Director Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 epic There Will Be Blood is set on the blazing frontier of California's turn-of-the-century oil boom and charts the westward founding fathers' ruthless quest for wealth and power. As mineral-prospector-turned-oilman Daniel Plainview, Daniel Day-Lewis channels the intonation and timbre of the late John Huston, whose classic rumination on greed, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, was a major influence on the film. In Plainview's way is Eli Sunday, an evangelical preacher dead set on extracting money from the oilman to build his church. The codependent, uneasy alliance of old-time religion and unchecked capitalistic excess is, at its core, an origin story of the America we live in today. The Webster Film Series presents There Will Be Blood at 8 p.m. this evening in Moore Auditorium on the Webster University campus (470 East Lockwood Avenue; 314-968-7487 or www.webster.edu/filmseries). Tickets are $4 to $6.
Thu., April 17, 8 p.m., 2014