PHANTOM THREAD: Paul Tomas Anderson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Fifties London

http://www.focusfeatures.com/phantom-thread/

Thomas typo.

Thomas Typo Types Tentatively

The thread of threads.

Anyway, trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNsiQMeSvMk

this looks insanely boring

So apparently DDL is not a gay dude in this

PTA does M/I.

this looks insanely boring

― Simon H., Monday, October 23, 2017 7:57 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

interest piqued

this does not appeal

well I live in hope that it's not actually about fashion, the most boring topic on earth.

Like one of those Saint Laurent films.

My gf has been super into sewing and making clothes lately, so I'm excited for beautifully-shot sewing action scenes on her behalf.

looks good to me ... is this the first PTA movie to have nothing to do with California?

I'm sure this will be good, because PTA usually delivers the goods, but for all you folks who complained how boring the new Blade Runner is, man, it was a relative struggle for me to make it through this 2-minute trailer.

I'll watch DDL be boring anytime, though.

Y'all are nuts this looks great

I liked The Dressmaker (2015)! Although that combined costume porn with Western tropes.

Previous word on this film suggests that Phantom Thread's story is based on the life of Charles James (1906-1978).

looks good to me ... is this the first PTA movie to have nothing to do with California?

Hard Eight?

oh right!

I'll probably watch this, but yeah, it looks pretty dull

looks good to me ... is this the first PTA movie to have nothing to do with California?

There Will Be Blood is all Texas, isn't it?

Southern California

Looks insanely boring & I fear he shot without a complete script again

why do you all say "boring" like it's a bad thing?

i only hold films in high esteem if i nod off during them

There Will Be Blood has aged pretty poorly (mostly because the last 10 minutes have been parodied and referenced so much - a shame because the ending was so powerful when I first saw it), but The Master has aged really well... I saw that one by myself opening night & then the next day with a bunch of friends and we were all left scratching our heads... haven't seen it since, but it's bloomed in my mind in a way that TWBB hasn't, quite the opposite... maybe the difference between DDL & PSH...

why do you all say "boring" like it's a bad thing?

the cardinal sin in movies is being boring, i don't understand the question

yeah i watched Louis XIV die in bed for 2 hours last night

xp

flappy, have you dodged the entire Slow Cinema trend?

what are some examples

First person that came to mind when I read "slow cinema" was Kelly Reichardt, who's one of my favorite working directors. Certain Women is slow but it's anything but boring.

yeah slow =/= boring. "PTA fashion movie" is my idea of hell if that's really what this is

you can def nap to the work of apichatpong weerasethakul, one of my favorite directors

Guessing it was made with self-awareness of The Age of Innocence and Gosford Park as context, wild energetic American filmmakers telling a story in a restrained and refined world.

wild energetic

this is not a fitting descriptor for PTA imo.

I mean, anxiety is also a form of energy I guess

I keep hearing that the Paul Thomas Anderson/Daniel Day-Lewis movie is sort of an art-house FIFTY SHADES OF GREY...

— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) August 7, 2017

This tweet (coupled with some hints in the trailer) suggest that this movie is not primarily about fashion

Oh hell yeah

Unfortunately, 'art house 50 Shades of Grey' sounds like a movie full of the scenes where he's asking her why isn't she eating and then making her eat.

That does look decidedly boring

He should play WB Yeats soon

don't you remember he retired? (lol)

unless he has some sort of second coming...

There's totally going to be a scene where he sews a dildo into one of those secret pockets

The strange thing is that in real life Daniel Day-Lewis is actually a cobbler and his specialty is embedding dildoes in the soles of his shoes. It's kind of ridiculous when you think about it, this presumption that knowing one thing could actually translate into a meaningful ability to represent the other thing. Hardly method acting, if you ask me.

daniel dild-shoeis morelike amirite

I regret this.

daniel dild-shoeis morelike amirite

hahahaha

This looks great, not boring at all. The photography looks absolutely beautiful. Very excited to see it.

This looks great.

Is that Julia Davis playing the "rival" at the dinner table 1:15 in? She's not on the cast list.

I won't watch the trailer (I don't really watch them) but PTA, whom I don't like much, made Inherent Vice and The Master back to back, both of which tickled me.

i'd like to know what you think of the aesthetic fwiw, and it doesn't give much away. in fact it does the opposite. such a shock to see PTA shoot grey skies, rainy cobbled streets and wild green coastlines.

i mean i've got magnolia way up in the rankings so it's not like i'm dissing his earlier work. they're still of markedly different calibers though, and it makes him a more interesting artist to have both periods

pta's division down the center of his filmography is also a way clearer narrative than trying to define a rich mature period for either spielberg or scorsese, for me at least. and even then that's simplifying things too much, phantom thread is totally in conversation with punch-drunk love

I like the "in conversation" idea.

Don't mind me, I'm just a stubborn defender of those guys' earlier films.

