30 Day Film Challenge - Day 20 - Your Favorite Romantic Film Punch-Drunk Love This was a fun challenge. It would be easy to write this off as the ‘rom-com’ category or a sappy movie category, but there is such a wealth of films to explore here that I managed to come away with plenty of options, given the decades of options and varying types of films involving romance in some sense. Really though, I lean towards the older, obscure, and more non-traditional films, when it comes to showing me a story about onscreen romance, which I am happy to get emotionally invested in. Paul Thomas Anderson’s version of a romantic comedy is exactly the kind of film I respond to. Stepping away from impossibly good-looking people that cannot seem to find love with the other impossibly good-looking people they interact with, this is a weird movie about weird people with issues. Really, it is not much different than Sandler’s 90s ‘Adam Sandler-type’ films. He plays a man with anger issues and a wacky job, but through the lens of PTA, we see true pathos in him. Plagued by abusive sisters, this is a man with troubles interacting in life, but thanks to the persistence of Emily Watson’s character, he finds motivation to do something and be with someone. The film is utterly sweet and honest, once you look past its oddities; features fantastic performances from not just Sandler and Watson, but Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a glorified cameo and Luis Guzman as a guy who just gets the kind of tone that PTA wants in his films. Jon Brion’s score is also brilliant, adding to the fantastical sense of place this film tries to establish, despite being mostly set in LA. To top it all off, PTA also may have my favorite film that features heavy use of lens flare.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 16:20:50 +0000
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