It has been over two weeks since I saw P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood. I still can't shake it. I have that rare impression that I get from a movie where I leave the theatre feeling like I was part of a great event. I actually saw something happen, and on some level, whether fully conscious or not, it will have an influence on my life. This only happens to me when a film is so well put together that you forget it's a film, therefore doesn't feel "put together" at all.

And though everyone seems to have something to say about it, not enough can be said for Daniel Day-Lewis's performance. That wasn't acting. Day-Lewis was a different person altogether. I have confidence that his portrayal of the power-sociopath and loving father Daniel Plainview should go down in the history books as possibly the greatest actor performance on film. Not to belittle all the great work there has been, but when honestly and objectively thinking about it, I can't for the life of me think of a work with this amount of nuance and depth. I was convinced this Daniel Plainview existed.

To complete this tryptic are Johnny Greenwood's sound poems. In an interview he said that he didn't create themes for characters or situations, but more it was all a study of Daniel Plainview's complicated mind—and it reads that way. It is shaped by the landscape he lives in, with the swells of hills and atonal hums of empty desert plains. It is shaped by the drumming labor within him, with all the clanking and pounding of a mind that never stops running. And it is shaped by the melodic peace he finds in the thought of his son. But throughout the score there's always the looming dissonance that says something is wrong—that something is coming.

And boy does it come.