As rumors go, at least the latest one surrounding director Paul Thomas Anderson makes a lot more sense than some of the other talk surrounding the gifted director. The Anderson fan site, Cigarettes and Red Vines, has reported on a rumor that's been gaining speed over the last few days: namely, that Anderson will direct the Las Vegas drama Power Play for Paramount. Play has been making the rounds at the studio for 10 years now and was picked up for Robert Evans to produce. Originally, Jack Nicholson was slated to star, and even then, Anderson's name was being bandied about to direct.

Variety Editor-in-Chief Peter Bart wrote the story about "a forward-looking Native American who, having made a fortune on his reservation, decides to take on the gambling elite in Las Vegas. The Vegas players do not take this invasion lightly, especially since their new competitor has also plunged into the exotic world of Internet gambling." Anderson is known to take his sweet time in between projects (much to my dismay), so until we get confirmation, a gal can still dream that we'll see another film by Anderson before too long.

Remember, this is all just idle speculation at this point, so stay tuned to Cinematical for the official word.

[via Big Screen Little Screen]

"So, ladies and gentlemen, if I say I'm an oil man, you got to agree."

Some will argue that There Will Be Blood should have taken home more Oscars; how it was not only a better film than No Country for Old Men, but a more relevant one -- what with its themes of religion and greed. But it's probably best not to think about such things. We're lucky to have received two of this century's greatest films in one year, and each will be remembered for decades to come. With There Will Be Blood, the brilliant Paul Thomas Anderson has given us his American epic, set in California at the turn of the 20th century. Daniel Day-Lewis (who deserves every inch of that Best Actor Oscar) plays a hungry oil prospector who'll stop at nothing (and sacrifice almost everything) to build an empire of his own. He'll soon find out that, while he most certainly has enemies, the greatest evil is not buried deep below the ground -- it's, instead, deep within him.

Just caught There Will Be Blood on DVD last weekend, and though it's after the fact, I'm pretty convinced now that it should have won Best Picture. I haven't yet explored the DVD (which comes out on April 8), but I definitely encourage you to pick this flick up and watch it again, or watch it for the first time. In my opinion, one of the best films in the past 10 years. Without a doubt. But anyway, came across this very cool Paul Thomas Anderson tribute video today and thought we'd share it with you. It's six minutes long, and covers only five films (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood), but it's cut brilliantly and worth a watch if you, like me, are a die hard PTA fanboy. Whoever cut this must have gotten their hands on a copy of the There Will Be Blood DVD (no, not me -- this would've taken me five years to cut together), so in case you want to go into that film fresh, you may want to skip this.

Additionally, this dude also made videos for Quentin Tarantino and The Coen Brothers, among others. Check them all out if you have some time to kill.

The 2008 Berlin International Film Festival awards have been announced, and while I've only seen one of the films that picked up prizes, I'm very excited about the results. The top honor, the Golden Bear, went to Tropa de Elite (The Elite Squad), which is the first fiction film directed by Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha, who last gave us the brilliant documentary Bus 174. It was also scripted by Oscar-nominated writer Bráulio Mantovani (City of God) and tells the story of a captain in Rio's Special Police Operations Battalion and the corruption within the city's military police force, particularly its brutality in the handling of Rio's favelas. The film was hugely popular in Brazil when it was released there last fall, though mostly it was viewed illegally via the internet. Originally due out in the U.S. last month from The Weinstein Co., Moviefone now shows the film as being a Summer 2008 release, hopefully with a lot of support now thanks to the big win in Berlin.

Another Latin American cinema winner was Mexico's Lake Tahoe, the latest from Fernando Eimbcke (Duck Season), which picked up the Alfred Bauer Prize for innovative filmmaking and a FIPRESCI critics prize. Other winners include Errol Morris' eagerly anticipated documentary on Abu Graib, Standard Operating Procedure, which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize (aka second prize) and Paul Thomas Anderson, who won the Silver Bear award for best director, for There Will Be Blood. Anderson's film also received a Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution (Music) for Jonny Greenwood and its score. The Silver Bear award for best screenplay went to Xiaoshaui Wang for In Love We Trust, while the Silver Bears for acting went to Sally Hawkins, for her peformance in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, and Reza Najie for his performance in Majid Majidi's The Song of Sparrows. Kumasaka Izuru won a best first film award for Asyl -- Park and Love Hotel. For the rest of the Berlin winners head over to the festival's website.

