Paul Thomas Anderson: C or D?

amen, brotha! It sickens me, as a film geek, to see the magazines and critics and such hailing some guy with 2 credits under his belt as the "next Kubrick, next Scorsese"... hell, the "next Tarantino, even". Perhaps the long-range effects will be akin to strangling an artist's precious room for growth, for change, for risk-taking, for DARING to make a film that doesn't have the same "razzle-dazzle" as his/her "last one". It's a cliche, but it's true: Go back and look at the very first films of many old-time directors: See how many of THOSE feature glimpses of the directorial style/genius those people would come to be known for. Yet, on the basis of today's critics/hipsters/audiences, Hitchcock would be a horrible failure -- after all, he didn't really hit a stylistic "stride" until after a decade or so into his career.

the context in which directors like walsh, ford, hitchcock, etc. honed their skills doesn't exist any more. hollywood simply doesn't make as many films anymore, so there's less chance for directors to apprentice on low-risk pictures. also because of the whole culture of film schools and film buffs, there are 1000x more prospective directors, all of whom feel like they need to make a name for themself. So there's a repertory of "impressive" effects that they employ to do so. PTA has mastered these effects with admirable thoroughness and has even gone beyond them. But i still think he fits into that watch-what-I-can-do culture.

if the opporunity for apprenticeship exists it's in television. but directors who move from television are often ridiculed.

He's definitely indulgent (someone needs to tell him that Philip Baker Hall isn't as great an actor as PTA seems to think), and it's unfortunate that he's determined to put some Mamet in with his Altman. But I'm glad to see someone is doing something with the Altman-esque form, ESPECIALLY if he uses actors like Phil Hoffman and John C. Reilly.

yeah it was a melodrama but it was so honest in its misery and meloncholy, and so difficult to watch it, the frogs seemed to be nessecary to alleviate the tension.

amateurist=the film Geir? ;)

strangely, the first thing that comes to mind is the laughable scene in "Dressed to Kill" where the black thugs at the train station exist solely to menace Nancy Allen and chase after her purty lil' white booty... i.e. their blackness is used as shorthand for "menacing strangers"... and this from a guy who howls at reruns of "All in the Family", okay!

god that is so ILM

kind of loved the book tbh

it's fun

Josh Brolin looks like exceedingly good value in this. My enthusiasm dissipated when I saw Owen Wilson though.

his skin doesn't look good in that photo up above, but his hair looks good

i feel like that NYT photo was just an exceedingly bad picture following quite closely on from the death of his pal.

he should shave that beard thing though.

PTA used to be pretty cute

can't fathom hatin on the Butterscotch Stallion

xp

i love that this is where this thread is at. he has made some pretty good movies but he mainly exists in my head as just such a handsome guy. the nyt picture's taken under that tunnel on central park west, somewhere in the sixties, isn't it? all blustery. i am p sure there will be a nyff premiere pic at which he looks his usual dapper salt & pepper ruggedly urbane self & we will all be able to stand down & not worry so much. even if we are in an autumn of paul thomas anderson's handsomeness, it is still a while until wintertime.

My enthusiasm dissipated when I saw Owen Wilson though.

Right? I had the same reaction.

Oh, wow, this looks grea...oh, uh huh.

http://41.media.tumblr.com/2da8d04916414e3fed0abb86148845a6/tumblr_mjplw2womU1s2u10mo1_400.png

you get what you give

shave + bucket hat = no longer looks 60

(or is that from 1998?)

That's got to be old, when he was dating Fiona.

Yeah, uh, Fiona herself looks like she's been suffering through some tough times, if the recent pictures I've seen of her are anything to go by.

man, that photo. he's wearing sandals on the red carpet! should be a crime IMO.

http://www.vulture.com/2015/07/paul-thomas-anderson-will-write-rdjs-pinocchio.html

was hoping that would be the other RDJ

New documentary out today, who knew?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLhSyy6UM94

yeah they've been emailing me about it and yet i have no desire to bother

A local rep started a PTA series tonight: Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood.

