There Will Be Blood

I saw There Will Be Blood yesterday. Hoo boy. It was a pretty amazing movie. It looked amazing -- imagine the possibilities with gushing oil wells, oil fires in the middle of the night, gurgling, lazily bubbling pools of oil, people streaked with, you guessed it, oil, all in the middle of alternately dry and lush California scrubland where it takes place. It sounded amazing -- the music is sometimes country-bluegrass sounding, sometimes straight out of a horror film, sometimes straight classical, and then, often enough that you never settle down, dissonant and terrifying for seemingly no reason. Daniel Day-Lewis is amazing, and his character Daniel Plainview's development (if that's the word for it) throughout the movie is subtle and pretty damn scary. (And even darkly funny.)

For the record, I am pro-ending. It's shocking and gruesome and absurd. There was some debate about whether or not the ending is inconsistent with the rest of the film for some reason. It does kind of take the film to a new level -- just the setting is a big change from the rest of the movie, suddenly (almost) genteel and ostentatious and wealthy. But to my mind, there was no way to get around having an ending like that. That's the inevitable, and if it is over the top, well, just think of the rest of the movie, which was just teetering on the edge of madness and obsession. If you've seen the movie, and want to see some of the critics' opinions on the ending (I particularly like the quote from the LA Weekly guy), go here. Otherwise, just see the movie.