When I saw Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, I was mesmerized by the musical score. In the opening, dialogue-free scenes, the dissonant, rhythmic, disturbing music and the raw imagery draws you into a very different world. Even people who didn't like the movie as a whole were impressed by Jonny Greenwood's remarkably effective original musical score.

Everybody, that is, except the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which evidently feels that Greenwood's score is not sufficiently original and ruled it ineligible last week. In his Red Carpet District blog for Variety, Kristopher Tapley reports: "The disqualification has been attributed to a designation within Rule 16 of the Academy's Special Rules for Music Awards (5d under 'Eligibility'), which excludes 'scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music.'" Tapley says that Greenwood's score includes "35 minutes of original recordings and roughly 46 minutes of pre-existing work," as well as "peripheral augmentation" from a piece Greenwood composed for the BBC in 2006.

Tapley indicates that the Academy was aware of all these "inclusions" since early December -- it had already ruled out Into the Wild and Enchanted for having too many songs -- but did not make a final determination on Blood until it notified Greenwood last Thursday, January 17. (Academy nominating ballots were due on Saturday, January 12.) Sources at distributor Paramount Vantage are "baffled," though respectful of the Academy's decision, telling Tapley they only wished they had known sooner so they could appeal the ruling.

There Will Be Blood ended up with eight Academy Award nominations (including one for Best Sound Editing), which is one short in my opinion. The films that did get nominated? Atonement, The Kite Runner, Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, 3:10 to Yuma. I haven't seen most of those: anything memorable from their original scores stick in your mind?

Last month the honorable task fell to me to review two of the year's most anticipated movies for Cinematical, Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth (9 screens) and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (51 screens). In retrospect and with a comfortable critical consensus in place, moviegoers can easily see that Youth Without Youth is a "bad" movie and There Will Be Blood is a "good" movie. But in that first moment, when the movie is freshly unspooling, there's nothing to go by but your own anticipation, experience and gut reaction. And these were two of the toughest movies I ever saw. In each review I said something like "these movies may have their flaws, but they're too rich and complex to be easily dismissed."

December is jam-packed with notable movies, each vying for a spot on our personal top ten lists or on our awards ballots. There are many more movies than usual and there is a heightened sense of anticipation for each movie. It's easy to get befuddled, our heads packed with too many images and opinions. I didn't much like Margot at the Wedding (85 screens), and I liked Persepolis (7 screens) very much, but I had a hard time recalling either movie a few weeks later, mainly from overload. (Critics who cover film festivals usually experience this same phenomenon.) What I really needed was more time to ponder each movie, or at least a second chance to see certain movies.

One of the best moments in There Will Be Blood comes when oilman-misanthrope Daniel Plainview first meets preacher Eli Sunday, after having already met and done a business deal with Eli's identical twin brother Paul earlier in the film. The camera lingers on Plainview's face as he examines Eli, trying to ascertain whether this is some kind of scam and if the person he's talking to is really Paul, passing himself off as the new brother for some nefarious reason. Some have speculated that this scene and the whole identical twin device P.T. Anderson uses has a lot of resonance because it shows what a disadvantage Plainview typically finds himself in when trying to know the mind of another person. (It's a problem that he deals with again in the film when a man arrives claiming to be his long-lost brother.) But it seems that we may be reading too much into it -- in a new half-hour Fresh Air interview, Paul Dano, who plays both Eli and Paul, says his casting in the roles of both brothers had a much more mundane genesis -- another actor was originally cast as Eli and then let go.

"Somebody else was cast in that role and replaced with you?" the NPR interviewer asks Dano, to which he replies "Yeah. For what reason I'm not sure. I don't care to know, or I didn't want to know." Dano says that the unknown actor had already been filming for a short while when Anderson approached him about taking over the role and he had less than a week to prepare for the part. "We looked at some scenes and talked about the part a little bit and he said 'I'd like you to do this part' and they'd been filming for a little bit already, so I said 'Okay, that's great. It's a little bit of a shock.' And he said 'And why don't you still play the Paul part and we'll just make them twins?'"

Dano also talks at length about how he views Eli, saying that "he's somebody who I think made himself up. He invented himself. I think he's quite a bit of an actor. He created this persona at a very young age once he saw what religion and his curiosity with religion could do for him." If you want to hear the rest of the interview, and I recommend it, get yourself to NPR and click on the recent Fresh Air programs.

