There Will Be Blood

I watched this two and a half hour movie this morning instead of going to my two and a half hours of classes. Call it a lazy Tuesday. Hey, nobody said I could accomplish my quest to unclog the backlog without making some sacrifices. My GPA, career, and future? Collateral damage on the road to a greater cause, I'm afraid. Anyway, the decision has paid off so far. (I'll get back to you on this once midterms happen.) There Will Be Blood was a great movie. Everyone's heard about how awesome Daniel Day-Lewis was, but you've really got to see it to understand it. This wasn't just Oscar-worthy; his performance just may rank as one of the top ten of all time. The other true standout in this film was its score. Every piece of background music fit perfectly. This includes the lengthy periods of time in which there was only silence. I'm not usually one to pinpoint specifics when it comes to music, but there's one chaotic scene in particular in which the action is accompanied by several percussion instruments. At first, they're all following their own beat, and the frequencies of their patterns are noticeably disjointed. It causes additional discomfort. Then, as the scene unfolds over several minutes, the different percussion noises all begin to "find each other," so to speak, and before long all the banging is in unison, much like a frantic heartbeat. Likewise, the scene's tone has shifted from chaotic to dramatic. Masterfully done. Now, a lot of people (myself included) are apt to liken this movie to 2007's other big hit with the critics, No Country For Old Men, another slow-paced, long, "thinking" movie set in the wide open west. But they're very, very different. One's about a crazy criminal and a three-way game of cat-and-mouse. The other is a biopic of sorts about an oil tycoon in the early 20th century. People's biggest problem with No Country was that it was a suspenseful thriller for an hour and a half, and then it completely and abruptly dies; you feel like there's an epic climax building, and then there's nothing of the sort. Blood is kind of the opposite of that, in that the extremely memorable and climactic five-minute ending comes out of nowhere at all. Almost like a scaled down Departed. Crazy. I'm sure there were also plenty of thematic and philosophical messages to take away from There Will Be Blood, but I fear that I am not a man who is always capable of grasping these on his own in an articulate way. The movie was great, and I know that it was great, and could sense that it was great, and didn't need all the hype beforehand to come to the conclusion that it was great - all of this is true, even if I can't explain exactly what made it so great or why. But there are other blogs you could read for opinions on that sort of stuff. Here, you'll just find a couple of guys who want to watch some movies, play some games, and read some books. Tune in sometime in the near future for Sweeney's reactions to Oil!, Upton Sinclair's novel that Blood was adapted from. Yeah, that's right. We've got all the bases covered.