jürgen fauth’s muckworld

The promising first half of George Stevens’ Texan epic sets up a tiresome three-and-a-half-hour descent into mediocrity. Displaced northern bride Liz Taylor slowly fades from the center of the story, nouveau riche James Dean is woefully misused, children come and go, and Rock Hudson’s stubborn cattle rancher is granted an improbable redemption. Giant keeps pulling its punches, and in the end, it’s home sweet home and upstart Jett Rink lies under a table where he belongs. After 201 minutes, we have arrived in the cornball fifties, cheated out of any kind of pay-off, and that’s the real tragedy.

No doubt There Will Be Blood owes more to Giant than just the Marfa location; in fact, Anderson’s film feels like Giant’s evil twin, made up of all the scenes the other movie suppressed: the real drama, the truth of the matter. You know, the good scenes. After the jump, screenshots from both movies that seem to talk to one another, in the spirit of Kevin Lee’s influence spotting. Don’t click if you haven’t seen the movie yet: There Will Be Spoilers. For more Blood talk, I Drink Your Milkshake.com is the place.

Giant. George Stevens, 1958. ***

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Ladies and Gentlemen, I have traveled over half our state to get here this evening. I couldn’t get away sooner because my new site was coming in at idrinkyourmilkshake.com. That site is now flowing at two thousand hits per day, and it’s paying me an income of five thousand dollars a week. I have two others uploading and sixteen producing at About.com. So — Ladies and Gentlemen — if I say I’m a web man, you will agree.

I do my own coding, and I paid quail prices for the domain. This is the way that this works. Sign up now and get your very own idrinkyourmilkshake.com email address.

There will be puns, there will be awards, there will be awesome. Based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson (whose movies I often failed to appreciate in the past) has made a magnificent epic about the price of the precious resources, liquid and otherwise, that we extract from the ground — and from other people. Daniel Day-Lewis is reliably fantastic as Daniel Plainview, a prospector turned wealthy oilman and all-around American monster, but the real stunner here is Paul Dano as his nemesis, the pimply-faced fire-and-brimstone preacher Eli Sunday.

This one’s got “movie of the year” written all over it, and I’m already itching to see it again as soon as possible. We’ll have much more on this before the December 26 release. I drink YOUR milkshake!

UPDATED: My gushing review is now up at About Worldfilm.

There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****

• Karina Longworth found two tacks from the terrific score, and here’s the latest trailer:

What the hell ever. Some scenes were interesting, but the individual stories seemed only loosely connected to me–too losely, from what I could tell. Oh my, when it comes to oil and power, governments and individuals turn positively ruthless? You don’t say. Clooney and Damon are good.