Jeffrey Wells

Some were cold or indifferent to it, but most of the viewers I spoke to after last night’s Castro theatre screening of There Will Be Blood were either very approving or admitted to having been powerfully moved. Consider the cheers and applause that greeted the closing credits. Here‘s my final interview of the night with a huge fan. And here‘s a longish recording of several people offering various reactions. (Sorry for the ambient wallah-wallah, which makes it difficult to hear some of what’s being said.)

Snapped an hour before the Castro Theatre sscreening began — Monday, 11.5.07, 6:45 pm

Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood is one of those legendary, go-for-broke, fiercely psychological big-canvas art movies that you need to see twice — the first time to go “whoa!” and recoil and get all shaken up and bothered about, and the second time so you can reconsider and see what a masterwork it is, despite your feelings about the malignant emotional content. If you’re a film maven of any kind you can’t let your piddly emotions get in the way of recognizing diseased greatness.

Daniel Day Lewis‘s portrayal of the remarkable Daniel Plainview — a driven, increasingly manic and misanthropic oilman who builds an empire in the early 20th Century — is historic. It’s one of the most riveting and demonically possessed performances ever put to film — more feverish than any monster played by Lon Chaney or Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi — and yet human and vulnerable-seem- ing enough to stir a certain recognition. He’s playing John Huston, after all, by way of Noah Cross. Or is it vice versa?.

Plainvew is a Count Dracula who spews oil rather than sucks blood. He’s starts out as a hard-working miner, then a tough businessman, then a religion-hating misanthrope, then a father who abandons his son, and finally a full-out fiend.

Lewis has a Best Actor Oscar nomination in the bag, of course, but the moral matter of what he and Anderson have brought into the world may give pause to some.

I’m imagining Anderson and Lewis holding a miniature infant version of Daniel Plainview in baby blankets, fresh out of the womb and wet with afterbirth and yet adultly proportioned (as he is in the film), and saying to us all, “Come see our child! He’s a monster, no question, but he came from our ribs and our souls and we love him…God help us but we do. We realize you can’t love him — he’s not constructed that way — but can you respect him at least? Can you at least see that he’s where some of us — perhaps more than a few of us — have come from? Or is a person that, God help us, some of us may actually be?”

No one in the world will argue that the musical score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood isn’t a major mind-bender. It’s boldly intrusive, brassy and manic, pushy, crazy-man symphonic. It expresses Plainview’s psychological state, of course, but it’s also a character unto itself. It keeps saying “listen to me…no, no, listen to me!” And you do, and you can’t help but think and think about it afterward. It’s a guaranteed Oscar nominee.

I really don’t know what to say about Blood‘s chances of being Oscar-nominated for Best Film, or Anderson’s for Best Film or Adapted Screenplay (based as it is on Upton Sinclair‘s “Oil!”). My first reaction was that it’s too cold for the Academy types to embrace it, but I’m starting to wonder. I really don’t know if my first reac- tion is the one to trust or the reaction I’m feeling now, having seen it a second time last night at San Francisco’s Castro theatre with a huge crowd, and admired it all the more.

“Does it have a chance of being named Best Picture by a critics group?,” I wrote a week and a half ago. “Conceivably. Does it have a chance in hell of being nominated for Best Picture by the Academy? I really doubt this. A film this black and misanthropic has never played with the Academy. Compared to Anderson’s film, No County for Old Men is a fairly gentle and kind-hearted thing, at least in terms of Tommy Lee Jones‘ lawman character.

I was wowed but mixed after seeing There Will Be Blood on 10.25. There was no question I’d just seen a masterfully well-honed psychodrama about a two-pronged figure — a snarly, self-made oil tycoon and a creature from the black lagoon — in early 20th Century California.

I also knew this was a powerfully convincing portrait of what a rough, backbreaking thing it was to get oil out of the ground 80 and 90 years ago, and a seriously strange but fascinating look at the primal influences of big oil and evangelical Christianity — religions that obviously still prosper today.

It was also clear there was a strong, somewhat plagued psychological engine at its center. I’m speaking principally of Anderson’s sardonic, dark-leaning world view (portions of Punch Drunk Love aside) and, I strongly suspect, his feelings about his late father, big-time announcer Ernie Anderson, who was allegedly a fierce personality with very dark leanings himself.

People are going to be talking about There Will Be Blood‘s closing line — “I’m finished” — for a long time to come. As well as those first 15 or 20 minutes of dialogue-free story-telling and atmosphere absorption. It’s obviously a work of a first-rate filmmaker delivering a very high-end art epic, at times stunningly so.

There is nothing but realism in There Will be Blood — there isn’t a fake line or moment in the entire 2 hours and 38 minutes — but it’s also an embodiment of a very creepy psychology. Black as night, black as oil, blacker than the bottom of a sealed-up well. My girlfriend hated it. The thought occured to me during the first screening that it’s probably going to make as much as The Assassination of Jesse James…if that.

