I finally had a chance to see There Will Be Blood this week, and now all I want to do is talk about it, see it again, spend way too much time analyzing every cut and camera angle and acting nuance until my eyes bug out.

Relax, I’m not gonna go all Howard Hughes and lock myself up in a screening room with a copy of the film and a steady supply of empty milk bottles, though I guess if somebody wanted to obsess over a movie while slowly losing their grip on reality, this would be as good a film as any to do it with.

I’m not quite that obsessed – truth be told, it’s not my favorite movie of the year, or even my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson movie – but I did walk out of the theater pretty overwhelmed, and certain that I’d seen something that will be talked about long after its (probably inevitable) Oscar victories are old news.

Rather than bore you with the ten million or so questions I’d love to ask Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis if I happened to run into them at Starbuck’s, however, I’ll just spend a minute here focusing on one small, bite-sized chunk of what makes the film the incredible experience it is: it’s got, hands down, the most memorable opening and closing scenes I’ve seen in a movie all year.

Smart filmmakers never underestimate the importance of beginning and ending their films on the perfect notes – if you can grab your audience by their collective jugular within the first minute and send them out two hours later with a line or image that will bang around their heads for the next month, you’re golden. Everybody loves a great ending, of course, but beginnings are equally important, and most of the time don’t get the attention they deserve (except over at Jim Emerson’s blog Scanners, with its ongoing and awesome Opening Shots Project).

Anderson is particularly skillful at both beginnings and endings, so I sort of figured he’d do something impressive with his latest. Who could forget the tracking shots that open Punch-Drunk Love and Boogie Nights, introducing and drawing us in to two very distinct film worlds right from the get-go? Or the spellbinding Ricky Jay-narrated bit about coincidences that kicks off Magnolia? Or that famous shot that closes Boogie Nights, where porn king Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) finally takes a good look at, er, himself in the mirror?

So, right, There Will Be Blood. Consider this a spoiler warning – I’m not going to reveal anything that doesn’t happen in the first five or so minutes, but it’s still better to go in cold and just experience it for yourself.

The film opens with one of its many arresting landscape shots, then provides us our first glimpse of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) – the man we’ll get to know in frightening detail over the next two-and-a-half hours – as he descends into a subterranean silver mine that’s more foreboding and otherworldly than any of the fantastical underground hellholes in the Lord of the Rings movies. The opening sequence, like the rest of the movie, plays out with deliberate intensity; between the creepily slow camera movements and Jonny Greenwood’s nerve-jangling score, it’s unsettling on levels both palpable and subconscious. By the time the scene is over, we know several things: one, that no risk or sacrifice or rationality can stand in the way of Daniel Plainview getting what he wants; two, he’s as hard and unforgiving as the rocky, barren country where he does his bidding; and three, most importantly, that the movie to follow is going to take us to places darker and scarier than that hole in the ground could ever hope to be, and – like Daniel – we’re going to be too fixated to even consider looking away.

Spoiler warning or not, I’m not going to reveal what happens in the closing scene, since I couldn’t hope to do it justice. Suffice it to say that it takes place in a mansion as eerie-looking as the silver mine in the opening scene, it reunites two characters that we absolutely needed to see together one last time, and contains a dramatic speech that will twist your guts in knots. It’s an exclamation point of an ending, the kind of thing that even viewers who didn’t appreciate the rest of the film will have trouble dismissing. It’s also the best few minutes of screen time in Day-Lewis’s already amazing career.

It’s true, these are only two scenes in a very lengthy movie, but they do so much to elevate everything that falls between them that they deserve to be singled out.

Alright, that’s enough out of me for now. I’ve got to go track down a screener copy of There Will Be Blood and a few dozen milk bottles… so, see you when I see you, I guess.