"There Will Be Blood" … It Will Be Frightening

Rabble-rousing film blogger Jeffrey Wells has unleashed a monster of a response to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

To sum up: Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

Breaking News Reviews

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Steven D. Greydanus at Decent Films argues that this month’s Marvel movie “exploits the tactical and comic possibilities of its Alice in Wonderland size-changing to greater effect than previous movies. After Doctor Strange, Ant-Man and the Wasp is the only other recent Marvel movie with action set pieces that are visually unique and organically funny.”

Skyscraper

Alissa Wilkinson in Vox sizes up Skyscraper, saying that its muscular protagonist, played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, “is not a movie character; he’s the protagonist of a video game, the sort without much character development or moral inquiry. He’s a standard-issue American hero. We’re there to watch him do crazy stuff, and he delivers. Just don’t think too hard, or it might start to fall apart.”

Quotable

“Democracy, in its essence and genius, is imaginative love for and identification with a community with which, much of the time and in many ways, one may be in profound disagreement. … When definitions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ begin to contract, there seems to be no limit to how narrow these definitions can become. As they shrink and narrow, they are increasingly inflamed, more dangerous and inhumane. They present themselves as movements toward truer and purer community, but, as I have said, they are the destruction of community. They insist that the imagination must stay within the boundaries they establish for it, that sympathy and identification are only allowable within certain limits. I am convinced that the broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global.”

– Marilynne Robinson, “Imagination and Community,” in When I Was a Child I Read Books

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“I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.”

– Orson Welles

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“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.”

– Ernest Hemingway, in a Paris Review interview by George Plimpton, 1958

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For more of the quotable wisdom that captures the vision of Looking Closer, check out The Looking Closer Book of Wisdom.

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Looking for Looking Closer’s archive of film reviews?

Here it is.

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What is a “nous”? What does “theoria” mean?

These two words are at the heart of Looking Closer’s vision.

"There Will Be Blood" ... It Will Be Frightening

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