Review of Punch Drunk Love

Introduction

Punch Drunk Love is the sixth outing on the big screen for writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson, who I shall refer to as PTA for the rest of this review. This is PTA`s first film since 1999`s critically acclaimed (if slightly flawed) Magnolia, and it teams him up with Adam Sandler of all people. I shall confess straight away that I`m not a member of the Adam Sandler fan club, although I quite liked his "Operaman" on the Concert For New York City DVD.

The film was apparently inspired by a story about an engineering student who stumbled upon a lucrative Air Miles type promotion. By purchasing 12,000 puddings for $3,000, he accumulated 1.25 million Air Miles. Similar things have occurred in the UK with supermarket reward promotions, but not quite on that scale! I think that the nearest that we`ve had is someone buying shed loads of bananas at Tescos a few years back.

So what do you get if you cross the writer and director of Magnolia and Boogie Nights with the writer and producer of The Waterboy and Big Daddy? Let`s find out...

Video

A 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer greets us on this disc, and it`s full of detail, very sharp and looks clean and crisp. I couldn`t spot any major print damage, which is what you would expect from such a recent film. Light levels vary dramatically, but this is all intentional on the director`s part, and scenes travel from darkness into extremely stark bright white light. Blacks are very black indeed, and all of the colours look just right, apart from when the cinematographer Robert Elswit has deliberately messed with them (and that happens quite a bit).

The visuals feature a lot of artwork from Jeremy Blake.

Audio

A DD5.1 soundtrack is here to please your ears. A dts version exists on the region 1 SuperBit release, but we don`t get that pleasure. What we do get is certainly a top notch track though. Despite the fact that this isn`t some booming and banging blockbuster, there`s plenty going on. There`s action all around the sound stage and you might be looking over your shoulder to see where the noise came from once or twice!

PTA has teamed up with composer Jon Brion again for the soundtrack, and it`s a very weird and wacky one, utilising a lot of instruments that you don`t normally hear in film soundtracks. It even sounds out of tune at times, but it`s all intentional and just adds to the quirky atmostphere of the film.

Features

A 2 disc set, and all the extras are on disc 2.

First up a sort of featurette, called Blossoms and Blood - this just features clips of the film and various imagery set to bits of Jon Brion`s soundtrack. That`s all there is to it, honest.

Then we have some scopitones (a kind of precursor to music videos), which showcase Jeremy Blake`s artwork. They are very short. There`s also some more artwork that you can look through.

We also get some deleted scenes (which don`t add much to the film), trailers and the full commercial for Mattress Man.

All in all, not a lot of content for an extras disc.

Conclusion

I still haven`t worked out what I saw when I sat down to watch Punch Drunk Love. I know it was a PTA film, I know Adam Sandler was in it, and I was also very impressed by Emily Watson, who was excellent. But that`s kind of where my definite conclusions dry up.

It seems that PTA decided to see just how weird and wonderful he could go while having Adam Sandler in front of his camera. This is not an Adam Sandler film, but Sandler plays what seems like a typical Sandler character. Fans of typical Sandler films might not enjoy this one so much though. It`s weird, out there and wacky. But it is original. And if someone tells you it`s a romantic comedy then ignore them.. It`s not. There`s some romance and some comedy, but this is no formulaic clap trap.

So there we go. A film which I don`t know if I really liked or not, see if you can draw a conclusion from that. As for the DVDs, the quality of everything on disc 1 is fine, but disc 2 is incredibly empty and hollow, with only about half an hour of content. It would have been nice to see a documentary like the excellent one on the Magnolia 2 disc set.

Even if you are a PTA fan and enjoyed Magnolia, I`d recommend renting this one first.

Although I haven`t made up my mind about liking the film or not, I have to give it a score, so I`m going for 7.