50 Movie Challenge, Punch-Drunk Love
7. Punch-Drunk Love. 2002. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Not romantic. Not comedic. Not as clever as it thinks it is. Not recommended.
7. Punch-Drunk Love. 2002. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Not romantic. Not comedic. Not as clever as it thinks it is. Not recommended.
March 16th, 2005 at 4:00 pm
I liked it.
March 16th, 2005 at 4:08 pm
I’ll never get the time back from seeing this movie and I hate Adam Sandler for it.
March 16th, 2005 at 7:23 pm
I don’t blame Sandler. I put full responsibility on the director.
March 19th, 2005 at 10:28 am
A friend of mine whose opinion I respect disagreed with me about Punch Drunk Love. He reminded me the great scene in which Sandler goes to dinner at his sister’s house, and is hen pecked until he finally erupts and throws a chair through the plate-glass window. He noted that it’s a great movie about repressed anger, then wondered whether I may not be angry enough to appreciate it. (Ha! One of the things we had to do before we sold our old place was patch a stretch of wall because I’d kicked it in one day.) And one of the enjoyable things about PDL was how Sandler runs around with all this anger, then these goons start following him, and he’s able to go to town on them, and they deserve to be the brunt of the anger. My friend also said that he liked how the movie showed that you run around in your life full of bad feelings, then something happens (in the movie, he meets Emily Watson) and it just transforms everything. Also true, I agreed. Finally, he said he liked the look and the music in the movie. I found the latter intrusive, something I’m finding in a lot of films lately, so perhaps it’s a personal bugaboo. I also found the stylization distracted from the humanity of the story. I still have some problems with PDL, but like it a little more now.
April 8th, 2005 at 2:21 pm
I found another friend who liked this movie. He pointed out that the scenes and color were used deliberately and skillfully for emphasis. He also identified with what he called “the search for a keel”. These are good points, so I like the film even a little more. Not enough to watch it again any time soon, though.