Paul Thomas Anderson: C or D?

amen, brotha! It sickens me, as a film geek, to see the magazines and critics and such hailing some guy with 2 credits under his belt as the "next Kubrick, next Scorsese"... hell, the "next Tarantino, even". Perhaps the long-range effects will be akin to strangling an artist's precious room for growth, for change, for risk-taking, for DARING to make a film that doesn't have the same "razzle-dazzle" as his/her "last one". It's a cliche, but it's true: Go back and look at the very first films of many old-time directors: See how many of THOSE feature glimpses of the directorial style/genius those people would come to be known for. Yet, on the basis of today's critics/hipsters/audiences, Hitchcock would be a horrible failure -- after all, he didn't really hit a stylistic "stride" until after a decade or so into his career.

the context in which directors like walsh, ford, hitchcock, etc. honed their skills doesn't exist any more. hollywood simply doesn't make as many films anymore, so there's less chance for directors to apprentice on low-risk pictures. also because of the whole culture of film schools and film buffs, there are 1000x more prospective directors, all of whom feel like they need to make a name for themself. So there's a repertory of "impressive" effects that they employ to do so. PTA has mastered these effects with admirable thoroughness and has even gone beyond them. But i still think he fits into that watch-what-I-can-do culture.

if the opporunity for apprenticeship exists it's in television. but directors who move from television are often ridiculed.

He's definitely indulgent (someone needs to tell him that Philip Baker Hall isn't as great an actor as PTA seems to think), and it's unfortunate that he's determined to put some Mamet in with his Altman. But I'm glad to see someone is doing something with the Altman-esque form, ESPECIALLY if he uses actors like Phil Hoffman and John C. Reilly.

yeah it was a melodrama but it was so honest in its misery and meloncholy, and so difficult to watch it, the frogs seemed to be nessecary to alleviate the tension.

amateurist=the film Geir? ;)

strangely, the first thing that comes to mind is the laughable scene in "Dressed to Kill" where the black thugs at the train station exist solely to menace Nancy Allen and chase after her purty lil' white booty... i.e. their blackness is used as shorthand for "menacing strangers"... and this from a guy who howls at reruns of "All in the Family", okay!

god that is so ILM

Does it relate to Vineland at all?

"loosely inspired by" apparently

That looks quite a lot like Vineland, I think?

hearing that they shot some up in Humboldt County?

loving the mojave shots in the trailer.

ok this looks v much like it is my shit :D

i think i can set aside my deep dislike of leonardo dicarprio for this one. still, i wish i could understand why he needs to be in every movie

it's pretty simple. when he's in a movie, it makes more money. So if PTA wants a bigger budget, casting Leo helps him get it.

also interesting to note that Leo was going to be Dirk Diggler at one point, but dropped out to do Titanic.

At least he's in schlubby fuck-up Rick Dalton mode, that's the only acceptable Leo mode.

i don't know many normal people, or many people at all lol, but everyone i know dislikes leo. who are all these people who seem to like him? titanic nostalgia people?

maybe it's an overseas thing.

n.b. i'm not looking this up myself on the internet

Got more “actually acting” vibes from Leo than usual. I don’t like him but rather Leo than Joaquim any day.

Scrunchy Face is effective when he plays guys haunted by the loss of youth, like in Once Upon a Time....

I don't know if anyone past a certain age in 2025 is a fan of actors, period. My students don't know the names of anybody and have said they rarely watch a movie "because" of an actor (Chalamet has become an exception).

why bother with movies at all when they have one minute soap operas on the phone

Perhaps the closest thing to vintage brand stardom is the cults surrounding Zendaya, K-Stew, and Aubrey Plaza.

find it hard to dislike leo these days. he’s been good in a lot of his roles recently and seems like a decent guy

Aubrey Plaza has a cult?

seems like a decent guy

just don't let him around your daughter, provided she's under 25

Aubrey Plaza has a cult?

― Jordan s/t (Jordan), Friday, March 28, 2025 5:46 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes

I think the draw of Leo has been the fact that he’s generally in pretty cool movies, and seems to pick his projects with great care. I was surprised to see he’s only been in five films since The Wolf of Wall Street — The Revenant, OUATIH, Don’t Look Up, Killers of the Flower Moon, and now this one.

I saw a 30 second tv ad already, this thing’s got a marketing budget

I’m well up for this. Agree it looks like a much more faithful adaptation than I’d been expecting given the “loosely inspired” talk, the big change if the trailer is anything to go by is that it is much more centred on the father character — the fakeout of the novel is that it largely ditches Zoyd after a couple of chapters and focuses on Prairie (and Sasha and Frenesi) I’m sort of hoping the trailer is similarly misleading

It’s interesting that it’s been updated to modern day since PTA is so known for period settings and Vineland is so much a novel of the 80s (explicitly in how it deals with Reagan and yuppies and ex radicals Selling Out but also in the details of its popcult concerns, mainly a preoccupation with all things ninja), however I read it for the first time a few weeks ago & it was certainly still chiming amid… all this

Looks like the army of rollerblading mall shoplifters make an appearance, I’m happy

New Thread: "It's Not Not Vineland...": One Battle After Another (PTA, Pynchon, DiCaprio etc.)