Adam Sandler is The Hungry Boy

inherent vice > phantom thread > there will be blood = magnolia = the master > punch-drunk love > boogie nights

No Hard Eight?

i haven't seen it yet!

oh man -- can't wait

Magnolia is my least fave by now, I agree w/ PTA that it should be cut way down.

it was my favorite movie of all time when i was in high school/college and i rewatched it last week and its effect has not diminished, i have no objectivity about it. it is just this cascade of scenes and dialogue and performances i love building up to catharsis. though this time i noticed how the deletion of the worm plotline essentially makes some characters fully disappear from the plot (stanley)

(deleting an entire plotline is still one of the smartest choices pta made with that film)

I saw Magnolia last year for the first time and while it didn’t land the way it would’ve if I were in high school there’s some stuff in it that really landed for me. Much of it to do with Tom Cruise’s hollow-eyed performance.

Still his best movie.

Well yeah. Also a much better version of The Power of the Dog imo.

I've never watched a film in which a director's absolute mystery of visual and sound design and cinematography had me vacillating in sympathy from one character to the other.

lol mastery

It’s interesting to me that altho I have adored PTA’s work since Boogie Nights, nearly all his films have felt incomplete to me. BN and Phantom Thread probably the most complete. But there’s always something unresolved or not quite tucked in. Don’t know if it’s a flaw or a signature.

something unresolved or not quite tucked in

I think he senses it too, which is why his endings can seem like he's wrenching to put all his meanings in order.

he removed an entire story thread from magnolia, he’s def got the impulse

i don’t agree with the sentiment about his endings tho. did the ending of the master give you the feeling he was trying to put all his meanings in order? far from it imo

https://media.giphy.com/media/26DN5ayYLdN6bK62I/giphy.gif

Yes, I think The Master is his most successful film with, no coincidence, his most successful ending.

haha fair! but i love the way inherent vice and phantom thread end too, and neither of them feel like a late massing of the film's themes

I'm shocked a picture as dialectically subtle sprung from the mind of an American writer-director.

John Simon is cheering that post; I am not.

what -- mine?

Simon wouldn't write a thing without a passing gibe at a person's looks, using strained alliteration, or lamenting how even good American movies fall short of a European tradition he's got lodged in his head, which means he's like me.

as an aside my ranking upthread is not correct but i had only seen the master once at the time

Yes; subtlety in American films is hardly rare (maybe dialectically subtle is a distinction I'm missing). Funny you say "from the mind of," though, because Phantom Thread to me very much belongs to the From the Mind Of genre, where you get some portentous voice announcing "From the mind of _________" (Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, etc.--David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick in a previous lifetime) in the trailer.

I mean, it's also a movie about closeups of Welsh rarebit, martinis with a twist, and mushrooms in butter.

now that I think about it Boogie Nights ended with something not quite tucked in

Inherent Vice works because it's somewhat built in that putting everything neatly away by the time it ends was not ever really on the table

rewatched this before christmas, best film hollywood has produced since john ford died

(xxpost) I started to defend Boogie Nights' ending...then I got the joke--nice!

xp hey now devvv, I'm with KJB that A.I. is that movie

rewatched this before christmas, best film hollywood has produced since john ford died

No American film in the last few years makes me more uncomfortable. Letting someone "in your life" is a risk: you look like a manipulative Hitchcock-esque svengali like Woodcock, and that's the benefit of telling the story through Alma's POV; but I'm also annoyed that she won't respect his boundaries, especially since she lives in his house. Scraping the toast, throwing a surprise party for him -- it's clear he's on the spectrum when we see his reactions to them, and I cheer her hilarious, sadistic, cheerfully willful attempts to break him...but why shouldn't he expect (at his age!) to go on drinking his tea at a certain hour and not be disturbed? He's so hateful, and she's so right, and yet.

That scene in the rural inn where he patiently, meticulously, smilingly requests a traditional breakfast, and PTA cuts to Krieps' hungry expression (she's thinking, "OMIGOD he gets it!") is just perfect.

i don't have a fully formed thought on it, but thinking through the relationship dynamics in this and licorice pizza is really interesting bc there are some things that are strikingly similar and some things that are very much not

Also: he's the worst gaslighter in movies since Charles Boyer.

I didn't like anybody onscreen, which is fine because I dislike 98 percent of the people I watch or read about. But the film is sharp about the delusions of men who experiment with the feelings of women but expect solitude to work on their art.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, January 24, 2018 8:57 PM

still stand by this

Didn’t Morbs say this movie was about “a closet case with a poisoning fetish”? I think about that phrase a lot.

alfred otm

I just love this movie so much

his best movie

incredible

Saw it for the first time on New Year's Day, 10/10 masterpiece

this movie is perfect and PTA's best movie? rewatching it i was trying to think of arguments against it being his best and all i could come up with is that it's so mannered, almost sterile at times, and that there are probably people who prefer PTA's messier early movies (boogie nights, magnolia, punch drunk love) or even his goofy anarchic mode (inherent vice, licorice pizza) to his insane prestige mode (TWWB, the master, phantom thread). but not me! i want amazing actors doing amazing acting that is filmed beautifully and has a groaning and/or lush jonny greenwood score please.

also this is such a basic acting point but it's crazy, having just rewatched TWWB, how much DDL changes his voice between the two roles

i prefer inherent vice but this is his best

also this is such a basic acting point but it's crazy, having just rewatched TWWB, how much DDL changes his voice between the two roles

― na (NA),

and to think his previous film was Lincoln!

That clip of DDL having lunch while in TWWB character is massively unsettling!