There Will Be Blood

A Long, Dark Journey into the Soul of Greed and Power
Upton Sinclair's epic novel OIL! has been successfully transformed to a film by screen writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson ('Magnolia','Boogie Nights', etc). The film is a long song (158 minutes), covering a fascinating span of time in turn of the century California when oil gained the lure of gold and transformed the land and the people into creatures of capitalism and greed and lust, and were it not for the presence of Daniel Day-Lewis' powerful performance as the man who makes it all happen, the story itself would become tiresome. It doesn't.

Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a silver miner in 1898, but soon discovers oil and begins on a mission to become wealthy, owning most of the oil fields from the mountains of central California to the Pacific Ocean. With his medicine man manner of getting people to do what he wants he pursues his greed relentlessly, disrupting small sleepy towns like Little Boston as he gains access to the wealth of the black gold. There...

Great movie, disappointing DVD special edition--5 star movie, 2 star extras--go for the single disc edition
When is a "Collector's Edition" not a collector's edition? When the second disc barely has an one hour's worth of additional featurettes and other extras. "There Will Be Blood" deserved to be recognized as one of the finest films from last year. That's not to say the film is perfect but its flaws are pretty easy to overlook because of Paul Thomas Anderson's sweeping and ambitious storytelling. I'd recommend the single disc edition as the "Collector's Edition" doesn't have all that much in the way of extras. The single disc edition is really all you need even though it doesn't have ANY extras.

The packaging for this set is horrible (which I could forgive if the discs weren't scratched up in the process). How did this get past the marketing department at Paramount?

"There Will Be Blood" based on Upton Sinclair's novel OIL! gives us two portraits of two very different men both ruled by their own obsession--Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis in his Oscar winning role...

Greed, That is. Black Gold. Texas Tea
"There Will Be Blood" is probably the absolute best film of the year, and this is due to more than the extraordinary talent of Daniel Day-Lewis. At its core, it tells a story of insatiable greed, of how the lust for absolute power can drive anyone into a state of pure evil. Based on Upton Sinclair's novel "Oil!" the descent of oil tycoon Daniel Plainview (Lewis) is long and slow, but it's definitely constant--he starts off in 1902 with drive, passion, and charisma, only to lose himself to hate, arrogance, and a complete lack of decency by 1927. By the end of the film, absolutely nothing about this man is likeable, and one gets the sense that he wanted it that way all along: "I hate most people," he says at one point. "I look at people and I see nothing worth liking." Here's a character that can't be pitied, simply because he created exactly what he wanted for himself.

The first ten minutes of "There Will Be Blood" contains no dialogue, but it still manages to establish a...

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