First time I've seen Hard Eight in 15 years--I watched it at home not too long after Boogie Nights. Didn't like it at all at the time; not surprisingly, I wanted to see The Father of Boogie Nights. Tonight's print, as the series host pointed out, looked like it had never been screened. (He also said you can't get it on DVD at the moment.)

I liked it more tonight than I did then, but I still see Boogie Nights as a quantum leap forward. (I'll put that to the test next week, but I have no reason to believe I'll change that viewpoint.) Hard Eight was more interesting to me than compelling. Thought it built pretty well for the first half, then you have that endless scene in the hotel room where things go bad. It regained its footing after that, and offered some credible backstory to Philip Baker Hall's character (which I'd completely forgotten, so I was again "I don't get this guy at all"). I think there's one fantastic performance--not Hall, and not Philip Seymour Hoffman (he's good, but he's there and gone in the blink of an eye), but Sam Jackson. It's nestled in there between Jungle Fever/Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown--he was so unbelievably good during that run. As tedious as I found the hotel room scene between Hall, Baker, and Reilly, I thought the long scene where Jackson set Baker straight balanced the scale. (And Baker sitting waiting in the chair could very well have been on Tarantino's mind when he made Jackie Brown.)

Besides the cast (extending to Robert Ridgely and Melora Walters), there are a couple of unmistakable links to Boogie Nights. The main theme--this weirdly still bit where it sounds like a bell is being rung--is used again in Boogie Nights when Wahlberg hooks up with that guy in the parking lot. And when Jackson harangues Hall about the old-time gangsters, he mentions Floyd Gondolli; that's Hall's character in Boogie Nights (who may or may not be the same Gondolli).

If you think Hard Eight is better than Boogie Nights, I'm guessing you're someone who's content with the direction Anderson started to take with There Will Be Blood. I thought of Truffaut's famous quote on the way home tonight, about all great movies either being about the joy or the agony of making cinema. (Flowery, I know, but memorable.) Boogie Nights is the one film of PTA's that is completely--well, give or take a couple of scenes during the Hello-'80s meltdown--about the joy. And it's still far and away my favourite. (Before the film, they had a trailer for the series cut from all four films, scored to Three Dog Night's "One." The trailer got an ovation and deserved to.)

You can't get it cheap, but you can get it:

http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Eight-Special-Samuel-Jackson/dp/B00000K3D3/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1513402441&sr=8-2&keywords=hard+eight

Supposedly Criterion is working on an edition of Hard Eight/Sydney.

As tedious as I found the hotel room scene between Hall, Baker, and Reilly

Better than if I'd written "between Philip, Baker, and Hall," but what I meant was Hall, Paltrow, and Reilly.

If you think Hard Eight is better than Boogie Nights, I'm guessing you're someone who's content with the direction Anderson started to take with There Will Be Blood.

How so? I don't much like There Will Be Blood but like Hard Eight. The Master and Inherent Vice are his best.

I regard Hard Eight as a one-off chamber piece, an exercise by a young filmmaker testing his limits.

What I meant was that Hard Eight is dark and brooding and slow, that Boogie Nights is anything but (except for those couple of scenes from the 1980 section), and that that's where his films have resided since There Will Be Blood at least. (Inherent Vice was probably an attempt to loosen up some again--I think it's the least interesting film he's ever done.) If you take his career from start to finish, Boogie Nights is the anomaly. And, for me, the best.

70mm screenings of PT's PT

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/12/phantom-thread-70mm-screenings-1201905384/

You can't get it cheap, but you can get it:

You could have bought that film print yourself, too.

Before the Boogie Nights screening tonight--a 35mm print that Warners supposedly gave them a hard time over, suggesting they play a Blue-Ray instead--Brendan, host of the series, brought a friend with guitar up and they played "Feel My Heat." Pretty funny.

