Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Punch-Drunk Love. Roger Ebert draws some really interesting conclusions…
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Punch-Drunk Love. Roger Ebert draws some really interesting conclusions from this film regarding Adam Sandler's entire oeuvre. (Also, I regularly read Ebert's Movie Answer Man column, where he and readers say hilarious and opinionated things.)
I myself enjoyed the film. I got to see it on a Tuesday matinee -- perhaps three people comprised the audience -- and I liked that I didn't know what would happen next, and the strange abstract color animations reminded me of Kieslowski's Blue, only less off-putting. Also, I will probably never see any other Sandler movie, just as I will never see a Jim Carrey film besides The Truman Show.
More coherently, I adored the protagonist, and rooted for him, and completely empathized with him, and the plot and dialogue and cinematography surprised me, and I felt very strange and alive when I exited the theater. I felt variants of this sensation after High Fidelity and Pleasantville, for purposes of comparison.
Immediately after watching it, I wasn't sure whether I had liked it -- that's how much it affected me emotionally!
