Whew! Oh how I love weekends.Friday night I went to see There Will Be Blood with a few friends. I went into it expecting a stellar and riveting film, due to the 91% score at Rotten Tomatoes and rave reviews from people I generally trust. I left feeling disappointed and not exactly sure what I just saw. Doing a pros and cons list is sort of “my thing” lately, so here goes (spoiler free):
Pros:
- The acting. I haven’t seen a movie with acting this good in a LONG time. Daniel Day Lewis was absolutely as believable as it gets and in my opinion made the movie worth seeing. There is one particular actor (Paul Dano) who plays two different characters in the movie, and I read that he only had 1 week to prepare for his role of Eli Sunday. Eli Sunday was my favorite character personally – I thought he was the creepiest and most interesting character and I would have loved to see even more of him.
- The imagery. I knew going in that this would be a beautiful movie. Some of the shots of the fire, and of the landscape and the expressions were just phenomenal.
- The music. This is going to be a pro and a con. When they actually got into the meat of the songs and played them orchestrally in the background – it was extremely well picked. I recognized at least one Brahms piece and it was very well placed.
- The religious aspects. I always enjoy controversial movies that question organized religion – but there was definitely a lot of anti-Christianity in the movie. If you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, steer clear of this one.
Cons:
- The length. At 2 1/2 hours, this movie dragged in places. The amount of plot and actual STORY that happened was so miniscule that it could have been an hour shorter and done away with a lot of filler. Yes, the long pauses and slow methodical conversations did add to the artsy aspect of the movie – but I think viewers might be bored as hell watching this one on DVD.
- The music. Whomever directed the music must have been accustomed to horror movies. The music and sound effects were so harsh in spots that I found myself wincing and covering my ears. There were big buildups in the music that led to absolutely nothing. There were beautiful grandiose classical pieces so full of emotion and energy that it made the actual scene occuring in the movie seem that less interesting. Some of the music just completely outshined the plot and were far too epic and sharp for what was actually going on in the story.
- The plot. While it had great promise, it just wasn’t hashed out enough for me. I think this was mostly due to the unnecessary length of the film making it seem like absolutely nothing happened. Looking back, it’s actually a really neat idea for a movie that could have been taken in so many better directions. The ending of the movie seemed a bit rushed and I would have loved to see more of Daniel’s downright evil.
Anyway, I’m still on the fence about this one. Everyone I went with disliked it and banned me from picking any more movies from now on. I don’t think it was as bad as they think (I blame it on them all being smokers trying to sit through a 159 minute movie, hah!) Go see it if you’re interested in the art aspects and the acting (it’s definitely going to take awards this year) but you may want to wait for the DVD. And choose the friends you go with carefully, because it isn’t a crowd-pleaser!
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I thought There will be Blood was a great movie! I really liked the acting, the story was really interesting, and the character was interesting.
“– and I would have loved to see even more of him.”
JEEZ TAMI. He was a ‘man of god’! You pervert.
I liked this one better than I liked No Country… the story here was definitely delved into more, and was interesting (probably because I know next to nothing about oil ‘drilling’ and the movie-cut mechanics were cool to see). I’m just not a fan of extreme characters I guess and it felt like this movie took a jump off the ‘what the hell?’ cliff about 2/3 through and proceeded to focus only on the way out-there actions of the characters instead of the story I sat through an hour and a half to build up and get into.
Definite agree about the visuals and the music… there were several points where the music is very jarring, and while I get where they were going with the ominous-disjointed-discomfort sound of it, I think it went a little too far in places and left me physically uncomfortable. Lols, maybe I’m just getting old.
I’m torn between two taglines for this movie:
“There Will Be Blood. Two and a Half Hours in. Bring a Book.”
or
“If You Liked No Country, You’ll Love There Will Be Blood!”
You have to go into that movie with people having the full knowledge that the first 15 minutes there is NO speaking. If someone can understand the 15 minute no speaking aspect then they’ll do fine. Otherwise they wolnt like it.