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kottke.org posts about There Will Be Blood

One way to deconstruct a movie, using There Will Be Blood as an example

Evan Puschak takes us behind the curtain at the Nerdwriter a little bit and shows us that one way to deconstruct a movie is by counting the number of cuts. If you do this with PT Anderson’s There Will Be Blood for example, you’ll notice that the average scene is quite long compared to most contemporary movies, which makes the viewer pay more attention to each cut.


Dire Straits’ Walk of Life Improves Every Movie

It is the assertion of The Walk of Life Project that the Dire Straits song Walk of Life is the perfect thing to play at the end of movies. I have watched more than a dozen of these and they are all great, but I picked Lost in Translation, There Will Be Blood, and Terminator 2 to embed here.


There Will Be Blood with live accompaniment

The Wordless Music Orchestra will offer live accompaniment of two screenings of There Will Be Blood in NYC in September. The composer of the film’s score, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, will play a musical instrument called the ondes Martenot as part of the performances.

This fall, the Wordless Music Orchestra will once again collaborate with Jonny Greenwood for the U.S. premiere of There Will Be Blood Live: a full screening and live film score to Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 masterpiece, which will be projected onto a massive 50’ movie screen at the historic and absurdly beautiful United Palace Theatre: the second-largest movie screen in all of New York City.

For these shows, the film’s original score โ€” comprising music by Jonny Greenwood, Arvo Part, and Brahms โ€” will be conducted by Ryan McAdams, and performed by 50+ members of the Wordless Music Orchestra, including Jonny Greenwood, who will play the ondes martenot part in both performances of his own film score.

Tickets on sale now. See you there? (thx, gabe)


Super There Will Be Blood

The Super Nintendo version of There Will Be Blood:

This is pitch perfect. What really puts this video over the top are the sound effects (“milkshake!”) and that it doesn’t go on too long.


There Will Be Blood is out on

There Will Be Blood is out on DVD already. And so are the other four Oscar nominees for best picture (well, ok, Juno is out early next week).


There Will Be Vader, a mashup of

There Will Be Vader, a mashup of There Will Be Blood and Star Wars, with Daniel Plainview playing the part of Vader.

(via house next door)


Top shots of 2007

An annotated list of the top ten cinematographic moments in film in 2007: part 1 and part 2.

The shot that stuck out in my head the very first time I saw the film spoke to me so deeply that I referenced it in my initial review: “A few years trickle by as Plainview adds onto his enterprise until finally, oil. A black-tarred hand reaches to the sky and suddenly you sense the influence of Stanley Kubrick on the film. Like the apes who discovered weaponry in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Plainview has come upon the object that will dictate America’s destiny for the next century and more.” I don’t thiink I could say it any better now.

(via house next door)


There Will Be Blood milkshake line

The milkshake line from There Will Be Blood came from a transcript that PT Anderson found of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal.

Anderson concedes that he’s puzzled by the phenomenon โ€” particularly because the lines came straight from a transcript he found of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Sen. Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes for oil-drilling rights to public lands in Wyoming and California.

In explaining oil drainage, Fall’s “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,’ ” Anderson says. “I just took this insane concept and used it.”

(via observations on film)


Just purchased: Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be

Just purchased: Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood soundtrack on the recommendation of Alex Ross in the New Yorker.

Greenwood is better understood as a composer who has crossed over into rock. Trained as a violist, he worked seriously at writing music in his youth, and had just embarked on studies at Oxford Brookes University when, in 1991, Radiohead was signed by the EMI record label. He dropped out of college to join the band on tour.


The I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!!! scene from

The I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!!! scene from There Will Be Blood. If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t watch this…it’s from a scene near the end. (P.S. DRAINAGE!!!)


There Will Be Blood

Daniel Day-Lewis is flat-out amazing in this film; I can’t think of when I’ve seen a better performance. But with this movie and No Country For Old Men, both of which top many people’s lists of the best movies of 2007, I found them really good but not great. Not sure why. Maybe I’ll have better luck with Juno or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.


Early rave review for There Will Be

Early rave review for There Will Be Blood, the new PT Anderson/Daniel Day-Lewis film, calling it “maybe one of the best movies I’ve ever seen”.

Without revealing much of the plot (it’s probably better to go in cold), it’s a complex man’s simple story rendered hugely, horribly, and wonderfully in equal measure, and it’s revelatory as hell.


Trailer for There Will Be Blood, the

Trailer for There Will Be Blood, the highly anticipated film from PT Anderson starring Daniel Day-Lewis.


Trailer for There Will Be Blood, the

Trailer for There Will Be Blood, the first movie from PT Anderson in I don’t know how long. The flick stars Daniel Day-Lewis and is adapted from Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (via crazymonk)


Some PT Anderson news: A Prairie Home

Some PT Anderson news: A Prairie Home Companion is out this summer; Anderson seems to have co-directed this with Robert Altman, but no one seems to know just who did what. And There Will Be Blood is Anderson’s newest solo project starring Daniel Day-Lewis and based on Oil! by Upton Sinclair.