Punch Drunk Love

Yo, I can't help it that I'm allergic to your ILXOR-CHICK-ATTRACTIN-COLOGNE.

I was very impressed with Sandler. None of his previous films had remotely appealed to me. Is he as good in any of those? PTA seemed to be implying that his acting strength was obvious in his previous work.

i think the movie captured a feeling of craziness - sandler being struck with a barrage of insanity and bullshit. can someone remind me what set off his 'episode' in the restaurant bathroom??'

biggest part i've seen mary-lynn rajskub in so far... i hope she continues to act more!

Overall, I thought PDL was worth seeing for the little moments, like any PTA film. Narratively, it's a shambles.

so is jon bryon! (the guy that did the music)

hey martin s, that mad lady was RIGHT punch drunk love was quite loud

I don't remember where I mentioned the mad woman! She wasn't mad for thinking it was loud, but because of the way she behaved after the matter was discussed and everyone else tried to move on, and she kept shouting about the noise.

Anyway, it left me a little bemused but I loved it. The Shelly Duval song was great and there was a terrific orchestral piece at one point too. I gurgled with pleasure quite a lot.

I mean, what was up with that terrible music, that played whenever they were in the warehouse??

Adam Sandler was wasted on this film. Give me Mr Deeds any day. Seriously.

(note: I watched this on a DVD that kept freezing, and the wide screen took up half the screen, and the stereo sound was hard to follow. *Sigh* I just want to be able to get things on video. I was shouting at the TV by the end of the film, fwding and rwding to try and get the damn thing to play. I don't usually shout at the TV)

oh i love love love this film!

CHAKI YOU HURT ME IN MAH HEART!!!!

I loved this movie so much. It's hella simple, sweet, the music, in it's gratingness, does very well to sorta put you in Barry's mind. Luis Guzman is like ALWAYS the shit in every movie he's ever in, too, even when he's got a really basic supporting role like in this. I think this is PTA's subtlest and easiest-on-the-mind film, I mean, it's like pretty much just a really twee lovely and just-slightly-fucked-up love story that manages to avoid a lot of love story cliches. Ah, I dunno, to each their own...

here's how it read to me: put-upon shlub (by everyone, oh his awful sisters, what cunts grr!) learns to love perfect, motiveless englishwomen and threaten evil sex-industry managers who have DONE HIM WRONG. crank the quirks up to 11 (plungers, how delightful!), add a few wierdo color washes, presto.

Magnolia kind of sucks, too. ooh, so serious, that movie is!! wowee the human condition blah blah fucking blah. tom cruise cries, how AMAZING.

i'm beginning to realise i judge people based on their opinions of this film.

A little more context, please?

I love this film, Sean! xpost

Adam Sandler was wasted on this film. Give me Mr Deeds any day. Seriously.

old ilx, ladies and gents.

david, that's great! yet another confirmation that the technique works.

I just think this is such a great movie, so beautiful and tender, and emotionally startling, and arbitrary and strange. i love so much the way it takes a romantic comedy and reduces the romcom plot elements to their most basic form, to the point of outright absurdity, and the only throughline of strength and clarity and sense in the whole film is the certainty in the end that I LOVE HER. and it revels in the arbitrariness of this, the unjustifiedness of this, the inexplicableness of this - and it resonates in me as a romantic but also as a hopeless pomo pessimist. it's the idea that a love, no matter how weird or accidental or arbitrary that (or any other love) is, can be grabbed with both hands, and you can forget the rest, and just try to feel fully that pleasure, and all colour and sound and light, its warmth hot enough to feel on your face.

it's one of the best voicings i've ever seen of this post-postmodern (neo-modern?) idea, that everything's fuzzy and fake and confusing and distracting and bullshit and yet I LOVE YOU O I LOVE YOU OH I DO.

(AND YET DESPITE THE ABOVE MUMBOJUMBO IT'S SO EFFORTLESS, LIGHT AND SILLY.)

and i don't know what it is that makes it a good barometer for my friends... whether it's the romanticism, or the particular aesthetic of colour/percussion/silence, or the broken comedy of sandler's performance, or the vague tweeness i guess... but i suspect it's the ability to BELIEVE and FEEL while in the midst of the ridiculous; the particular alchemy of sincerity and confusion.

or something!

