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Opinions! We all have them. Find out what people really think with polls and surveys from Crowdsignal.
"There Will Be Blood" is long, yet economical in its storytelling. It sprawls, but is tidy. Each viewing feels like going the distance with prime Mike Tyson. And even though you lose, much like Balboa in "Rocky," all is well in the end because it restores hope, faith, and order in the art of moviemaking.
PTA's dark epic has it all -- oil, family, greed, religion, capitalism, the West, and of course, blood. These ingredients, along with Robert Elswit's poetic, brutalist cinematography, Jonny Greenwood's unnerving score, and Daniel Day-Lewis' transfixing performance, mix to tell the horror story of America.
Now this is the kind of Final Four matchup Filmspotting Madness is about. There Will Be Blood is one of the best movies of the century, but so is The Fellowship of the Ring (though Return of the King is better). I agonized over this more than I have any Madness matchup in history. Can I live in a world where Daniel Plainview doesn't get his ocean of oil out of the ground in Little Boston? No! But can I live in one where we don't see how Frodo and the gang begin their journey from the idyllic Shire to the woods of Parth Galen? Absolutley not! I voted for the PTA film because I think it's the more essential and unique work, but Jackson's movie has both those things in spades, too! I'm going to need something stronger than a milkshake to cope with this.
fellowship beat 3 movies from my top ten of the decade (city of god, basterds and the dark knight)
but it shall not pass, no more.
plainview is about to drink some hobbit milkshake
Never could have hoped Fellowship would make it this far, but I'm truly thrilled that it did. As with many of it's matchups so far, my support for Jackson's fantasy epic has proven that when it comes to film, I tend to side with the heart over the head. Sure, PTA's stark and grueling take on American capitalism and our inability to square morality with greed is fascinating, masterful and profound. Undoubtedly the more intellectually engaging experience. But I'm drawn to champion the heart of LOTR and it's passionate, moving and epic look at the corrupting nature of power and the power of myth. Jackson, a world-class cinematic visionary, was given one of literature's greatest playgrounds to explore and as a result, we were given the most vivid and rich fantasy worlds ever. There are movies out there that can replace, or at least come close to replacing, the experience of watching There Will Be Blood. But nothing I've seen has come close to the awe of exploring Middle Earth and it's history; which is really the only functional logic I can think of when considering an apple and orange matchup like this one.
I’ll conciet that voting against the Coens was much easier than I ever anticipated in the final four, and that is truly upsetting to me. But I was 17 years old when There Will Be Blood came out and it was truly a transformative experience for me. It taught me to understand the importance of subtext, themes, and the power of autuer filmmaking. In so many ways this film still informs my veiws of politics, art, and the relationship between the two. But the Lord of the Rings trilogy is the most important film series of my childhood. Why would you take my childhood away from me? It will be a perilous journey, but I’ll hapily take on the burden of carrying PTAs masterpiece myself to throw into the fires of Mount Doom.
I'm with Albert from Pasadena cheering on Daniel Plainview and from the sidelines as he bludgeons Frodo to death. This is what Filmspotting madness does to me. To all of us. Pitching one beloved treasure against another and screaming in delight one gets decapitated. What have we become?
I have never written but this matchup has compelled me to speak!
Of course things were going to keep getting harder as we wore down the contenders, but I didn't imagine we would get here. I always had some way to make a choice between two beloved films, but now seeing There Will be Blood up against The Fellowship of the Ring, I don't know. There Will be Blood is simply a better movie. It is a more important movie. It is a more delicately crafted movie. It is a more profound and intellectual movie. It is all of those things and more. And so I voted for Fellowship of the Ring.
I voted for The Fellowship because when I was 13 years old, after making fun of my friend for his LOTR fandom for months, I saw Fellowship in a free Canada Day screening at the grand re-opening Windsor's now-demolished Palace Cinemas.
I am voting for The Fellowship of the Ring because the way that movie made me feel that night, and how nothing had ever made me feel that before, and nothing has made me feel that way since. I liked movies before, I always did. But this is when the love affair really began. When the voracious appetite began. When the scouring of VHS bargain bins with my paper route money began. When the movie marathons began. I think that was the night I hit movie puberty.
There Will be Blood touched by brain and enriched me, and remains one of my favourite films of all time. But The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, touched my mind, my heart, and my soul. I am a different person because I saw that movie. I am pretty sure we will be seeing a redux of the 2008 Best Picture Oscar in the Filmspotting Madness Finals.
But I had to say, if Fellowship is burned up and gone forever, part of me goes with it.
No pressure though. ;)
Let's see, the best film of the 21st century - a towering achievement, Paul Thomas Anderson's best film and Daniel Day-Lewis's best performance vs a film that's not even the best in it's trilogy. Fellowship should not have gotten this far. I thought it was cute at first, but now it's just annoying. You can find me at the sidelines cheering on as Daniel Plainview bludgeons Frodo to death with a bowling pin. I'm finished!!!
