Promising Reviews

The New Yorker's reviews of Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie, There Will Be Blood and Juno fills me with excitement for the holiday season. The opening lines of the review read

"Early in “There Will Be Blood,” an enthralling and powerfully eccentric American epic (opening on December 26th), Daniel Plainview climbs down a ladder at his small silver mine. A rung breaks, and Daniel (Daniel Day-Lewis) falls to the base of the shaft and smashes his leg. He’s filthy, miserable, gasping for breath and life. The year is 1898. Two and a half hours later (and more than thirty years later in the time span of the film), he’s on the floor again, this time sitting on a polished bowling lane in the basement of an enormous mansion that he has built on the Pacific Coast. Having abandoned silver mining for oil, Daniel has become one of the wealthiest tycoons in Southern California. Yet he’s still filthy, with dirty hands and a face that glistens from too much oil raining down on him—it looks as if oil were seeping from his pores. The experience chronicled between these two moments is as astounding in its emotional force and as haunting and mysterious as anything seen in American movies in recent years. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but after making “Magnolia” (1999) and “Punch-Drunk Love” (2002)—skillful but whimsical movies, with many whims that went nowhere—the young writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has now done work that bears comparison to the greatest achievements of Griffith and Ford.

Have I written yet that Paul Thomas Anderson is my director, period, of anyone, including Wes Anderson, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese and whoever your favorite director is? Yes, my absolute favorite. I own three movies in DVD format: Boogie Nights, which I gave my brother for his birthday, but which I stole back from him after I later learned he had never even taken the damn thing out of the plastic wrapping (ed: that is because he is a heathen), Magnolia, which I stole from my brother since he did not deserve it since he only bought it because it has Tom Cruise in it, and Donnie Darko. He's a genius. I cannot wait. I will be seeing There Will Be Blood alone in a dark theater in Memphis, Tennessee on December 26. If you are also there, do not bother me.