![]() There Will Be Blood screens Wednesday, May 25, 7:30pm. I still am not sure what "I'm finished" means, though. These were the things I noticed after I listened to my brother and divested myself of my desire to be entertained. Meanwhile, Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview and Paul Dano as Eli Sunday are two impresarios, circling around each other in a deadly duet, taking turns humiliating and debasing one another in a sustained grapple for power in the name of God and mammon. "The space in between the action tends to put more weight on the depth of the story," says my brother. The same logic applies to the long stretches of silence, where there is no dialogue except that between man and landscape. Really, Im anxious to finish this project so I can go watch the rest of the film. "They are demanding on the actors and the audience alike," he said, and he's right: A close-up shot of someone who isn't speaking, only glaring, is a direct challenge to the gazing audience, and director Paul Thomas Anderson isn't letting anyone off the hook. Im talking, of course, about the films wordless 15-minute opening sequence. When I asked him what it was about There Will Be Blood that made his skirt fly up, Jeremy specifically mentioned the long scenes and close-up shots. Where I emit an obnoxious, yawned " bo-ring!," he settles in with a good beer and a brain that's ready to engage. Where I tend toward the big, escapist movies, he is more drawn to the quietly contemplative, slow-burning films like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and There Will Be Blood. The last scene of There Will Be Blood (2007) is one of the most gut-wrenching, memorable finales in recent film history. I see my brother's practice of this technique in his approach to film appreciation. The more you practice this kind of active listening, the more textures the music takes on. You have to trace the motifs and phrases, listen to the way a note turns into an emotional expression and the way that the players interact with one another. You see, jazz is all about active listening you can't get the full experience of the music if you sit back, a passive consumer. Jazz." It is Jeremy's love of jazz that helped unlock There Will Be Blood for me without his intervention, I might have forever written off the film for its lack of shopping montages and kicky bubblegum soundtrack. ![]() In fact, he once harbored dreams of getting a doctorate in jazz theory so that he could call himself "Dr. Vincent, but he is probably the closest thing to a jazz aficionado I've ever known. ![]() He loves Phish and Sufjan Stevens and St. He's a music teacher, father of two, incredibly smart and funny, but he keeps to himself for the most part. My brother, Jeremy, is a complicated guy. ![]()
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