There Will Be Blood

Koko: It took eighty years for this book not to be boring. Improbable but true. And best of all, Paul Thomas Anderson, whose career comes with a barbiturate warning, is the young, stunning punk who breathes blood into the mildewed procedural against money, power, and deaf children. It takes serious talent, and seriousness, too, to make the obvious evil. Banality is terrifying, and the desperate, screaming effort to escape from it, here represented in all its lonely inevitability, absolutely shocks. Oil is just a substance; hell is the human heart, and its fear of being forgotten compels us to aspire to Parnassus even as it degrades our dull, drunken ascent. Climb all you want; you'll never elude anonymity--and you'll never defeat ambition. Great movie.

Slothrop: Great and terrifying movie. Because we're all like Daniel Plainview. And yet, why is it that when Slothrop watches movies about greed, he thinks to himself that if he were Daniel, he'd sell his first, what--three, four?-- oil wells, and then he'd spend the rest of his time learning to play the piano in the company of educated, short-skirt wearing ladies. Addictions of others are much easier to diagnose and reject than one's own, aren't they? A slow and deliberate film that was never boring; the devil takes his time and softly entertains us so we don't think too much about it. 

I pity the poor immigrant
Who tramples through the mud,
Who fills his mouth with laughing
And who builds his town with blood,
Whose visions in the final end
Must shatter like the glass.