What a stupid movie.
I really did not like it. It is a very dry and a mostly boring 158 minutes. The first 15 minutes are without any dialog. It’s just a very artistic display of a man digging for silver alone with no music for 15 minutes.
There is almost no musical score in the whole movie. What the movie has in its place is often really weird and really bad loud tense screeching orchestra. I think they were trying to intensify the rage the main character was showing. It didn’t do that for me. I just wished I wasn’t there to hear it.
It’s a movie about a man obsessed. He is so singularly driven he drives away all that love him without remorse. The problem is they want you to think that he is driven crazy over time from the rage caused by this obsession. But I did not buy it. It seemed to me he was always a bit nuts and time and success enabled him to explore the insanity more. Which is different.
Also, everyone wants to say this movie was about an "evil" man. Sure he was not a good man and he did kill one person that tried to con him. But it is not the tale of a truly evil man. It’s just not. He is not that ruthless either. Most of the time, he is only a shrewd business man doing what he needs to do to succeed. As I see it in the 30 years that transpire within the movie he does three evil deeds on his road to the top. He lies to a town about how rich they are going to get. He kills a man that conned him. He beats up on a young greedy evangelist that is clearly a cliché con-man too. Sure these are not nice things but to waste my time and money with this story is also evil.
Daniel Day-Lewis portrayal of this oilman was very good. Very good is an understatement. He played a man with occasional contorted rage to such an extreme and I bought it the whole way. I assume the slow pace of the story was not his choice and I therefore believe he deserves full marks. The problem I believe is when you have a truly outstanding performance like this people tend to give too much credit to the movie itself.
Paul Dano on the other hand I place some of the blame. He was too over the top and way too cliché in his roll of a sniveling evangelist. Many people in the audience were often laughing at the performance throughout the movie. Not laughing with the performance if you know what I mean. Maybe it was just bad casting.
I went to go see it because of the 5 movies up for best picture it’s the one I thought I would want to see the most. Unfortunately the movie's name and ads were misleading for me. The movie is not about a ruthless oilman killing any that gets in his way on his path from rags to riches. That is the movie I signed up for. But no, it is about a crazy oilman that gets crazier before our eyes. There is actually very little blood in the movie and not once does anyone utter a phase as exciting as “There will be blood”!
Another big reason I hated this movie is because of how little story there was in it. One of my rules is if the plot of the movie can be summed up very easily then it better have lots of action. It’s the reason I hate Sleepless in Seattle. That movie distills down to: There is a man that can’t sleep. He still can’t sleep. Oh yeah and he lives in Seattle. He is still having trouble sleeping. He meets a girl and THE END! BAH!
By the way - I loved Pan’s Labyrinth which was a really well done artsy movie. So it’s not that I do not like artsy movies. Honest!
Unless you are one of those movie freaks stay away! The Movie should be called "There will be boredom"; 3.0 stars.
IMDb
Rotten Tomatoes
I really did not like it. It is a very dry and a mostly boring 158 minutes. The first 15 minutes are without any dialog. It’s just a very artistic display of a man digging for silver alone with no music for 15 minutes.
There is almost no musical score in the whole movie. What the movie has in its place is often really weird and really bad loud tense screeching orchestra. I think they were trying to intensify the rage the main character was showing. It didn’t do that for me. I just wished I wasn’t there to hear it.
It’s a movie about a man obsessed. He is so singularly driven he drives away all that love him without remorse. The problem is they want you to think that he is driven crazy over time from the rage caused by this obsession. But I did not buy it. It seemed to me he was always a bit nuts and time and success enabled him to explore the insanity more. Which is different.
Also, everyone wants to say this movie was about an "evil" man. Sure he was not a good man and he did kill one person that tried to con him. But it is not the tale of a truly evil man. It’s just not. He is not that ruthless either. Most of the time, he is only a shrewd business man doing what he needs to do to succeed. As I see it in the 30 years that transpire within the movie he does three evil deeds on his road to the top. He lies to a town about how rich they are going to get. He kills a man that conned him. He beats up on a young greedy evangelist that is clearly a cliché con-man too. Sure these are not nice things but to waste my time and money with this story is also evil.
Daniel Day-Lewis portrayal of this oilman was very good. Very good is an understatement. He played a man with occasional contorted rage to such an extreme and I bought it the whole way. I assume the slow pace of the story was not his choice and I therefore believe he deserves full marks. The problem I believe is when you have a truly outstanding performance like this people tend to give too much credit to the movie itself.
Paul Dano on the other hand I place some of the blame. He was too over the top and way too cliché in his roll of a sniveling evangelist. Many people in the audience were often laughing at the performance throughout the movie. Not laughing with the performance if you know what I mean. Maybe it was just bad casting.
I went to go see it because of the 5 movies up for best picture it’s the one I thought I would want to see the most. Unfortunately the movie's name and ads were misleading for me. The movie is not about a ruthless oilman killing any that gets in his way on his path from rags to riches. That is the movie I signed up for. But no, it is about a crazy oilman that gets crazier before our eyes. There is actually very little blood in the movie and not once does anyone utter a phase as exciting as “There will be blood”!
Another big reason I hated this movie is because of how little story there was in it. One of my rules is if the plot of the movie can be summed up very easily then it better have lots of action. It’s the reason I hate Sleepless in Seattle. That movie distills down to: There is a man that can’t sleep. He still can’t sleep. Oh yeah and he lives in Seattle. He is still having trouble sleeping. He meets a girl and THE END! BAH!
By the way - I loved Pan’s Labyrinth which was a really well done artsy movie. So it’s not that I do not like artsy movies. Honest!
Unless you are one of those movie freaks stay away! The Movie should be called "There will be boredom"; 3.0 stars.
IMDb
Rotten Tomatoes
1 comment:
I have always had a lot more tolerance of "plotless" movies than you, so it is not surprising I liked this more. The film owes a great debt to Stanley Kubrick in its style, which is basically like smoking crack for me. Hard to resist.
I don't necessarily think it is about an "evil" person either, but it is definitely about a person whose moral standards differ greatly from those of the people around him. As he says himself, he has very little use for the other humans on the planet.
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