The Director's Guild has announced their five nominees for best director of 2007, and they are: Ethan and Joel Coen for No Country for Old Men; Tony Gilroy for Michael Clayton; Paul Thomas Anderson for There Will Be Blood; Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; and Sean Penn for Into the Wild. For those of you paying attention to the major kudos, that's two different directors than the Hollywood Foreign Press nominated for the Golden Globes. Rather than recognizing Atonement director Joe Wright or American Gangster director Ridley Scott, the Guild has gone with Anderson and Penn.

So, which grouping will be closest to the Oscars? Who cares? I hate that with every announcement about non-Academy-related awards we get a statement like "since ____, only _____ winners have failed to claim the Oscar ... " Well, the fact that there is some divergence means there is no predicting who will get the Oscar nominations, let along the award. So, let's just appreciate the Director's Guild Awards for what they are. That said, I haven't seen all the films (I'm actually about to head out the door to finally catch There Will Be Blood), so I can't fairly pick my favorite. In fact, two of the nominated films that I have seen are so different in style that it's quite difficult for me to decide which I think is more deserving of this honor. Ultimately, despite the fact that I greatly admired Schabel's ability to make a first-person POV-shot engaging throughout the majority of his film, I'd have to go with the Coen Brothers. Except for that one controversial shot, I think they gave us the best visual storytelling of the year and I also think that they managed to get some of the most amazing performances of the year from their actors. However, my mind could easily change in about an hour when I sit down in front of the work of Paul Thomas Anderson. The winner will be announced on January 26.

Yahoo reports that the National Society of Film Critics (made up of 61 film critics across the country) has chosen Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood as the Best Picture of the Year, beating The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and No Country for Old Men. Anderson also won Best Director, over Julian Schnabel and the Coen Brothers. Daniel Day-Lewis was named Best Actor for Blood, and Robert Elswit received an award for its cinematography. The critics are clearly crazy for Blood, but I don't think it'll take the Best Picture Oscar. It's too cold a film for Oscar voters to fully embrace, and though I know I'm practically alone in this assessment, it's too flawed.

Julie Christie was named Best Actress for her understated performance in Away from Her. Casey Affleck was named Best Supporting Actor for his excellent work in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. And Cate Blanchett was selected as Best Supporting Actress for a performance that, for me, didn't amount to much more than a pretty good Bob Dylan impression. No End in Sight, a straightforward account of the bad decisions made by the Bush administration after the invasion of Iraq, won Best Documentary. Tamara Jenkins' script for The Savages was named Best Screenplay. I really loved the first half of The Savages but felt the second got distracted with side stories that thinned out the story's impact. Only 41 of the Society's 61 members cast ballots this year (?), and their choices frequently differ from Oscar voters. We'll find out just how much they differ when the Academy Award nominations are announced on January 22nd.

One of the most towering achievements in cinema this year, Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, finally opened in New York and Los Angeles on Christmas Day and was rewarded with a per-screen average of $91,300 over the weekend, the best average of the year, according to Pamela McClintock of Variety. Of course, the film only played at two theaters, but still, that's mighty impressive. Nineteen cities across the country also hosted a midnight screening on Saturday; no word yet on how those screenings were received. I thought this was an astounding film when I saw it at Fantastic Fest and I can't wait to see it again.

Cinematical's Scott Weinberg has been raving about The Orphanage since he saw the Spanish ghost story at the Toronto film festival (check his Top 10 list), and the film grossed a very healthy $12,260 per screen at 19 engagements, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. That's just slightly more than the French-language Persepolis, the animated tale about a little girl coming of age during the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which earned $12,160 per screen at seven engagements. James Rocchi reviewed the film at Cannes, and Erik Davis recently posted his interview with directors Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud.

When it played at the Toronto festival, Monika Bartyzel called John Sayles' Honeydripper "a simple and plainly executed ode to the start of rock 'n' roll." Movie City News pointed to Stephen Holden's "withering notice" in The New York Times, which provoked Ira Deutschman of distributor Emerging Pictures to respond: "Do people show their own ignorance–and even racism–when they have a kneejerk reaction to a story that, while set in a certain time and place, is trying to get to something a little different from what is expected?" The picture made just $2,400 per screen at four locations in New York and Los Angeles.