Dale Cooper Black

Tarkovsky v. Soderbergh. The remake is probably better than you think (or remember).

This was the best episode in a long time, so thanks for that. I didn't think I'd need to watch this movie again before voting, but this episode has convinced me otherwise. I'll offer a few thoughts on this movie in the meantime, but I'm officially on the fence until the re-watch. First up, full disclosure, I am somebody for whom Barry's loneliness and depression deeply resonate. I had the experience of seeing this movie on the big screen, among a sea of Adam Sandler fans, when it first came out. The scene where Barry breaks down while trying to describe his emotional isolation was especially memorable to me because, while I was connecting with Barry's desperation, nearly the entire audience erupted in laughter when Barry first collapsed into tears. They abruptly stopped when it became clear that they had misread the scene's intention, but it was fascinating to watch a movie palpably subvert an audience's expectations in real time--and deeply ironic to feel so alienated among a crowd of people, given the point of the scene. On the other hand, this movie has always felt, to me, like kind of a sketch, cobbled together from a bunch of good and great ideas that don't necessarily fit together. And I think you could argue that every character in this film is underwritten. (I've always thought Punch-Drunk Love would be a masterpiece of a short film, if certain elements had been pared down or cut out completely.) The air miles loophole is actually based on a real incident, and it's certainly a fascinating story--there are, to this day, people who travel around the world using similar loopholes--but it feels shoehorned into this movie. My understanding is that PTA originally wanted to do a straight-up Adam Sandler comedy (or at least toyed with the idea), and part of me thinks this movie was built on the wreckage of a much different movie, maybe an Adam Sandler vehicle about a little league coach who uses the air miles loophole to fly his ne'er-do-well team to the world championships. (In my version, Chris Sarandon plays the airline executive who tries to thwart them.) But, if true, the story about PTA being artistically incapable of delivering a typical Adam Sandler comedy says a lot, not only about PTA as an artist, but about the artistic process itself. As I get older, I'm getting less and less interested in the "auteur" theory of film direction, but Paul Thomas Anderson's entire career is certainly a point in favor of the theory. As an artist, he is completely in control of his craft; if Punch-Drunk Love is kind of a sketch, it's still a lot more interesting than most other artists' fully-realized works.

pre-Crisis continuity

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Seriously guys, I need to know and I can't find it on google

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another true story

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true story

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Fingers crossed that it's the former

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I think we can all relate

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His Black Panther review is a thing of beauty, tho https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/02/black-panther-overhyped-race-fantasy/