Rep screening of There Will Be Blood last night. First time I saw it, when it came out, I remember how exasperated I was feeling with those first 15 minutes; ~ 20 years and five or six viewings later, I think it's a very dark and fascinating film. In conjuction with the soundtrack, feels like a horror film at times.

Noticed something that, even though a meaningless coincidence, still got me wondering if there was something there. TWBB is always dated as 2007, even though both IMDB and Wikipedia list its first screening as January 2008; presumably it played festivals before that. Mad Men also launched in 2007, during the summer. Both have a prominent character--Don Draper, of course; in TWBB, the guy who pretends to be Plainview's brother--who steals the identity of a man they have a circumstantial relationship with and who dies.

Daniel Day-Lewis in his baptism scene and in the final scene is a rare example of over-the-top acting that works for me--amazing.

TWBB is always dated as 2007, even though both IMDB and Wikipedia list its first screening as January 2008; presumably it played festivals before that.

it didn't open wide until Jan 2008, but it opened in NY and LA in Dec 2007, which made it eligible for that year's Oscars.

I wonder why those two sites go with the opening-wide date; I don't see why those earlier screenings wouldn't count. I can maybe see putting festival screening to the side, but those December screenings aimed at awards (Toronto, too, I'm guessing--if so, I was no doubt there) are public screenings like any other.

I am not sure where you are seeing that on Wikipedia and IMDB.

Wiki:

"There Will Be Blood premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin on September 29, 2007: it was first theatrically released in New York City and Los Angeles on December 26 and in selected international markets on January 25, 2008."

IMDB:

"Release date
United States
September 27, 2007(Fantastic Fest)
United States
December 10, 2007(New York City, New York, premiere)
United States
December 26, 2007(limited)
United States
January 2008(Palm Springs International Film Festival)
Canada
January 4, 2008(Toronto)
United States
January 25, 2008
..."

I just looked at this on IMDB--Release date January 25, 2008 (United States)--without clicking through for all that additional info. And I looked at this on the Google sidebar--Release date: January 11, 2008 (Canada)--and probably got that mixed up with Wikipedia. I'm old!

Wasn't PTA rumored (reported?) to have done a polish on "Killers of the Flower Moon"? Because I just saw a story in passing that he polished up Scorsese's next one, too.

Yes, he somewhat confirmed this. I'm not sure if he actually rewrote the script, but Scorsese asked him to take a look at it, and at minimum, he gave suggestions. What they were and whether he executed them himself (or wrote any dialogue), no one has said for sure.

I wonder what else he has had a hand in? This, Ridley's Napoleon, Killers ... was there a rumor he had something to do with Judd Apatow's/Adam Sandler's "Funny People"?

Would like to see a PTA Muppet movie

Despite my reservations with maybe half of his films, he's always been a great writer when it came to dialogue, maybe even the best. (I would take his dialogue over Quentin Tarantino or even David Mamet's any day). I remember seeing Boogie Nights for the first time at home with some friends, and maybe 30 minutes into it, someone said "I'm really digging the way this guy writes his movie" and we all agreed.

In his 2019 autobiography Baby Don't Hurt Me, Chris Kattan claimed that Paul Thomas Anderson (writer-director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia) and Richard LaGravenese (screenwriter of The Fisher King) each assisted with rewriting the script for Corky Romano, for which they received no official credit.

A too-many-cooks situation if ever there was one. (Actual amount of cooks needed: zero.)

negative c

cooks

FWIW, Tarantino did a polish/rewrite for his friend Julia Sweeney and It's Pat.

since when is tarantino Polish jk sorry i’ll go

Easy to spot Tarantino’s uncredited scenes in The Rock (Beatles explaining) and Crimson Tide (pop culture levity, if I remember right).

Would be funny if all they did was grammar, spellcheck and formatting. Like "oh, you were expecting me to REWRITE this? Hahah, no."

Always thought it was weird of Pat to just start tossing around the n-word like that.

best/weirdest ghostwriter is still Tom Stoppard on Revenge of the Sith

The Rock had Clement and Le Frenais doing a dialogue touch-up for Connery that supposedly resulted in a substantial rewrite too…

wonder which one of them came up with, "losers always whine about doing their best, winners go home and fuck the prom queen"

M. Night Shyamalan on Stuart Little

xp now imagining a little mouse saying that

PTA coaches little league!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm3H6fRRrLM