There Will Be Blood DVD is anti-state of the
Thursday, April 17th, 2008There Will Be Blood DVD is anti-state of the art. Its the work of an analog filmmaker railing against an increasingly digitized world. In that sense, the movie is idiosyncratic, too: vintage visionary stuff. Its physical and tactile. Together Day-Lewis and Dano produce the years most mercurial moments. Conjure up the maddest despot scene you can remember and you might get a sense of the seismic register of Day-Lewiss extravagant performance. Watch and marvel, though you may have to suspend your disbelief from the top of an oil derrick. Andersons period piece evokes memories of East of Eden with its family conflicts, Elmer Gantry in its evangelical moments, and Days of Heaven in its epic visuals. The dense, elegiac and extraordinarily mature character study There Will Be Blood is such a departure in tone, theme and execution as if to seem by a different filmmaker entirely. Anderson is attempting to harness the old-fashioned American Western epic with the probing psychology and intimacy of a modern-day character study. The fact that that character happens to be so repellent is one of the films many strokes of genius.