Screened at The Frida Cinema
“Do you think that God is going to save you for being stupid?”
There is something extremely important about the time period in which Paul Thomas Anderson chooses here because it very much is needed to embody the great foreshadowing of today. Throughout history, there have been all types of factors that clash but fail to veto a simple fact of life: intellectual belief will always come second to the intrinsic nature of an animal. But the inception of the petroleum trade in America – the real swinging industrialization of the country – anticipates better than no other movie on the subject, that capitalism has become the new centerfold that will come first before our other personal values, and that our biology — i.e. our wiring for family, our wiring for sexual reproduction — has alas reached a point where it can now more easily be the after-thought instead. The nature of fleshly creation (via us) has alas been bought out by a form of production far more powerful. Specifically, this is the start of the mechanical age of reproduction, where we will begin suppressing our intrinsic, animalistic nature faster than ever in order for corporate business endeavors to operate at full speed with no breaks to halt its excess of creations for the consumers who must undergo these constant changes, fueling a new spectrum of accumulating sorrow in us. Daniel Plainview is an example subject of a pioneering founder for this modern evolution, and he — quite literally — guides Hell onto Earth’s surface to sought it. His competitor Eli even kills his own beloved God by the film’s coda for the sake of business.
And so I congratulate There Will Be Blood for being the best to depict it. If we had to save one movie to represent what’s been going on in humanity for the past century, then this is it. Here’s furthermore to fifteen years of not being topped!
Verdict: A+
All-Time Favorites, PTA Ranked
“There Will Be Blood” is now available to stream on Paramount+.
Burning the Celluloid 
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