OTM.

Scenes with his sisters are the best.

i hated this movie

i cant even remember one scene from it but i sure remember the seething anger i felt afterwards

you're heartless!

but really, i think that a big part of getting into this movie is being able to identify with sandler's character. i found parts of the movie absolutely excruciating, but in a good way - everything that was happening to him i felt was happening to me/had happened to me/will happen to me in the future (nb i'm not nearly as much of an introvert as Barry!)

i seem to remember him being kind of a loser that refused to help himself

The bonus feature of them filming the Mattress Man ad over and over is great.

^^^ Pretty sure they only film the ad once, but watching it over and over is basically necessary.

disbelief at the hate for this film! i'd have though it'd be right up ILX's street. i loved it personally.

also this brought a lol for sure =

stoked for his western

― gr8080, Tuesday, 25 December 2007 01:07 (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

how terrible that is going to be

― chaki, Tuesday, 25 December 2007 01:11 (2 years ago) Bookmark

i may need to see this again with a more sympathetic eye

to rationalise my hatred: i saw it and upon the credits rolling, thought it wasn't TOO bad at all. watched some dvd extras. didn't mind it.

but then, it festered. the aftertaste was objectionable as sin. i'd been duped. at least, i felt duped. for a movie solely based around character, i hadn't once been made to believe in a character. all there had been were smoke and mirrors and gimmicks.

but i could be wrong. hmph.

Adam Sandler is pretty believable as an angry awkward nerd, I thought.
Much more so than as a successful bitter comedian in Funny People where he got more believably out-bittered by Eminem.

god, i fucking LOVE this one

karina longworth on pdl: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/film_salon/2009/12/17/longworth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJz84S6Quec

also omg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PwsDb6K6S0#t=05m47s

damnit, that didn't work, #t=05m47s

Comments to that piece are revealing.

i was highly, and pleasantly surprised, by the film's wonderfully brave risk in switching to splashes of abstract color in representing emotion. when i saw this happen in the theater i couldn't help but let slip an audible "oooohhh...".
—jgarth

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I spent the entire movie expecting to find out that...

Emily Watson's character was nothing but a hallucination of Adam Sandler's character. Really. I'm not kidding. Does she even exist outside of Sandler's need for her?
—BollWeeble

otm

So brave! So wonderfully brave, to cop out of representing real human emotion through good acting or good filming! Random colours WHAT DOES IT MEAN it must convey EMOTIONAL TURMOIL/CALM (delete as appropriate)

I hesitate to call it good acting when Sandler is basically modulating his Canteen Boy persona, which is already based on Sandler, but definitely good casting at the least. That's genuine nerd anger there!

So brave! So wonderfully brave, to cop out of representing real human emotion through good acting or good filming! Random colours WHAT DOES IT MEAN it must convey EMOTIONAL TURMOIL/CALM (delete as appropriate)

― Electric Universe (wherever that is) (acoleuthic), Monday, January 4, 2010 3:37 PM (3 hours ago)

maybe theyre just...random colors and you're getting all mad over nothing and should stfu?

i'm responding to someone. read above! also, why random colours then? why anything i guess. freedom of artistic choice

p.s. not actually mad

It is a moving painting -- it's a painting that moves the viewer.

lol

yeah, it's just a real pretty effect. i don't think it's supposed to be profound; as far as meaning goes, it's more or less intentionally trite.

It is a moving painting -- it's a painting that moves the viewer.

this is kind of LOL.

LJ gets mad at non-representational paintings in galleries bcz they're not as good at representing real human emotion as a photograph of a face

not a jackson pollock fan, i gather

who is LJ?

