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Dale Cooper Black

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Posts posted by Dale Cooper Black

  10. Posted

    But with the Marvel Studios movies they took characters who were (frankly) not all that popular before they became movies.

     

    It's probably worth noting that this was largely by necessity. Thanks to the truly epic shortsightedness of Marvel publisher Martin Goodman in the 1960s, the company still didn't have the film rights to its most notable characters when Marvel started their great cinematic experiment decades later. With the exception of Captain America (who was indeed a household name prior to the MCU), the company mostly had second- and third-tier characters to work with. (Most of their best characters were completely off-limits, and even the Hulk couldn't star in his own film without making a complicated deal with Universal.)

     

    But, yeah, it's true that the Marvel movies (unlike the comics) aren't 100% dependent on nostalgic 50-year-old boys. The MCU has managed to tap into the youth market in the same way that the Marvel Comics Group did during its heyday.

  11. Posted

    The Marvel cinematic universe has cranked out some very entertaining movies, and the studio deserves a lot of credit for figuring out how to scale Marvel's special brand of familial, secret-clubhouse vibe for a mass audience, but... The Avengers? Canon-worthy? Seriously?

     

    I hear the word "epic" (a quintessential Marvel word if ever there was one) being thrown around a lot regarding these movies, and it makes me chuckle to realize that an entire generation of adults has so completely bought into Stan Lee's hyperbolic horseshit. The infantilization of the general moviegoing audience (which started, arguably, with Star Wars) seems to be more or less complete.

     

    The Marvel movies, at best, comprise a loosely-connected soap opera, not an epic. It will be difficult to take seriously a Canon that includes an "epic" like the Avengers, but not a single film by Kurosawa, Fassbinder, David Lean, Sergio Leone, or DW Griffith.

     

    And anyway, if we do need the MCU to be represented in the Canon, Iron Man is as good a place to start as any.

  21. Posted

    Post re-watch, this is a definite "yes" for me. Another Canonizer (is that a thing?) used the term "tone poem," and that pretty much sums it up. The clunky parts are still there, exactly as I remembered, but the beautiful parts are so absurdly, mysteriously beautiful that the clunky parts don't even matter. After the re-watch, I'm inclined to disagree that this movie would have been better with a different lead actor. It is precisely because of Sandler that this film A) exists and B ) works. For whatever reason, PTA decided to mine Happy Gilmore in search of emotional truths. I wouldn't say he hit paydirt, exactly, but the nuggets he found are certainly enough to sustain this movie.

     

    I mentioned Robert Altman elsewhere in this thread entirely at random, but there are some parallels between Altman and PTA that I only noticed after re-watching Punch Drunk Love (and hearing that song from Popeye again). Both directors specialize in making films that are wildly divergent from each other, and yet each of their films bears the unmistakable signature of its director. To push the comparison a little further, I would say that Punch Drunk Love is a cousin to Altman's The Long Goodbye. I don't think Elliott Gould was cast "against type" in The Long Goodbye so much as his "type" was transplanted into an entirely new context, thus adding depth to both the character and his new surroundings. I think the same is true of Sandler in Punch Drunk Love.

     

    Anyway, thanks to Amy & Emily & everyone on this board for a fascinating conversation.

  23. Posted

    The only way I could allow PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE to be entered into The Canon was if we let in every Paul Thomas Anderson film into The Canon.

     

    Maybe it's time to start putting a director's entire oeuvre up to a "yea or nay" vote. (Some of the homework assignments would be pretty intense, though--imagine watching every Robert Altman movie in a single week.)

    • Like 3

  25. Posted

    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.

    • Like 2
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