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There Will Be Violins
Jan. 27th, 2008 02:06 am(There will be SPOILERS behind a cut tag below.)
There Will Be Blood is an amazing character study in search of a story. I haven't seen anyone disagree that Daniel Day Lewis's acting was stunning; leaving the theater, I said to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
adfamiliares, "Y'know, somebody could really've made a good movie about that guy." I love me a good character study; it's just not enough to support 160 minutes of movie.
The story is so simple as to be trivial: ( SPOILERS within. )
Add the most intrusive score I can remember in a movie — it shrieked "BE TENSE! IT'S TENSION TIME, BABY!" — and I left the theater feeling terribly let down. No Country for Old Men, which is one of two obvious comparisons (the other is Citizen Kane), succeeded in wedding a non-traditional but gripping plot to its bleak premise; TWBB wanted us to watch character and call it plot. That's not to say it was a bad movie: many individual scenes were unforgettable; the desolate cinematography was gorgeous; there's a great deal of subtlety in the script to chew over. In the end, though, the movie is left sitting on its ass in a bowling alley, having shouted and ranted and failed to accomplish what it really needed to.
There Will Be Blood is an amazing character study in search of a story. I haven't seen anyone disagree that Daniel Day Lewis's acting was stunning; leaving the theater, I said to
adfamiliares, "Y'know, somebody could really've made a good movie about that guy." I love me a good character study; it's just not enough to support 160 minutes of movie.The story is so simple as to be trivial: ( SPOILERS within. )
Add the most intrusive score I can remember in a movie — it shrieked "BE TENSE! IT'S TENSION TIME, BABY!" — and I left the theater feeling terribly let down. No Country for Old Men, which is one of two obvious comparisons (the other is Citizen Kane), succeeded in wedding a non-traditional but gripping plot to its bleak premise; TWBB wanted us to watch character and call it plot. That's not to say it was a bad movie: many individual scenes were unforgettable; the desolate cinematography was gorgeous; there's a great deal of subtlety in the script to chew over. In the end, though, the movie is left sitting on its ass in a bowling alley, having shouted and ranted and failed to accomplish what it really needed to.
