No No, Don't Leave. You Heard Correctly, There Will Be Blood...Eventually.
I went to the movies yesterday and going in, I was pretty excited. I don't get that excited about most movies and it's rare that I go to a movie without Debbie. See, my girlfriend doesn't watch R rated movies, which pretty much means I don't watch R rated movies. This time, though, I just couldn't wait to see Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. In case you haven't heard about it, I've found the trailer that inspired me to see it and I encourage everyone to take a moment to watch it:
If you just watched the trailer, please thank me, for I have saved you from sitting through what felt like nine hours of nothing! What a huge disappointment. What was wrong with it? For starters, and this is the movie's big surprise, there's no blood. In fact, after two and a half hours I finally saw some blood, but I realized it was my own blood! I had unwittingly dug a hole in my leg after being left on my own to entertain myself for so long. I think I heard that there was blood at the very end of the movie but I'm not sure because after the whole leg-hole incident, I blacked out from- oh the irony- a loss of blood! So, much like the cake, the blood is a lie. And I don't need lots of blood for a movie to be good, I just didn't think Paul Thomas Anderson needed false advertising to fill the seats. Clearly he does, though. Look for his next movie, a thriller about day-to-day operations in a cracker factory called There's Lots of Sex and Violence in this Movie. It'll keep you on the edge of your seat.
About half way through Blood (which I should more accurately dub Boredom), I realized why I was so excited to see it. I thought to myself what it would have been like to walk in on the movie at that point and I became really interested! This same thing occurred to me in probably five scenes throughout the film. However, like so many girls I've met in my life, once you get to know the movie for an hour it's just not nearly as interesting. Luckily for Marketing, it did make for a great trailer.
I know the film is up for a lot of Oscars and even though I didn't like it, I'm actually okay with that. Daniel Day-Lewis did a great job with his character, Paul Thomas Anderson really is a terrific director, and whoever did the sound managed to make a lot of the scenes make me think, "This sounds like something exciting is going to happen!", even though it never did. As far as Best Picture, it's unfortunate that it gets nominated but you know what? You gotta come up with five and I understand that. In a perfect world, Juno wouldn't have made it either. Regardless, No Country for Old Men will steal the show this year, and rightfully so.
In the end, the story didn't do anything for me at all. Call me old fashioned, but I like conflict. I like adversaries. I like climax and resolution. It's a good thing Anderson didn't title the film There Will be Plot, because that would have really built me up and then let me down. Like I said earlier, Daniel Day-Lewis did a fantastic job, but the entire movie was just him, and by the end I was even tired of watching him act, which is a shame. At least I have Lost to look forward to tonight.
Oh yeah, and the previews sucked.
Comments
"However, like so many girls I've met in my life, once you get to know the movie for an hour it's just not nearly as interesting." - Easy man, the rest of us need this resource and if you ruin it for all of us - there will be blood.