunday represents the plight and also the resilience of the everyman by taking what he can from the grift and getting the hell out, while his brother Eli represents those who seek to create and control the grift. One thing I surely won't be discussing in detail is how those two central characters (Daniel Day-Lewis's Plainview and Paul Dano's Eli) are representative of the two driving forces of post-colonial American society: commerce and religion. And, finally, let's not utter a peep about which of those grifts might 'win out' in the end; I wouldn't wager a guess that there's any clarity offered by the fact that one of those two bludgeons the other to death with a bowling pin. Who's to say. Not me.

I just want to watch this scene...


and this scene...


and also all the other scenes in between and when almost three hours pass, it feels like nothing and I could easily start the movie again. That's all.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 423 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 425 ⫸

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There Will Be Blood is a 2007 American epic period drama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely based on the 1927 novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a silver miner turned oilman on a ruthless quest for wealth during Southern California's oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Paul Dano, Kevin J. O'Connor, Ciarán Hinds, and Dillon Freasier co-star. It was released on September 27, 2007.