“I half-agree with the near-unanimous praise for There Will Be Blood,” Slate‘s Timothy Noah wrote yesterday. “[But] I would call it a halfterpiece. The first half and especially the film’s dialogue- free first 20 minutes, ranks among the most thrilling moments I’ve witnessed on film. About midway, though, I felt that There Will Be Blood lost its clarity, for reasons that say something about the impoverished state of political discussion in the movies generally.
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Paul Thomas Anderson‘s “failure to say anything interesting or even coherent about the structure of American society is not unusual. I can’t remember the last time I saw an American movie that did (excepting documentaries; gangster movies, which inherited this function from The Godfather; and the occasional movie promoting ethnic, sexual, religious, or some other form of tolerance and inclusiveness).”
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