Oh, There WILL Be Blood!!! (L)

I just finished watching "There Will be Blood" with C. I can't remember the last movie we watched together and it took two nights to finish it. This is what I knew beforehand, Daniel Day Lewis had won the Oscar and it was supposed to be a long and dusty tale of greed and the beginning of oil in America.

It sounded boring. The title also made me worried me that there would be mafia street gangs covered in oil. But my mother had it on Netflix and wouldn't be watching it for awhile, so I snatched it.

As the shadowed light played over Danny boy's aging face and ridiculous mustache, his character a bit bent and hobbled by an early accident, I found myself longing for the Lewis of old who wooed and smelled of women or carved a canoe from a tree while wearing few clothes. My mind nimbly skipped over memories of his left foot. I once almost saw him as Hamlet in a London Theatre. I got as close as opening the program to see an insert that said "Due to an illness, Mr. Lewis will not be playing the role of Hamlet. It will instead be played by this wanker who nobody cares about." I later read that he had had a nervous breakdown from getting so involved as the character in "My Left Foot".

But we are all aging and getting more boring by the day, so I tarried on. I did stop to consider that he would make my top ten list of people that would make you uncomfortable to have for dinner. He seems too noble and modest. His magnificence is in his acting. He'd probably demur all questions and either be all British and smugly intelligent or incredibly socially awkward.

When I saw the first couple of people in the film get conked in the head with metal tubes that have something to do with drilling, I thought "oh good, there's the blood bit". Ha!! There was so little blood when he finally shot someone in the head, I didn't know the bullet had struck until he was burying him. I rewound it and like a fool watched to see if he'd actually killed him (Hello, he was digging a hole and rolling in a body!). But nothing could prepare me for the senseless bloody bludgeoning he delivered at the end of the movie, as he declared "I'm finished" and the credits rolled.

I was finished too, what a crap full of depression and uncharacteristic violence. Just when you thought he'd become decent, he'd do something even shittier. Why do people like this stuff? God, I had to top off my wine glass to get the taste of that movie from my mouth. If I ever do have Mr. Lewis over for dinner, I'm going to make him declare "I am a false actor! I make movies that no one should see!" and then I'm going to slap him in the face a few times and make him take off his shirt just to see if he's still worth it.