Rating: 
Summary: PT Sabotages His Own Good Idea.
Review: October 31, 2002A little too much of PT Anderson's art house neediness
gets in the way of what could have been an outstandingly
sweet film. The idea of casting Sandler in an innovative
movie about a loser redeemed by love was inspired--and
Anderson knew his man well enough to write him a perfect
character to play--but too much directorial "virtuosity"
ends up getting in the way. Anderson beats on all his
cinematic drums, obscuring what is basically the film
equivalent of a quirky clarinet solo. The audience I sat through "Punch Drunk Love" with was
made up of people, I suspect, lured in by the advertising
campaign. They didn't care for it, from what I saw and
heard. I thoroughly enjoyed huge sections of it, only to
occasionally have my fingers slammed in the trunk door by
Anderson's tinkering. For example, a number of scenes in
which Sandler's nervous character is meant to be suffering
through panic attacks are written over by percussive soundtracks and hyper-kinetic staging of the players. In the end, I suppose how much you enjoy "Punch Drunk
Love" is dependent on how sensitive you are to aggressive
film style. There's a wonderful Adam Sandler-Can-Really-
Charm-A-Movie-Audience movie underneath "Punch Drunk
Love", but it too often serves as the foundation for Anderson's
This-Is-My-Movie-And-You-Will-Notice directing style, when
it should be the other way around. The story, and our
empathy for the lead character, suffer as a consequence.
I think most casual viewers will pick up on this, and,
despite the fact that movie is very entertaining in places,
leave the theatre a little bemused and disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Worst Movie I've Ever Seen
Review: I've seens some bad movies in my day, but this one takes the cake. There is no subtle charm in this movie whatsoever. There are several scenes that have nothing but silence - no background mood music, nothing. Then, many of the other scenes have painful background music that drags on and on. Further, the cinematography is horrible. There are random camera shakes which I thought are part of the plot line when in fact it is just poor production. Not surprisingly, Adam Sandler cannot hold his own in a non-comedic role. His acting skills left a lot to be desired. As I walked out of the movie after about 40 minutes, I noticed that the door in the back of the theater was left open. I soon realized why as more people began walking out after I did. Make your own decision here, but I strongly recommend seeing anything else, or go golfing or something. Don't waste your time.
Rating: 
Summary: P.T. uses past styles for his own. No complaints
Review: There are three active film makers who's films draw my immediate attention: The Coen brothers, Christopher Nolan, and P.T. Anderson. All have autuer styles of their own and always but on a good show but in some ways I'm starting to feel like Anderson is starting to express a voice above the rest.
First of all, he writes his own script. (The Coen's often adapt & Nolan only directed INSOMNIA) Second his amazing style is an excellent blend of some of the best masters of the past.
For PUNCH, Anderson stays with the Orson Welles-like long camera takes while incorporating a Hitchcockian like quietness in order to build out the tension until BAM. He unleashes Sandler's rage. Often this is startling as well as comic.
I haven't laughed more this year, but even more interesting is I was more startled in this film than in Insomnia, Red Dragon, and Signs combined. P.T. could do well to make a horror film next, because he truly understand his ability to pace a film for emotional reaction. Plus, he is under control of his picture in every frame.
Perhaps the most wonderful feature of LOVE is the soundtrack. I am currently haunted by the "he needs me" part that runs over a some what bizarre, but still effective, kissing scene. I friend suggested a link to Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT on how Anderson will run one type of music over a long sequence of film. Although his style is different I can see the similarities.
It got me thinking that this P.T. project is very similar to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE in the way that himself and Kubrick used the main characters rage for cinematic effect. Kubrick used classical music combined with different camera speed. Anderson uses long takes and growing tension with haunting scores that partly play over the dialogue. He wants to build up the suspense for when Sandler goes nuts.
He does. It's often short but more effective than any other film he has ever started in. Fans of Sandler should realize that was eventually going to evolve out of the mundane roles of the past, but his core followers may be shocked at the subtly and Anderson's seemingly lack of explanation for why certain events occur.
