There Will be Blood (Anderson, 2007): Everyman Screen on the Green, 10.30pm
This is part of the Everyman Screen on the Green Paul Thomas Anderson on 35mm season at the cinema. Full details here.
Chicago Reader review:
Paul Thomas Anderson's fifth feature (2007), a striking
piece of American self-loathing loosely derived from Upton Sinclair's Oil!,
is lively as bombastic period storytelling but limited as allegory. The
cynical shallowness of both the characters and the overall
conception—American success as an unholy alliance between a
turn-of-the-century capitalist (Daniel Day-Lewis) and a faith healer
(Paul Dano), both hypocrites—can't quite sustain the film's visionary
airs, even with good expressionist acting and a percussive score by
Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Day-Lewis, borrowing heavily from Walter
and John Huston, offers a demonic hero halfway between Thomas Sutpen in
Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and James Dean's hate-driven tycoon in Giant
(shot on the same location as this movie), but Kevin J. O'Connor in a
slimmer part offers a much more interesting and suggestive character.
This has loads of swagger, but for stylistic audacity I prefer
Anderson's more scattershot Magnolia.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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