I respect this film enormously. I admire each and every part. But it leaves you with nothing but the taste of bile in your mouth at the end. Bile and ashes that you want to spit on the pavement as you’re heading out to the parking lot, and at the same time you want to keep with you because they came from a strong and penetrating film.

The day after first seeing it I wrote that Anderson “has a heart of darkness inside him that would make Joseph Conrad tremble and turn pale. I don’t know anything, but There Will Be Blood doesn’t seem like a movie for audiences to watch and delight in as much as a therapy session for Paul to work out his rage and anger at Ernie.”

Lewis’s “Bill the Butcher” in Gangs of New York was a grand guignol psychopath, but Plainview is even more diseased as he lets no light in whatsoever. No gentleness, humor or warmth (except for the love he shows his young adopted son during the first hour). A shrewd survivor, but consumed by utter greed and calculation. A man looking for love and loyalty, and yet ready to kill or abandon those he feels have betrayed him or let him down. Not a character as much as a kind of demonic force of nature.

A week and a half ago I wrote “there is no way — no way in hell — that rank-and-file Academy members are going to embrace this performance, forceful and amazingly intense as it is, enough for Lewis to win. I support his being nominated because I know what great acting is, but no way in hell does he win. Forget it.” Now I don’t know. Last night’s viewing turned me around somewhat. I feel less emotional and more sure of the greatness at work here.

Castro Theatre marquee — Monday, 11.5.07, 6:50 pm

Within its own heavily male, oil-soaked, organized religion-hating, misanthropic realm, There Will Be Blood is brilliant.

But (and I’m talking about the first viewing, not the second) it’s about as hateful as a quality film can be — hateful in that there’s no one to care about except for the young son (and his adult incarnation at the end), and not that much to think about. Most women viewers will probably despise it, and yet it’s easily one of the year’s best made films.

I haven’t mentioned the fall-on-your-knees quality of Robert Elswit‘s widescreen cinematography or Jack Fisk’s production design. I’ll get into the other fine performances by Paul Dano, Ciaran Hinds, Dillon Freasier and Kevin J. O’Connor down the road. It’s primarily a Lewis show from start to finish, and it’s hard to focus elsewhere for the time being.

Anderson is saying, I think, “Don’t let yourself be like this guy….but if you are like this guy, don’t turn to religion to cure your ills because God is a foolish superstition, and religions are run by money-grubbing hypocrites.”

There Will Be Blood is a cautionary tale — beware of the Daniel Plainviews in your life, and the ones living inside you. Is it worth two hours and 38 minutes of experiencing a seething misanthropic cauldron to absorb this message? Yes, it’s worth it…definitely. It passes along a kind of insanity, but it does so with absolute greatness.

Fred Claus blows, according to Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt. Won’t matter…never matters! The family audience will fork over for anything Hollywood cranks out as long as it’s kid-friendly and well-marketed with two or three big names. (I often refused to take my kids to crap like this when they were young in the early to mid ’90s. Well, most of the time.)

Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti in Fred Claus.

“Even more confounding than this mirthless, misanthropic mess,” Honeycutt writes, “is the involvement of such talented people as Vince Vaughn, Paul Giamatti, Miranda Richardson, Rachel Weisz, Kathy Bates and Kevin Spacey. Holiday films invariably perform well opening week, and the reunion of Vaughn with Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin should give Warner Bros. a momentary holiday lift. It might not last long, though.

“One additional problem: Family films should not clock in at 115 minutes.

“The film isn’t just not funny, it is off-putting. The Claus family confrontations are poorly written, the occasional slapstick action is weakly executed — these look like warmed-over leftovers from Disney’s The Santa Clause series — and below-the-line contributions surprisingly mediocre for a Joel Silver production. With Santa Claus movies like this one, who needs Ebenezer Scrooge?”

I respect Shia Lebouf‘s on-screen energy, but I haven’t been a huge fan. There was no choice but to feel badly about his Transformers performance, and with his casting in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull he became known as Steven Spielberg‘s little protege. He has seemed too young, too obsequious, too eager to please his elders. All is forgiven, however, in the wake of his Chicago Walgreens bust a day and a half ago.

It’s obviously not a good or admirable thing to get drunk and then arrested, but Lebouf has at least removed the goody two-shoes stamp from his persona. Break open the bubbly — he’s gotten in touch with his inner Marlon Brando. He’s proved to the world he can be a rude lout who insults Walgreen security guards if he’s pissed off enough. He has come to not only understand but embody Tom Petty‘s “I Won’t Back Down” when some guy with a badge says, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’re going to have to leave the premises.”

All hail the flawed, vulnerable regular guy he’s now become. No longer that smiling, well-behaved kid and no longer a beaming Spielberg puppet holding the space helmet on the cover of Vanity Fair. An hombre, a descendant of Neal Cassady…a guy you want on your side in a bar fight.