Aww the snobbery and smugness of Their Will Be Blood fans. It is great movie, but it is a cold cold movie. Fellowship on the other hand has it all, and it has a lasting cultural and cinematic presence, and even though PTA’s beloved will slurp its milkshake, still FoTR will always has my vote.
Aww the snubbary
No question , I vote for Blood , it is epic , dramatic and shows how the ambition destroys morality and tranforms human beings into monsters .One of my 5 favourites of the 2000s; Fellowship is good , probably great , but does not reach such heights . It is amazing for me how it has gone through in this poll.
I remember when I saw Fellowship all those years ago. I was extremely hyped and completely the target audience. In fact my hype had been built up to such extremes that by the time I sat down in the theater I thought "this can't possibly live up to this can it?"
It could.
In fact It was even better than that.
On the other side I finally caught up with There Will Be Blood only a couple of years ago.
It was fine.
I think if I really open my mind I can put myself in the mindset of the type of person who believes Fellowship deserves to be here. I guess if you spent your whole life as a huge Tolkien fan and believed his books were ultimately "unfilmable", it would be a big deal to watch these movies get made so competently.
That's about all the fairness and empathy I can muster. Beyond that I have no idea how anyone can see this as a hard choice. Even if this poll ends up 99% on the side of There Will Be Blood, that leftover 1% will still blow my mind.
Definitely the easiest choice of the entire tournament for me.
Are these new movies? Haven't seen yet but hope to get to the cinema this weekend if they are still out.
So, in the end, we're going chalk?
It's just going to be 2007 all over again?
Good thing I wasn't counting on a payout for this tourney.
I voted No Country, I mean There Will be Blood (as always, how was that name not used before)
This is my personal championship. I like No Country and Eternal Sunshine, but There Will Be Blood and Fellowship are the two best movies of the decade. Whichever wins should win next week as well. That said, this shouldn't even be that close of a semi-final as There Will Be Blood isn't just the best movie of the decade, its the best movie in several decades, if not all time.
I was so happy when Fellowship beat Dark Knight last round, but immediately hurt when I saw the next matchup. Fellowship was the first great movie I saw in a theater, so it holds a place in my heart nothing else can. But There Will Be Blood is the exceptional film. I may be losing Fellowship, but I still have the memory.
I can’t believe Fellowship is still in this. I did my own best of the 2000’s movie bracket challenge on Facebook that was inspired by your filmspotting madness bracket challenge and guess what won...
You guessed it, The Fellowship of the Ring!?!?
Don’t let this happen again people. Don’t make the same mistake my friends and family made.
Lord of the Rings, “You shall not pass”!!!!!!
Tolkien, famously, hated allegory, so there's something delicious about the pitch-perfect adaptation of his masterpiece going up against PTA’s (also perfect) allegory for the Bush administration. Ack! How to choose? There Will Be Blood was the movie I watched to celebrate graduating from seminary. The Fellowship of the Ring is, in many ways, the reason I went to seminary in the first place. Heart over head! Hope over despair! Fellowship it is!
I can't believe that Fellowship got to the Final Four. I'm very pleased, but I didn't think it would be possible. Not only that, it went through some heavy hitters: City of God, The Incredibles, Inglorious Basterds, The Dark Knight. I would not have been surprised if it had lost to any of those. I like them all. And yet here we are. Fellowship of the Ring has cheated death and overcome overwhelming odds, just like the protagonists in that film. I think There Will Be Blood had an easier path to the Final Four.
As for There Will Be Blood, I understand that it can be objectively argued that it is the better film. I'm not even going to attempt to argue otherwise. But film isn't all about objectivity is it? No art form is. The thing is I grew up reading LOTR. When I finally saw the scenes I had imagined in my head since I was a kid finally brought to life on the big screen when I was 27 years old, I was flabbergasted. For the most part, Peter Jackson nailed what I had in my head. Paul Thomas Anderson's film is one which I greatly respect, but don't love. Watching Fellowship on opening night, was one of the most memorable movie going experiences I have ever had. I just have a connection to that movie that I could never have with There Will Be Blood, so I can't vote against it.
It isn't a hard choice for me. I want FOTR in the championship round.
I was in graduate school when "There Will Be Blood" was released, and although I was up to my eyeballs in avant garde theater and performance at the time, damn if it wasn't one of those awakening moments. Like the day I discovered Robert Wilson as a college freshman and said, "woah - theater can be this?", watching blood was a watershed: movies can do THIS. That's probably compounded by the fact that I was a big P.T. Anderson fan already. I laughed and cried with Barry Eagan; I fired up Aimee Mann's music whenever I drove around in Southern California. With movies like "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights," Anderson had taught me to expect certain things: he liked to embrace his audience with chatty characters, nostalgic pop references, and recognizable circumstances in familiar places. He loved dynamic ensembles and had a feel for improvisation.
