Jumping right on board, I saw There Will Be Blood and I did like it very much and think it's worth going to see. While it's has it's faults, like some glaze-inducing overly-misanthropic pretensions, it's got a lot going for it. Daniel Plainview is the role that makes me not regret watching Daniel Day Lewis play that top-hatted, mustached gang boss in Gangs of New York. He is a little more interesting to watch than the other great villain this year, Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men, because his character is as bluntly instinctual and yet his on screen drama has a much wider, clearer vantage. His hate is measured by more than just not wanting to be seen. The best scenes show him awkwardly dealing with an undeniable and unfitting desire to be a family man and a respectable business man. While he's neither, he certainly has some obscured desire to be these things. We see him wasting time pursuing these things, just like anyone has to, but in a veiled enough way that it's convincingly sincere, at least to me. I also like the style of the film for the most part. Understated, portentous, the scenes carry themselves along with a certain weightlessness for much of the film, and at the same time you've got something really brewing inside.
That's why I connect watching that movie with listening to James Tenney's Postal Pieces 2CD set. I think about it like listening to Feldman with none of the oppressive tension and all the benefit. The swimming scene especially reminds me of this. Empty and full at the same time.
I also liked that the end of the movie tried to turn that on its head (full and empty at the same time) in a bowling alley.
the movie would be better without the ending.
Comment by bill — February 13, 2008 @ 1:10 am