My son Eliot the film student and film blogger, was in a fever to see the lastest by his favorite living American director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), There Will Be Blood, and having to drop his sister off at the airport in Boston yesterday, we decided to make an afternoon of it and catch a showing in Harvard Square.
I tend to over-indulge in superlatives, but this film just made it into my top five list of films, a hallowed quintet that holds room only for Ordet, Apocalypse Now, Godfather II, Barry Lyndon, and now this, the best, most swaggering, gripping account of American capitalism and rugged invididualism I’ve ever read or seen.
The cinematography, particularly during the well fire scene, is pure art.
I can’t predict commercial success for this, it is a challenging movie to watch and the title will put a lot of mainstream viewers off, but I suspect this is going to gain an audience over time like no other film in the past twenty years.
Daniel Day-Lewis is at the top of his form. Some of the closeups on his face are satanic.
2 words: Sinclair Lewis.
Main Street, Arrowsmith, and, of course Babbit but for a nice dose of serious foreshadowing try. “It Can’t Happen Here.”
Little know bit: Sinclair used to sell plot ideas to Jack London.
Um, wrong Sinclair. Movie is based on Upton Sinclair’s (The Jungle) — Oil! — obscure book by the old muckraker, this one his rant against the Standard Oil monopoly.
http://www.amazon.com/Oil-Upton-Sinclair/dp/0143112260/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1199670491&sr=8-1