ThisTakesTooLongToType

My fiance’ and I watched There Will Be Blood, (TWBB), last night and the movie never got any happier from start to finish.  As a matter of fact, it was decidedly worse in the end.  But damn!  Daniel Day Lewis, (DDL), is an actor.  When you look up the word Actor in my dictionary, there’s just a picture of DDL as Daniel Plainview.  I have to be honest and say that I did not read anything about TWBB until this morning.  If I had then perhaps we wouldn’t have watched it last night.  My review is simple:  the pace is deliberate.   The movie never slows down or speeds up.  There are action sequences but they are muted with the signature Paul Thomas Anderson long-shot, (I don’t really know if it’s his signature; I just remember in Boogie Nights the camera following William H. Macy like it did DDL).  In my book, the only actors on par with DDL are Don Cheadle, Philip Seymore Hoffman, Gary Oldman, Steve McQueen, Peter Sellers, Sean Penn, and (not just a postumous award) Heath Ledger.  I’m sure there are many, many others but my list comes from watching movies with these actors and not seeing the actors anymore.  Their perfomances were so different from movie-to-movie that you absolutely cannot see the actor anymore than you can compare apples to oranges.  I will probably add Christian Bale in there at some point but not quite yet; I can totally picture Bruce Wayne chasing a woman down the hallway with a chainsaw.  Wait, what was I talking about…I forget.