30 Day Film Challenge: Day 20 - Your Favorite Romantic Film

Day 20 - Your Favorite Romantic Film

Punch-Drunk Love (2002, Anderson)

Here’s a nice romance for you and your loved one to watch on a Friday night. Or not. It basically amounts to an Adam Sandler movie if his childish characters lived in the real world instead of his normal, highly stylized habitat. That’s not to say the movie isn’t stylish, of course. This is a PTA film (yes, the third on this list) and his eye for cinematic flair is not lost on this smaller film. Along with Jon Brion’s nearly overbearing score, every frame is composed to make you feel along with Sandler. He does his long takes again (this time we see Sandler talking on a phone-sex line for several uninterrupted minutes) and his camera is never quite settled. But this is a romance! Emily Watson plays the girl that gives Sandler a reason to live when all else seems to have failed him. “I have a love in my life,” he says to his nemesis (played expertly by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in that slimy way he does), “it makes me strong than anything you can imagine.” Here’s a movie where going to Hawaii in pursuit of a girl works out. How is that not romantic?

Notes:

• This is basically a four person movie. Joining Sandler, Watson, and Hoffman is PTA favorite Louis Guzmán. This guy is always a bunch of fun. He brings the lightness that is sometimes lacking in the rest of the characters.
• This film is proof that Sandler can really act. PTA likes doing that with his actors (Tom Cruise in Magnolia, Mark Whalberg in Boogie Nights).
• Trailer! 

30 Day Film Challenge: Day 17 - Your Favorite Drama Film

Day 17 - Your Favorite Drama Film

Magnolia (1999, Anderson)

This movie often filp flops with There Will Be Blood as my favorite movie of all time. Where TWBB is a focused study of a man grabbing at whatever he can to get rich, Magnolia pulls back and looks at a dozen or so LA denizens and how their lives weave in and out of each other’s. It’s not the first movie to do such a thing and it owes a lot of debt to Robert Altman’s Short Cuts in both its form and function. But there’s a kind of craziness that underlies everything. This being PTA’s third film he is mostly allowed to go all out on the filmmaking front. There’s a couple of multi-minute-long shots, the characters take a break in the middle of the film to have a cosmic sing-along, and then there’s the ending. It’s a pretty audacious piece of work but what makes it my favorite drama film is the characters. Like I said earlier there are about a dozen characters and all of the directorial trickery works to make you care about each and every one of them. From Tom Cruise’s woman-hating public speaker to John C. Reilly’s well meaning police officer to Melora Walters’ junkie caught between love and addiction, each of the characters has a full life which we glimpse for only a day. It is one of the best combinations of script, direction, and acting I have ever seen and it never fails to get my tear ducts working. Sometimes it’s Cruise’s confession at his dying father’s bedside or the heartbreaking date between Reilly and Walters that ends with this line, “Now that I've met you, would you object to never seeing me again?” or the final, redemptive scene of the film; they knit together to create a dazzling and desperately human work of art.

Notes:

• I have, for some reason, only seen this film twice. I feel like I should go out and buy it right now. I’ve talked myself into it.
• As hard as it was for me to not turn this into a Borzage-fest, it will be just as hard to keep all of PTA’s films off the list. There may or may not be another one coming up soon.
• There were roughly a billion other films I could have chosen for this spot including films like The Assassination of  Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and most of Borzage’s movies and The Searchers and How Green Was My Valley and so on and so forth.
• LOOK AT THE AWESOME!