This has been the complaint of most reviews. You're not watching carefully. Emily Watson's character is not underdeveloped, just not overt. Her Lena has more in common with Sandler's Barry than is stated. You just have to look hard. Now I have seen it twice and have already picked up a lot (hint: look at the films lighting and wardrobe selections of ALL characters).
Anderson may be the best writer/director right now because of his ability to draw a large audience to an Art house movie, without explaining away or compromising his story. He is a master in his own right.
Rating:
Summary: The Avenging Angel
Review: Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) has got some monumental problems: a coven of nagging sisters, a temper capable of demolishing bathrooms or smashing plate glass windows whenever said sisters tease him (which is always) and a relentless gang of phone sex thugs who are blackmailing him.
On top of this (as if this wasn't enough) he's enchanted by a "Healthy Choice/American Airlines" promotion which offers 500 free air miles for every food item purchased. His shopping trip to the 99cents store to buy Healthy Choice pudding cups, with his assistant Lance (Luis Guzman) is a veritable psychedelic trip of kaleidoscopic colors and flashing lights.
Into this turmoil walks one Lena Leonard (a radiant Emily Watson) who offers up superwoman amounts of understanding and acceptance to Barry.
Lena literally arrives on the scene and into Barry's life brightly light from behind like an avenging angel ready to embrace Barry and all his troubles and to bring him salvation through the cleansing and redemptive powers of Love.
The director of "Punch Drunk Love," Paul Thomas Anderson has fashioned a film very much unlike his two previous films, "Magnolia" and "Boogie Nights" in that, with "PDL", Anderson has chosen to tell his story in a very compact hour and a half. His two previous films were double that length and were told in a Robert Altman-like structure of intersecting separate stories. "Punch Drunk Love" is linear in structure with a beginning, middle and an end.
Adam Sandler plays Barry straight without his trademark bratty-kid antics and ultimately Barry emerges as a hero in the classic sense: flawed but deserving of our respect.
"Punch Drunk Love" is a major success for all concerned: Anderson, Sandler and Emily Watson. That is comes as such a surprise only adds to it's shimmering and relentlessly cheery yet persuasively dark ambience.
Rating:
Summary: Punch Drunk Love
Review: By far the worse movie I have ever seen!
Rating: 
Summary: A Charming Fairy-Tale...
Review: Right from the opening scene, where a brutal car-crash ends with the passenger of the crashed van tossing a tiny piano into the street right in front of Adam Sandler, you know this isn't a study in realism....If you keep that in mind, you'll enjoy Punch-Drunk love. The title is appropriate, as Director Paul Thomas Anderson kept me feeling dazed all through the film. Sandler plays Barry Egan, a man who, despite having a successful business and a huge family, has no one to love. Enter Lena, played by the luminous Emily Watson. Their romance is both charming and seriously weird. Poor Barry also has to deal with the violent ramifications of a late-night call to a phone-sex line.... The cast is uniformly excellent, especially Luis Guzman (As Barry's employee/friend), and Philip Seymour Hoffman (As the sleazy phone-sex line owner). Watson and Sandler make a cute couple, and despite the sometimes-serious nature of the film, there are plenty of big laughs for Sandler fans. If you're in the mood for something different, Punch-Drunk love is just the ticket.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of time and money
Review: I just saw "Punch Drunk Love." It is awful. It is stupid. It is not funny. None of the characters are endearing. Emily Watson is miscast. It is plotless, violent, and there are about 1 and a half laughs (I really only laughed when the brother-in-law said he was a dentist, not a doctor.) This is not a romantic comedy. In short, it is a waste of time.
