Hollywood Reporter guy John Defore was also at the Austin Draft House last night, and he’s written that the fans of There Will be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson “might not know what to do with this picture, which has none of the attention-grabbing flourishes of earlier films — no hailstorms of frogs or deus ex machina pianos here.

“The closest it gets to self-conscious showiness is its closing scene, a confrontation as memorably strange as the fireworks-popping, ‘Jessie’s Girl”-belting drug deal in Boogie Nights. Its setting is as visually spare (a highlight of Jack Fisk‘s brilliant production design) as the other was decadent and cluttered, and eventually the scene makes good on the title’s promise — but only after offering a virtuoso humiliation to mirror one that Daniel Day Lewis‘s character suffers earlier in the story.”

I was told on 9.19 that a Blood screening would happen sometime during Fantastic Fest. I was skeptical at the time.