Notwithstanding that I have watched it too many times (not for quite a while, though), the film still amazes me. Even the dark, slow section, where I can understand the argument that it seems layered on--things fall apart now, because they have to fall apart--the way PTA cuts between Wahlberg in the parking lot and Reynolds/Graham in the limo, and then links both of those scenes to Cheadle in the donut store, all of that is masterful (punctuated by immediately going into the spectacular Alfred Molina scene). And I love everything after that: Wahlberg's apology, and the beautiful--except for the Colonel--grace note of the last five minutes. Really, the '80s third of the film is no less great, I'd say, than what comes before it.

Looks like the new one doesn't have a credited cinematographer, yet again--I wonder what happened between him and Elswit.

He turns 71 in a few days, maybe he wants to just chill idk

If Anderson and his crew enjoyed the collaborative experience on Phantom Thread, makes sense to carry on and develop that. Being 90% shot in the same environment was probably a good training-wheels experience for lighting?

...though I just went to check my memory on that and found that Elswit said (on a Mission Impossible podcast) that reuniting for Inherent Vice didn't feel so good:

“God, I don’t know what it is anymore. It’s like a bad married couple. Unpleasant.”

Asked whether he could see them collaborating again, Elswit didn’t sound optimistic. “I don’t know. Probably not. You know, it depends on how he feels. I would do it again…I didn’t enjoy myself on ‘Inherent Vice’…It was a combination of me and Paul just not getting along, and I can be as immature as him.”

And when he was asked about Thread for Adam Nayman's PTA book:

“Well, I know how he did it, because it’s the same people I work with, it’s the same crew. He just threw a lot of smoke in the room. Which he never would let me do, he never let me smoke a set. Not that I wanted to — I mean, he wanted it for a scene. But I think he shot tests and he knew enough that he didn’t know enough. But with the modern stocks you can do minimal low lighting and you can lower the contrast and shoot all the detail you want, just by adding smoke. I can’t imagine I would have done it that way and I probably could have talked him out of it if he wanted to.”

“But yeah it was a period film, it was okay and had really good locations. I enjoyed the film. I just…if I’d shot that movie I would not be happy with it ending up looking like it looked, that’s all. But I liked the movie. I actually like it better than anything else I’ve done or he’s done with me or without me. I like it more than “The Master” and I like it more than “Inherent Vice.”

He turns 71 in a few days

Really? Wow--had no idea. I would never have guessed that Boogie Nights was made by someone almost 50; always thought PTA was around 30 at the time.

PTA is 50 now, he's referring to Elswit.

I'm laughing at myself...that makes sense.

Lol, I pointed that because I also misread it at first but realized that couldn't possibly be right.

Just watched Phantom Thread the other day and wow what a film... why do I have such a love/hate relationship with PTA? Couldn't stand Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, and Inherent Vice but I adored Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood and now Phantom Thread. What a weirdo.

https://x.com/JarmuschMood/status/1752353224860827696?s=20

yeah, they're shooting that up in Humboldt County. A bunch of PA's went into a thrift store multiple times to buy clothes for the extras, they're stoked

Vineland? Holy Shit! Is that confirmed?

More details... they're being cagey about what they're filming

https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/leonardo-dicaprio-eureka-arcata-movie-filming-bc-18636090.php

DiCaprio in a bathrobe and scenes of paramilitary forces would definitely fit.

the thing i saw said the movie had a "contemporary" setting

Disappointed Leo isn't wearing the party dress and carrying the ladies' chainsaw.

More cast announced: Alana Haim, Teyana Taylor, Wood Harris, Shayna McHayle (aka Junglepussy)

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/paul-thomas-anderson-alana-haim-teyana-taylor-1235813631/

Chase Infiniti does already feel like a Pynchon name tbh

PTA was shooting in downtown Sacramento on Saturday :D

Sacramento Bee included this v bitchy aside in the report “The film is reportedly based on the Thomas Pynchon novel "Vineland." In a biting Associated Press review that ran in The Sacramento Bee on March 4, 1990, Mario Szichman called the novel "a sea of boredom, sailed by hardly recognizable characters." “

Noted. Thx for that
lmao “biting”

I know you'll recognize this: "It's a honor to leave the Chronicle and go work for the Sacramento Bee. Dare to dream, right, Robert?"

looool yes I loved that line lmao

Lol