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Phillip Youmans recommended There Will Be Blood (2007) in Movies (curated)

"Next up is There Will Be Blood. I gotta say, Paul Thomas Anderson might be the best working director alive. There Will Be Blood was such an interesting balance of showing why Daniel Plainview prospered in the oil rush of California. But it also shows how he’s essentially decrepit as a human being. He’s almost rotting away. He’s losing sight of his own humanity. It’s about dehumanization. Even outside of how gorgeous it looks, especially when the fire ignites the oil derrick and then the camera is rushing in. It’s a low angle tracking shot following Plainview as he’s rushing toward the fire. The colors in that scene are literally just dumbfounding. But the biggest thing is performance, performance, performance, performance, performance! Daniel Day-Lewis is amazing, and Paul Dano as the pastor is freaking insane. Insane! And his dynamic with Daniel Plainview is some of the most compelling s–t I’ve seen on film. The fact that Plainview views Paul Dano’s character as a necessary mechanism to control the people in the town, but he doesn’t give him any bit of respect; Plainview doesn’t believe a lick of what Dano is saying in those church services. But he feels it’s important for the people in the town that are working day in and day out for him to believe it. It’s such an interesting dynamic."

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Kudos

LoganCrews (2861 KP) rated Gentlemen Broncos (2009) in Movies

Jul 4, 2021

Gentlemen Broncos (2009)

2009 | Adventure, Comedy

7.6

(5 Ratings)

Movie Rating

I get a lot of the disdain but honestly, this is pretty much the exact natural evolution of 𝘕𝘢𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘰𝘯 𝘋𝘺𝘯𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘦 - for better and for worse. Am I proving the (brilliant) point of this film - portraying the intrinsic merits of an original idea over that same idea bastardized by greedy agencies and/or people who claim to be supportive while in the same breath spitefully swearing 'their version' is inherently better - in suggesting that if Hess would have restrained his weird Hess-isms just a smidge, that this downright compelling premise would have built up a bit more crucial meat which would have made this the great film it deserves to be? Then again, if that were the case this would have also missed out on its deliriously kooky atmosphere which provides such unforgettable nuance. I don't get much out of the main characters here but the supporting ones are next-level delish - Sam Rockwell and Jemaine Clement are fully game for this ravishing surrealism and it shows. Has some funny fuckin' moments but - as with most of the director's work - I admit that it strains from time to time. It also happens to be both gorgeous design-fetishism *and* has a dope soundtrack - Jared Hess is essentially Wes Anderson if he was obsessed with gradeschool potty humor.

Kudos

Heather Cranmer (2721 KP) created a post

Jul 13, 2021 (Updated Jul 13, 2021)

Watch a video interview with author Susie Finkbeiner, and enter the giveaway to win a $10 Starbucks gift card, a print copy of the Christian contemporary fiction novel The Nature of Small Birds, and a puzzle on my blog!

https://alltheupsandowns.blogspot.com/2021/07/book-blog-tour-and-giveaway-nature-of.html

**BOOK SYNOPSIS**
In 1975, three thousand children were airlifted out of Saigon to be adopted into Western homes. When Mindy, one of those children, announces her plans to return to Vietnam to find her birth mother, her loving adopted family is suddenly thrown back to the events surrounding her unconventional arrival in their lives.

Though her father supports Mindy's desire to meet her family of origin, he struggles privately with an unsettling fear that he'll lose the daughter he's poured his heart into. Mindy's mother undergoes the emotional rollercoaster inherent in the adoption of a child from a war-torn country, discovering the joy hidden amid the difficulties. And Mindy's sister helps her sort through relics that whisper of the effect the trauma of war has had on their family--but also speak of the beauty of overcoming.

Told through three strong voices in three compelling timelines, The Nature of Small Birds is a hopeful story that explores the meaning of family far beyond genetic code.

Kudos Comment

Awix (3310 KP) rated When the Tripods Came (The Tripods #4) in Books

Sep 18, 2019

When the Tripods Came (The Tripods #4)

John Christopher | 1988 | Dystopia, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Young Adult (YA)

7.0

(1 Ratings)

Book Rating

Fourth books in trilogies are inherently inelegant and awkward beasts; Christopher's final Tripods novel is unsurprisingly no exception. 1980s Earth is visited by alien invaders, who (initially at least) are easily repelled. But it turns out that your mum was right when she said that too much TV was bad for your health...

A bit dated, but that's the least of the book's issues. A prequel to the main series was really not required, and the main catalyst for writing it seems to have been the Tripods TV show which was broadcast three or four years earlier. (The TV show the Masters use to take over the world bears a suspicious resemblance to the TV adaptation of the first two books.) It's not really meta, more sort of peeved: peeved at critics of the show's shortcomings, but also peeved at the makers of the show for not doing a better job. As well as being dated, the relationship subplots of the book feel a bit proforma, but the depiction of the world slowly sliding out of human control and the end of modern civilisation is vividly presented in the usual compelling fashion. Whether it should all feel a bit more downbeat and bleak is probably a question of personal taste; Christopher's prose retains its good manners as well as its readability.