A baby looks up at the camera. Cue audio of Daniel Day Lewis, in confessional-style voiceover: “There are times when I look at people and see nothing worth liking.” The baby starts to cry.

That pretty much sums up the teaser trailer for There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s long-gestating interpretation of the 1927 Upton Sinclair novel, Oil!, which appeared on YouTube over the weekend. In his version, Sinclair, a high-profile advocate for Socialism, used the Harding oil scandals as an excuse to tell the story of a father and son battling over political ideology. Judging from the trailer, Anderson seems to have taken politics out of the equation in order to focus on greed, misanthropy, and resentment. The baby grows up. Day-Lewis moves through a crowd of apparent well-wishers as if they were snakes and says, “I can’t keep doing this on my own with these … people.” There may very well be blood, but as always, Anderson is less interested in the red stuff than in the fear and emotional violence lurking within the average American family.

A new P.T. Anderson film is a big deal, so over the past three days virtually every blogger with even the slightest interest in film has weighed in. The general consensus seems to be, “I don’t know what that was all about, but it’s probably brilliant.” In terms of the style of the trailer itself, Nathaniel R. at the Film Experience Blog had an interesting take:

Maybe this is a teaser version of the singular characters poster trend that is so prevalent now ? If it is perhaps Paul Dano as Eli Sunday will have his own teaser soon and more characters from There Will Be Blood will also emerge.

This movie is now at the top of my Spout list of Fall ‘07 Films That Are Making Me Drool. Surely you have your own list of fall films that you can’t wait to see; clue me in with a comment.