Link the first: Alex Ross on Jonny Greenwood's musical score in The New Yorker.
Most soundtracks lean so heavily on a few preprocessed musical devices—those synthetic swells of strings and cymbals, urging us to swoon in tandem with the cheerleader in love—that when a composer adopts a more personal language the effect is revelatory: an entire dimension of the film experience is liberated from cliché.Link the second: American Cinematographer's coverage of TWBB's cinematography in its January 2008 issue. As usual, it's a bit technical and jargony, but it also has some great insight into how the film captured the era it depicts.
Shaking his head at the memory, Elswit adds, "The next night, we had to shoot the reverses of the actors reacting to the big fire, and Paul didn’t want to use any artificial light." In fact, these reverses were lit with real fire generated by either the powerful flame jet operated by Cremin and his crew or, for certain shots, flamethrower-like devices. Crewmembers were protected from the heat by flame-resistant suits, but the grimaces on the actors' faces are genuine. "The flames got very, very hot, but that’s how we did it," says Elswit.Link the last: USA Today's story on the growing popularity of "I drink your milkshake!" as a catchphrase. The article digs up its origin (via director P.T. Anderson):
Anderson concedes that he's puzzled by the phenomenon — particularly because the lines came straight from a transcript he found of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Sen. Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes for oil-drilling rights to public lands in Wyoming and California.The film's studio, Paramount Vantage, is even using it as a marketing slogan.
In explaining oil drainage, Fall's "way of describing it was to say 'Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I'll end up drinking your milkshake,' " Anderson says. "I just took this insane concept and used it."
2 comments:
Thanks for the articles. After reading them I definitely have a lot more things to look out for when watching this movie again. I wonder if the milkshake line will get a reaction out of the audience now that it's grown like this.
As long as people in the audience don't feel the urge to say the line along with Daniel Plainview!
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