"There Will Be Blood" didn't just reveal what movies could do. It revealed what a director could do - in this case, recast himself as an auteur with an impossibly precise vision, partnered with a star who surgically embeds himself so deeply in his characters you'd worry about the guy if he didn't seem so in-control. He made an uncompromising period movie where minutes go by without dialog; where a shrieking string by a rock guitarist channels Penderecki and "The Shining." Guys, it's the coolest damn shift a modern director ever made, and one of the coolest movies I've ever seen.
"Fellowship?" It's the pretty-good, third-best movie in a fantasy trilogy that had more interesting things to say down the road. If it goes in the furnace, the best Gollum scenes for Adam and Josh to butcher are still out there.
I saw Fellowship when it first opened, in one of those midnight showings, and even when the credits rolled at 3 AM I didn't want it to end. As for Blood, I remember being grateful when it ended. Both films are journeys, but while Blood is a painful one that leaves me exhausted, Fellowship is a harrowing one that leaves me energized. That's not to say Fellowship is a better film, but it's certainly the journey I would rather take again.
Curiously the only match I can vote in as I have still not seen Eternal.
In this match-up we have a character going on a quest where he needs to convince a bunch of desperate people to help him find a magical spot in the earth that will give him a material that will help him complete his quest.
Then there is Fellowship.
Fellowship. All the way.
I can't give up my precious.
Rich in Dallas,TX
There Will Be Blood.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is an amazing achievement of filmmaking, but there is something about There Will Be Blood that I don't want to let go of. Not yet at least.
Please.
There Will Be Blood, obvs.
I love both of these films and I know that in the sense of pure film, TWBB is the better movie. That being said, LOTR shouldn’t be given short schrift. It was almost laughable how ambitious this movie is. It should have crumbled under its own weight, like the Hobbit movies would later do. But it didn’t! How does a franchise film muster this kind of cinematography? The score! The practical effects! How rarely does a film become an instant part of our cultural consciousness like LOTR did? I love TWBB, but Gandalf drinks your milkshake.
I am genuinely astonished, pleased, but astonished that Fellowship of the Ring has made it this far. It's the best part of a truly groundbreaking trilogy, it's both artistically and logistically ambitious, and it's wildly successful based on any measure one chooses, so I probably shouldn't be that astonished and it's a measure of how much I take the Lord of the Rings trilogy for granted that I am. That having been said, Paul Thomas Anderson's film is a significantly more impressive film aesthetically. There Will Be Blood is entirely free of the sheer weight of fan and corporate expectations that lead to some of the worst choices of Fellowship and the rest of the trilogy and that gives the story and the filmmaking an opportunity to speak truth to and about power in a way that Peter Jackson and his collaborators never even had a chance to accomplish. So, despite everything that I've written about wanting to choose hope over darkness, PTA's well articulated examination of the moral costs of ambition gets my vote.
I absolutely adore the LotR trilogy, and have watched all of the BTS extras that last even longer than the films. But its triumph and rightful place in cinematic history is as a trilogy, a complete saga across a complete world. The Trilogy is greater than the sum of its parts. Fellowship only gives us a sliver of that full grandeur, and IMHO is some way off being one of the top 4 films of the decade.
Certainly the Trilogy is right up there, but it's not a single film. And I can only hope that the people who voted for Fellowship so far can take pause and ask... is this incomplete piece of storytelling truly better than The Benchmark for Superhero movies AND The Dark Knight?! AND City of God (which is a finalist in my ideal bracket)...
Come on people. Get a hold of yourselves.
Even though it would totally mess up my personal bracket, I’d give a lot to see the final two be Eternal Sunshine and Fellowship of the Rng! If only to see everybody’s head explode! Also, unavoidable boring boring boring boring final two avoided.
Kymm from Hollywood, CA
This was probably the easiest matchup to vote for so far in the tournament. While I'm not going to pretend that LotR isn't a great movie, There Will Be Blood is a force. There are not many movies that feel as big and important as PT Anderson's masterwork and it deserves its rightful spot in the finals.
How a fantasy film that’s not even as good as 80’s trash like Krull beats The Dark Knight the best superhero film, Inglorious Basterds the 3rd best Tarantino film and The Incredibles the 3rd best Pixar film is a crime against cinema and nearly as big as a disaster as the Brexit vote here in the UK. Let’s not let this overblown bore fest pass into the next round!!
A recent rewatch of "There Will Be Blood" confirmed for me my original thoughts on its release: it's something very special, beautiful and dark, but it's kinda all about Daniel Plainview -- it's a one-man show, and he wouldn't have it any other way. But "Fellowship" -- well, it's right there in the title, isn't it? Although based on a most beloved work of literature, it feels fresh and new, tremendously inventive and creative, introducing us to a host of wonderfully complex characters ... and there will never be anything like it. Even Peter Jackson himself couldn't come close to it with his abominable Hobbit trilogy. As amazing as "There Will Be Blood" is, it's just a story about a greedy guy who will stop at nothing to line his pockets and feed his ego. Yeah, yeah, i know it's more complicated than that, but there have been films like this before, and there will be again. And there will have to be ... because There Will Be Blood in the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom.