I don't think I could be more excited for a movie than P.T. Anderson's new one There Will Be Blood. After all, Magnolia is my third favorite movie of all time and I was one of the few people that enjoyed Punch Drunk Love.
But there are always naysayers...Salon disagrees with my my undying affection for anything Anderson, calling the movie a "maddening folly." The review itself doesn't use those terms so this may be a case of an editor giving a title to an article that the author never intended. Yet, reading the review is maddening as I am confused as to why reviewer Stephanie Zacharek doesn't like the movie.
To grab just one line from the review, "But the greatest disappointment of "There Will Be Blood" is the way its actors seem to matter less than its themes." I find this funny as I think about my P.T. Anderson experience and my hometown Wisconsin audiences. I love to hear what people say to each other about the movie they have just seen as they leave the theater. When I lived in Wisconsin this was especially entertaining as movies are often viewed as entertainment and not much else. This is the group of people I was with when I saw Magnolia in which several people walked out in the middle and one person shouted as they left "you know, you can get your money back!" I just have this feeling that if There Will Be Blood makes it to a theater there, no one will ever say the following words "you know, the themes of that movie really mattered a lot more than the actors staring in it." But if I'm wrong and if they did, why is that a negative statement for a movie? It seems to me to be just criticism to fill up a negative review that was a 100 words short.
Danielson -- Bloodbook on the Half Shell
This track is from the Danielson album Ships.
