There Won't Be Romance

5
Reasons not watch "There Will Be Blood" on a date

SPOILER ALERT: Reading the following may spoil it for those who haven't seen There Will Be Blood, but I'm operating under the assumption that I'm pretty much the last person to see this movie, at least among those who have any intention of doing so.

• The early scenes inside the prospective oil wells. I have a new addition to my Jobs I Never Want to Have list, especially if the job calls for time travel back to 1898. Wow. These scenes invoke all five senses -- you can smell and taste the fumes the workers gulp in, and feel it when they get blasted in the face with bubblin' crude. Add in the lack of any dialogue early on, and this is sort of a director's unspoken statement of confidence in the movie: it's good, and Paul Thomas Anderson knows it.
  
• "You're an orphan from a basket in the middle of the desert. And I took you for no other reason than I needed a sweet face to buy land. Did you get that? Now you know." Whether this statement is literally true or not, I don't know. I'm not sure I'm supposed to. But through most of the movie, even those Daniel Plainview is loathsome to the core, you're still often pulling for him, because so many other people around him are every bit as bad, or worse. When Plainview says the above, though, it's officially impossible to pull for him any more.
  
• "There are times when I look at people and see nothing worth liking." -- A far cry from, say, "I gave her my heart, and she gave me a pen."
  
• Music Association -- Your next Brahms violin concerto won't seem very romantic if it reminds you of Plainview's bowling lanes.
  
• Be a frontrunner instead. If an utterly dark movie is your idea of a good date, go see the one that won the Oscar -- "No Country for Old Men." I've seen both, and at the moment I don't know which I like more. I need a few more days to digest TWBB.