I’ll have more on the Daniel Day-Lewis tribute in my diary entry later tonight, but first thing’s first: almost two hours into the tribute, Day-Lewis said, “Oh yeah — let’s invite Paul up here now,” and Paul Thomas Anderson took the stage to introduce 17 minutes of There Will Be Blood.
Anderson called it “the third reel,” but my first impression was that it played more like a product reel, with what felt like an entire second act condensed into less than 20 minutes. But thinking back on PTA’s body of work, this kind of temporal pacing wouldn’t be unprecedented–the guy loves his montages, and what we saw was so impeccably, purposefully edited to a gorgeous score (violin heavy, by turns subtle and scary–it’s so dynamic that it might be an existing piece of music, but if so I’ve never heard it before) that it could conceivably play within the film. And, could very well be amazing.
My full notes on the footage follows after the jump.