There Will Be Blood

by Suicide Girls on July 18, 2010 11:33 for SuicideGirls.com's Top 10 Films of the Decade

During a candid moment in this film, early California oilman Daniel Plainview expresses his personal philosophy: “I don’t like most people. I want to earn enough money to get away from them.” It’s that last part, the implied promise that once he has his own security, he’ll go away and stop siphoning off the resources of the poor and the credulous, which somehow sets him up as possibly morally superior to his religious alter-ego, Eli Sunday, a shameless evangelical charlatan with no such insights into his own black heart. America’s two founding lynchpins, big business and organized religion, are treated to their own masterfully-observed dual biopics in this, a huge but welcome departure for cinematic showman P.T. Anderson. The childish quarrel between Plainview and Sunday over who is the more righteous conman gets more soul-sucking by the minute and before it’s all over, see title.

by Ian Tindell on March 12, 2010 22:41 for The 10 Greatest Bitch Slaps in Movie History

Daniel Plainview is a hard man, a disciplined man, a calculating man, a man who takes every advantage he can and is never taken advantage of... until now. In order to make his millions - well, "more" of his millions - he finds himself manipulated into being baptized by the town's young religious leader, and for all intents and purposes his own mortal enemy, Eli Sunday. At 02:35, Eli takes advantage by slapping the hell out of Plainview, a man who should probably never be slapped, much in the same way that you should probably never shoot a spitball at a Terminator. But damn it, Plainview needs that oil, and if he needs to be publicly humiliated to get it then by God he's going to make a bigger spectacle than anyone has ever seen, asserting his dominance even in defeat. Best. Baptism. Ever.