Got into San Francisco of the BART train around 1:45 pm. Another 15 minutes to find my way to the Triton Hotel, which looks cool from the outside (a kind of 1950s neo-Jetsons design) but the rooms are laundry closets with beds and TVs jammed inside. The girl at the front desk said mine was one of the hotel’s biggest rooms. In other words, they have the effrontery to cram people into rooms that are 2/3 or even half of this size. Two and a half stars for the Triton Hotel! Make it two!

Link pic snapped from room #501 of Triton Hotel, corner of Bush and Grant Streets — Monday, 11.5.07, 2:55 pm

I’m off to LAX to catch an 11:50 a.m. plane to San Francisco and this evening’s Castro theatre screening of There Will Blood. I’ll be silent until the late afternoon.

The Saturday Night Live opener two nights ago was a skit about a Halloween party thrown by Bill and Hilary Clinton and attended by all the Presidential candidates. Moderately funny material with the usual pointed thrusts (i.e., Hilary is a witch, nobody likes her), but the wow element came when a guy wearing a Barack Obama mask walked in, took off the mask and turned out to be the Real McCoy.

Barack to Hilary: “And may I say you make a lovely bride?” Bill: “She’s a witch.” Hilary: “Bill!”

The sustained cheers that Obama got when he took off his mask were, I thought, somewhat significant. All right, maybe not.

This parody reel isn’t all that clever or special — it’s simply a Hollywood movie countdown from 100 to 1 — but the clips are nicely chosen and very well-timed. Some dude named “AlonzoMosleyFBI” assembled it, claiming it was his first effort and his first YouTube post. It was previously linked on Roger Ebert‘s Answer Man column. Thanks to HE reader Richard Swank for the tip.

Because Sylvester Stallone‘s Rocky Balboa kicked some surprising box-office ass ($80 million domestic, $150 million int’l) last year and similar-type earnings from his aging-Rambo remake may be in the offing, the MGM guys — holding high the attitude and aesthetic of Cannon Films in 2007 — are “in talks” with Stallone to direct and star in a remake of Death Wish, the 1974 Charles Bronson-Michael Winner film.

The belief seems to be that audiences weren’t into Jodie Foster and Neil Jordan‘s The Brave One, which was almost a literal Death Wish remake, because they thought it was too womanly-emotional. But they might have felt differently about a similar-type story with some hard guy blowing away the bad guys.

All right, cut it out, this is loony — no way is anyone going to be interested in seeing this story done again so soon after The Brave One. Plus there’s that pesky fact that New York City isn’t the crime capital it used to be in the early ’70s. If Stallone and screenwriters Michael Ferris and John Brancato are smart, they’ll think up a new locale and a new angle. And they won’t have Stallone’s Paul Kersey be an architect because no one will buy it.

Where credit is due: OK! is reporting that Katie Holmes ran the entire 26-mile New York City Marathon yesterday. She reportedly finished the race in 5 hours, 29 minutes and 58 seconds. Hats off, show of respect, eat my words.

Josh Brolin shared an observation earlier today about Lewellyn Moss, his No Country for Old Men character, that had never come to mind. The first and only time Lewellyn really smiles in the whole film is at the very end, when he’s talking to that woman sitting next to the pool, the one who wants to share some beers.

I mentioned that I loved the first intimate scene between Lewellyn and his girlfriend Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) because of how they sit close and don’t look at each other…casual, unforced…you know in less than 10 seconds these two have a great relationship. Brolin says “it was a conscientious decision not to look at each other….these people are going to be together for the rest of their lives, and you call tell that absolutely. I like that, man. Makes me happy. I’ve been going through all those shitty interviews…”

We talked about some other stuff besides, including a short film he’s made called X that he’s hoping will be shown at the Sundance or Santa Barbara Film Festivals. Here’s the mp3.

Laundry-listing the violent movies of November-December, N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James wonders if viewers “really want a river of blood” at this time of year or any for that matter. The turn-off factor is not blood or bleeding itself — it’s the sense that the director is indulging some kind of blood-pain fetish and trying to arouse the audience into sharing in it the way a master chef will tantalize diners with a whiff of some special sauce.

The only ’07 movie that seemed to play this game, by my standards, wasDavid Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises, which James acknowledges is “probably the year’s bloodiest film.” I’ve called it a Russian penis movie — queer for knives, reeking with odious machismo, seeming to lust for the thrill of dominance and the stabbing and slicing of flesh. I hated, hated, hated it, and I’m speaking as a worshipper of A History of Violence.

The only other film that may, according to buzz, be guilty of a blood fetish is Tim Burton‘s Sweeney Todd. The word is that in certain scenes the blood comes in gobs, torrents, rivers.

I’m cool with the “red, red vino” in all the others — the visually witty bloodlettings in No Country for Old Men, the faint use of the stuff in American Gangster, etc. There Will Be Blood shows it, I recall, in exactly one scene — the notorious final one. I don’t know why James even mentioned Lions for Lambs since it barely shows any traces of hurt or redness or anything.

I’m wondering which films may have struck others as too much, too sticky, too covered with the stuff. Not just this year but anytime since blood became allowable or semi-fashionable.