Paul Thomas Anderson

The Massachusetts set of Grown Ups had quite a few tiny visitors yesterday. Adam Sandler's wife Jackie brought their girls Sadie and Sunny along to come and say hi to their dad, while pregnant Maya Rudolph's long-term partner Paul Thomas Anderson accompanied their 3-year-old Pearl. This time, though, Salma Hayek was on her own as Valentina took a rare day off. There are lots of adult stars in the film's cast, which also includes Chris Rock and David Spade, but it must be a treat to have so many youngsters around to lighten things up.

INFDaily.com and Splash News Online

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From now until the 2008 Oscars air on Sunday night, I'll be breaking down the five contenders for Best Picture, giving you the scoop on why each film could win and why it might not stand a chance. Today, I'm kicking off the series with a closer look at There Will Be Blood.

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is a stark and stunning look at greed, power, and success viewed through the lens of the oil boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The bulk of its acclaim has come for Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as tycoon Daniel Plainview, but the movie has many other things going for it, as its eight Oscar nominations — for diverse categories including cinematography and sound editing — show. To see how I think There Will Be Blood will fare in the Best Picture race, just read more

In the days leading up to the Oscars, I'll be featuring the nominees in the various visual categories. This week, I've been looking at the nominees for Best Art Direction, which encompasses the entire look and feel of a film from the scenery to the lighting. Today brings us to the last of the nominees: There Will Be Blood.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson and gang did well with capturing the dangerous and spooky atmosphere of the oil industry at the beginning of the 1900s. Every frame portrays a dusty, dirty and oil-splattered world, all in that palette of slick blacks, coarse browns and sometimes fire-gold.

The film makes great use of its landscape, setting its characters against a barren desert or a shockingly blue sky. A few scenes — such as the one where an oil rig catches fire, ultimately tumbling to the ground in a heap of burning rubble — are particularly stark.

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The opening scenes of There Will Be Blood are like a preview for the superb Daniel Day-Lewis performance to follow. For the movie's first 15 or so minutes, there is not a bit of dialog — only silence interspersed with the dissonant, deep-stringed musical score by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. The action focuses solely on the grueling labor at hand. It's a striking way to start a story and also a metaphor for Day-Lewis's portrayal of Daniel Plainview, whose outbursts are as sinister as his silence and who lives for nothing but the pursuit of oil.

Based loosely on Upton Sinclair's Oil!, this movie is strange and hard to pigeonhole, and that's one of the main reasons I enjoyed it. It's a tale of two megalomaniacs, representing capitalist and religious greed, that at times has the feel of a horror film. The other big reason to savor There Will Be Blood is for Day-Lewis's eerie performance, which is hands down one of the year's best, so read more