Rating:
Summary: Whatever you expect - this flick is different
Review: Let me start off saying what everybody who's seen this flick already knows - it's NOT your basic Adam Sandler movie. It's not even in the same category as "Big Daddy" or "Wedding Singer" in which he plays a charming or romantic knucklehead. Sandler plays Barry Egan, a lonely Sou-Cal businessman (he sells bathroom supplies, including unbreakable plungers) who seems, in the opening shot of the movie, to have discovered a loophole in an airline promotion for frequent fliers. Alone in his darkened warehouse office, and before we can really tell what kind of movie this is, we realize that Sandler is going to be a painfully un-charming knucklehead. The only brother of about 4 sisters, Sandler was mercilessly tormented by just about everybody he knows. Everybody who knows him well (only family members, since Egan lacks the capacity to become friends with anybody else) remembers the names they called him as a child, or the violence that was his only response. Inexplicably wearing a horrible light-blue suit (in which he spends just about all of the movie) Sandler will alternate between slightly laughable and violent ends of his freakishly impulsive behavior. Lonely, and unable to bring himself to become attached with one of his sister's pretty co-workers (Emily Watson), Barry unwisely opts for about of phone-sex with a parasitic woman who calls herself "Georgia" that we later learn is played by Patty Arquette. With her claws into Barry's credit cards, his SS# and his address, Georgia sends her goons after Barry for more. Barry, slipping over the edge, finds himself reaching for whatever he can, and that proves to be Watson's character. When he can finally confront his tormentors, Barry learns that his strength is not in his photographic memory or his ability to find an outrageous loophole through some corporate marketing promotion, but true love. That said, there's just so much about this movie that doesn't make a lot of sense, or that could have done with some more editing. The biggest question of all is Emily Watson's Lena - just what does she see in Sandler that none of us can recognize, and just how can she miss what seems so bleedingly obvious to the rest of us? Barry is a guy we can all feel for, but not one we'd share a room or table with alone. His suit and the fact that he's always wearing it (even when impulsively flies after Watson to Hawaii) never bothers her. Yet she's been married and can have been expected to have learned a few things about men. Barry's dislocation is another problem - since Barry's love and his problems with Georgia coincide, it's hard to distinguish which of the two cause him to behave the way he does. Even his sisters seem clueless - they know what he's like, yet bait him anyway, as if oblivious to his capacity for violence. (In a spell that seems impossible, they even tell Lena, even as they want to set her up with him.) In what seems like the script's biggest stretch, Barry screams at his sister over the phone for Lena's Hawaii phone number. "Give me the phone number or I'll Kill you!!" he shouts from a Honalulu - and she gives it to him! From just about the first scene, a miniature piano (we later learn it's a Harmonium) becomes an almost silent fixture of Barry's existence. He doesn't know how to play it, and anyway it's needs some repair. We're supposed to see the machine as a metaphor for Barry - he's not just small and odd, but small, odd and damaged. As the movie progresses, Barry will repair the machine and his life so that they can both become whole again - even if that means that they'll both be good for nothing more than playing odd music. On the flip side - past the character holes and those parts of the script that never come together - is the flick's air of "enigmatic". Well into the movie's first half, we still don't know what kind of movie we're watching. We can say it's an "arthouse" movie, but that's a simplification. In one of the opening shots - immediately before the Harmonium is deposited unwanted in front of Barry's factory - a car careens down the street and flips on its side. We can still see the detritus of the wreck in the next scene meant to occur later that morning, but the accident is otherwise ignored, a sort of David-Lynchian event. Why the Harmonium finds itself planting directly in front of Sandlers factory is a mystery that Egan doesn't attempt to solve - occupied as he is by Lena, Georgia and his frequent flier miles. The biggest mystery isn't what kind of movie this is, but what sort of movie you want it to be - it's not all that funny, it's characters not really that attractive, and maybe we should be cringing at the prospect that they will become related at all. Still there's definitely a magic at work here, and if you're able to withstand the pain of Sandler playing a more genuine loser than the ones we've seen him play before, "Punch Drunk Love" will prove oddly rewarding.
Rating:
Summary: The Craziest Most Beautiful Movie In A Long Time
Review: A great example of a film that was able to combine a weird dramatic tension with a crazy emotional tension: laughter/crying at the same time. Crazy dialogue and situations that logically shouldn't work, but do in the most amazing way. The best American film since David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.
Rating:
Summary: recommended
Review: Good movie, good art direction, good cast. Full of taste, well constructed. The directer's choice of color, sound track, composition and frame is excellent. I strongly recommended for people who love watching movie with reasonable character drive, and also recommended for new movie maker, film student.
|
