8. There Will Be Blood
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3THVbr4hlY Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis gave the world of cinema one of its greatest and most morally ambiguous characters with There Will Be Blood and its main character Daniel Plainview. Plainview is a cruel, evil and manipulative man who is very difficult to love but somehow Anderson makes him someone that the audience can identify with. Showing Plainview's struggle to strike oil in the film's opening and his subsequent difficulty in getting out of the desert with a broken leg allows the viewer to, partially, see his reasons for being enveloped by greed and hate. This isn't to say that he's a good man by any means but by watching the film multiple times the story becomes less one sided and There Will Be Blood reveals new details about its protagonist that add a new layer of depth to him.
Dolan Reynolds
Contributor
My favorite movies are Before Sunrise, Pulp Fiction, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and Her so don't be surprised to see those pop up in my writing from time to time. I'm currently in school for Journalism/English and I have an obsession with all things cinematic on the side.
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Dolan