Another I don’t feel the urge to add much in the way of comment to, but damn, the dialogue is astoundingly real. I relate to Barry Egan so much.

20th September 2005:

Oh yeh – I kinda knew I was in the mood for this movie recently. This viewing puts it firmly in my all-time faves. It’s simply beautiful. Jon Brion’s score; the photography; the sound mix; the editing! It’s sheer perfection. I can’t believe it’s over a year since I last watched it.

18th March, 2004:

This is a scary movie… a scary, scary, scary movie where Paul Thomas Anderson outquirks himself condensing all the richness he’s known for spreading out over up to 3 hours into just a little over 90 minutes, in fact, I think there’s even more stuff than usual. One scene in particular is perhaps the most manic thing I’ve ever seen. Jon Brion’s score plays at varying volumes throughout, sometimes drowning the dialogue completely – every single actor (I’m pretty sure, anyway) walks in on the scene, there’s a big fork-lift accident going on the background, there’s unexplained pudding and a harmonium that everyone’s confused by, there’s a con-artist calling intermittently through the scene… it’s an incredibly visceral scene, you just can’t follow it, you just get a hit of Barry Egan’s insane existence. It’s like Paul Thomas Anderson is deliberately trying to see how much he can have going on at once, and he directs this insanity as perfectly as you’d expect.

Emily Watson is one of the cutest faces in modern cinema, but even she here has a line that goes, something along the lines of, “I just wanna suck out your eyes and chew on them,” (Sandler might have this line, actually, I’d have to check: but her side of the conversation is equally bizarre – it’s meant to be a romantic exchange for these two- ... I love it though) : nobody, not even Watson, can escape Anderson’s determination to have his characters wear their random, broken little human hearts and souls on their tongue.

It is incredibly full of its own desire to be different, but that’s something that really bears no relevance to the quality of the movie – if you don’t like this kind of extreme quirk, you’ve probably little desire to see Punch-Drunk Love. It’s a bit of a sneak putting popular Adam Sandler in there, and there’s really not a trace of his more popular brand of acting in this performance… like I said, this is a scary, scary, scary movie. But as an experiment, it’s certainly experimental. Me personally, I just love to see these whacky people from time to time, they’re basically caricatures of all our problems. One shot says it all, it gets me everytime, like Travis Bickle’s painful phonecall to Betsy after the date-gone-wrong in Taxi Driver when the camera just has to pan away from him because his pain is too private – here, Sandler stands in the middle of a busy room, clearly thinking everyone is talking about him in the muddle of voices (and some of them probably are) – he begins centre frame, our full attention on him, and gradually he side-steps until he leaves the frame completely. How brilliantly artsy is that.

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