This movie is such an oddity to me. There's a handful of incredibly memorable scenes stitched together in a 2.5 hour movie. The writing/characterization is downright poor at times. Eli is either miscast or lacks any sort of conviction as an impediment to Daniel. The milkshake line is so ridiculous I started snickering. The score is an unrelenting assault on the senses that only pays off during the oil derrick scene. It's overly bombastic (including DDL's performance) yet still seems stretched thing plot/pacing wise. There's so much individual talent in the movie and yet nothing coalesces into a greater vision beyond "look how beautiful the desert is and how good DDL is as an actor". I will never, ever understand how this sprawling mess gets compared to No Country for Old Men besides the obvious parallels.
>it's not me, it's everybody else
>>217800627>Eli is either miscast or lacks any sort of conviction as an impediment to Daniel. that's something I never understood either, was he meant to be completely ineffectual?
>>217800627Women don't understand art. It's not your fault.
>>217801004I think the idea was to have him be an overmatched adversary who really only got one over on Daniel when he wanted to get access to the Bandy easement. So Eli's getting his shit pushed around six ways to Sunday until that moment and that one victory burns a hole in Daniel's memory.I also thought PTA's handling of the vacancy filled by the first casting for Paul by having Dano as both Paul and Eli was a lazy decision.
>>217800627literally the last good movie ever made
>>217801349>Eli and Paul are two different people>Paul wasn’t an alias used by Eli doing a shady oil tip business deal with strangers he was meeting for the first time>Daniel referring to Paul in the ending monologue wasn’t a metaphor for the life Eli could have had if he wasn’t a sniveling attention hungry boobI’m so tired of this midwit take
>>217801409*ahem*
>>217800627>no no no, WE were the tycoons that built YOUR country!Emma Lazarus was a Red and everything about the film is boilerplate Hollywood inversion. This may as well have been set on some steppe stetl laying rail line from Petrograd to Moscow.
>>217800627it's literally The Great American Film
>>217801495>>Eli and Paul are two different peopleTo be quite honest with you senpai I thought it was one character too because Paul Sunday was such a small and frankly nearly pointless role that they could've just axed the character entirely
>>217800627agreed. You only need to watch two scenes to get the gist of it (the end and the church scene). The rest is just fluff.
>>217800627It was a successful book, Daniel Day Lewis was at the peak of his reputation, had a cool name, and looked like a masculine movie.It was a perfect storm for a movie that everyone would pretend to like, even though it was boring.
>>217800918Who are you quoting? Copernicus or Darwin?
>>217801677Fluff is hardly even the word for it, it barely has dialogue. It's like two and a half hours of lingering shots and "atmosphere".
