Did Howell really write a column wondering if milkshakes were an anachronism only to conclude they weren't and are you really repeating it?

Am I really commenting on it?

Wow. An Oscar-nominated writer/director actually got a crucial fact in his movie right. Amazing. It's like he spent some time writing it. I thought actors just made up the lines as they went along. The mind reels.

I just rewatched "There Will Be Blood" recently and I found exactly three frames of the movie that Jeff hasn't commented on...maybe there should be a contest of sorts for H-E readers to figure out which three they are... please submit your entry in the form of hour/minute/frame in standard SMPTE timecode 25fps format and the closest entry will win... something that has nothing to do with There Will Be Blood.

What a stupid article...

That being said, the milkshake line is kinda prefaced by the scene where Plainview makes the ailing H.W. a cocktail of booze & milk.

Too bad Day-Lewis' equally furious "Now that you've tasted my mutton, how do you like it?" line in Gangs of New York didn't catch on as much.

I mean "milkshake" is great... but come on... "mutton"... now that's fucking genius.

I think Bill the Butcher was overly saturated with "Milkshake"-like quotes. Couldn't come up with just one.

"See this? This is you. Notch forty-five, you Irish bug bastard."

"Why dontcha burn him, see if his ashes turn green."

"That, my friends, is the minority vote."

That's three from just one scene!

Daniel Plainview is nothing like Bill the Butcher, I don't care what anyone says.

One lines that's been popping up in conversations I've been having:

"There's a whole ocean of (fill in the blank, depending on the subject being discussed) beneath us! And I'm the only one who can get to it!"

It's fun AND adaptable!

Sophmoric or not, I want to read Pete Howell's homework. Where's the link? I don't get what Ed is saying, Jeff has barely scratched the surface. At Glenn Whipp's Q&A, PTA said many of the oil men's lives had tragic endings. He also said he shot it simply... NOT... every movie should be shot that simply.

Actually, I think this is wrong. I am almost positive that the milkshake line is specifically referring to the legal concept of oil drainage. In fact, the milkshake analogy is widely used to teach the idea in law schools. Its also worth nothing there are a number of lines in the movie that accurately use phrases from the oil and gas business. Picking up on the terminology used by Plainview and his competitors adds subtle layer of context to the film.

T.Holly I think what PTA meant is that the movie is shot with relative economy of movement and composition. Many of the scenes are long two shots of characters engaged, so outside the oil stuff, it's rather classical filmmaking.

Oh, and PTA admitted that the line originally was "I drink your SLURPEE" but after a quick web search, he had DDL come back in for ADR.

Especially compared with Anderson's other films, which are typically frenetic/exuberant in their coverage and camera movement.

Yeah, yeah-- but where did Andy Dufresne get a Zip-Loc bag in 1965?

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/080111

Just to clear things up, gang, I didn't write
anything about the milkshake line. No column,
no nothing.

It was just an observation I made in a friendly
email to Jeff Wells. I'm pleased to see he found my
milkshake research worthy of wider circulation.

Maybe I should write a column about it...

The possibility of an anachronism in the milkshake line occurred to me as I watched the film, but I figured it checked out. They certainly would not have been lacking the ingredients back then, and any guy who has a bowling alley in his house is probably on the cutting edge of dessert enjoyment as well.

It's nice to know that Hollywood Elsewhere's attempts to influence the pop-culture lexicon won't be impeded by historical inaccuracies.

So Anderson went on Wikipedia as well? Impressive.

I think PTA meant that Plainview and Eli draw from the same dark places of the soul. PTA didn't fool me -- it was not simply shot, it was complex and moving and covered with a reverse.

And when it's not tracking or reversing, it's plowing ahead with matching cuts, time jumps, continuous dialog and dissolves that make Scorcese and Schoonmaker look like amateurs.

Sorry for the assumption Pete. Consider me de-snarked.

cj, never apologize. Are you coming to Cloverfield?

Steven Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer has uncovered the genesis of our favorite new movie quote:

Turns out that it came from the Congressional Record - from a 1924 hearing in the wake of the Teapot Dome scandal.

"You can't make this stuff up, honestly," says Anderson, who adapted Upton Sinclair's Oil! - inspired in part by the exploits of Teapot Dome-tainted petro-king Edward Doheny - and spent years researching the era, before filming Blood in Texas in 2006.

"I read the transcripts of the congressional hearings," the writer-director says, "and all these guys had to defend their honor and describe what drainage was. There was essentially a lot of shady stuff going on, and there was drainage going on from the U.S. naval fields, these reserve fields that had been set aside for the U.S. Navy.

"Anyway, I don't remember who it was - maybe it was [New Mexico senator] Albert Fall - but someone had to get up there and describe what drainage was, and his way of describing it was to say, 'Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I'll end up drinking your milkshake.'

"It was more or less like that," says Anderson, who reworked the speech into the crazed lecture delivered by Day-Lewis. "But just the idea that somebody would be describing it as a milkshake was so absurd, I thought that's too good to pass up!"

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/steven_rea/20080113_On_Movies__Warming_to_this_Global_news_conference.html

CJ is coming, T.Holly.

I agree with Rodney Perkins above. My family is in the oil business so I can vouch for the accuracy of the oil and gas slang used throughout.

I won't see the film til this coming weekend so I won't plunge the depth of the milkshake remark.

However, all you have to do is turn an eye to the occasional food programs on either the Discovery Network or the Food Network to know that shakes have been around a long long time. And ice cream bars, ice cream cones...whatever you have a fancy for.

I dig a mint chocolate Klondike myself.

I'm all over Cloverfield, T. And I am sorry. It was a blatant misread and Mr. Howell's interpretation of the facts totally gut the snarky point I was trying to make. A harmless email between friends that our fine host was sharing rather than recycled filler. Why, I myself wondered if milkshake was anachronistic, though my concern lasted about as long as I wondered whether Eli and Paul were the same guy.

No offense taken, CJ, but very classy apology
by you all the same.

If I were to pursue this milkshake investigation further, my in-depth scouring of Wikipedia also turns up evidence that the first shakes had whiskey in them -- which makes Daniel Plainview's feeding of milk and whiskey to his son an even greater foreshadowing of the milkshake drinking to come!

I drink the Cloverfield monster's milkshake.
I drink it up!

I love that Wells turned a personal email from Howell into a column in Canada's biggest daily paper about this "now legendary" scene.

Exagerate much?

Jeff, I wish you would stop pushing this scene so much. There is so much more to the movie than a clever line.