LJ = lou1s j@gger = acoleuthic

I should really just start a "uber crazy stuff my dad says about movies" thread but he told me once that the car crash at the beginning of this movie is prob. based on a time in the late 80s when my uncle and PTA flipped a jeep and almost died while driving down a canyon.

the stories aren't so much "rolling with the stars" as they are "the only reason I got into this business is because my best friend was supplying Robert Towne with really amazing weed," Homer Simpson-type stories.

yeah, it's just a real pretty effect. i don't think it's supposed to be profound; as far as meaning goes, it's more or less intentionally trite.

― figuratively, but in a very real way (amateurist), Tuesday, January 5, 2010 12:05 AM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

what do u mean by that

I spent the entire movie expecting to find out that...

Emily Watson's character was nothing but a hallucination of Adam Sandler's character. Really. I'm not kidding. Does she even exist outside of Sandler's need for her?
—BollWeeble

yeah this is a good way of putting my biggest problem with the movie. not emily watson's fault, but she kind of has no character at all to work with in pdl. there are some intimations of shyness and quirkiness, but mostly she's this kind of blank slate for his projections. i think it just leaves a big void in the movie. i like adam sandler in it and there are specific oddball things about the movie i like a lot (including philip seymour hoffman's bit, especially that he's running his sex-phone scam out of the back of a furniture store), but the whole thing has trouble hanging together.

cmon woman hating brings everything together

'Random colours', no wonder the guy committed suicide.

LJ gets mad at non-representational paintings in galleries bcz they're not as good at representing real human emotion as a photograph of a face

― Audrey Wetherspoons (sic), Tuesday, 5 January 2010 05:09 (5 hours ago) Bookmark

there's a time and a place. the artifice of these 'random colours' wasn't exactly jackson pollock. if i want abstract expression i'd like it integrated, not spliced, into a movie.

like the characters go to a museum and look at abstract paintings?

http://images.moviefill.com/a434839cfc1b430d_b37acd94bfce1220_o.jpg

no, like the movie itself is made with abstract expression. rather than a conventional piece of abstract expression being logjammed in. goddamn it do i have to rant about bunuel here

p.s. sarahel before you make some comment i am not actually gonna do that, chill

mia sara is cuet

he's not guilty of logjamming. he primes you with weird clothing and background colors.
it doesn't do much for me, but if the glove does not fit, you must acquit!

hughes definitely guilty of shoehorning a trip to the museum implausibly as fun outing for a high school student playing hooky, though.

Just saw this. I get the criticisms upthread, but I liked it.

but really, i think that a big part of getting into this movie is being able to identify with sandler's character. i found parts of the movie absolutely excruciating, but in a good way -

otm

Criterion of this comes out next week I think.

SHUT UP! SHUT - THE - FUCK - UP!

great film. enrique otm

the plot/narrative is a dud, but there's still very much to enjoy

why hasn't anyone else as canny as PTA cast Sandler in another dark dramatic role? I know I know, Reign Over Me, total garbage. but he's fantastic in PDL, it's an extraordinary performance.

He's in the Safdie bros new one...

whoa!! Nice

i watched the first 45 minutes of this last night and was surprised by how well it stood up. it was much funnier than i remembered though that might stem from not suffering from my own my crippling self doubt anymore. the sisters are great and he uses Luis Guzman's deadpan facial expressions really well. i was worried the early 00's tweeness would make it unbearable, but it's transcending those tendencies so far

It’s a great film, so dreamy and strange. Must watch again sometime. No idea what PTA was thinking to marry the Popeye soundtrack with a story about coupon collecting for air miles, but it worked. Can’t be bothered scrolling upthread to see if I said this already, but the first kiss where they meet is one of my favourite scenes. Awkward arm stretched out for a handshake, they collide and kiss in silhouette as the world jolts to life around them. I love love love love this film.

I like it too. It tends to get dismissed on the PTA thread, but I always responded to the weirdness, to the showdown between Sandler's rage and PSH's, and to the supporting performances from Emily Watson (something of a lead, I guess), Mary Lynn Rajskub, and Luis Guzman.

I don’t rate it as highly as Bill Nighy, but I think it’s up there with PTA’s best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZAM0IWo3sw