Phillip Seymour Hoffman b. 1967- d. today

Learning of his death today I instantly remembered meeting Phillip Seymour Hoffman once, in 1997 or so at the wrap party for Todd Solonz's Happiness (1998), which I had completely forgotten, being rather drunk at the time, and shortly to have my very first celebrity intervention. My crew of willowy lounge hipsters were at a bar in the East Village, Black Star, drinking to our waning health as usual and straining to seem arch and debonair and that the DJ's music wasn't hurting our hangovers from the previous evening, when the wrap party for the Happiness cast materialized like a very odd circus, a stranger lot you couldn't imagine in that hipster bar. The super skinny bespectacled dweeb Solondz, a gigantic Mama Cass of a lady (Camryn Manheim) each making the other more freakish by comparison and dowdy young turk Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whom when we learned was an up and coming movie star left us incredulous. This guy? What next? Our circles were the only ones there so we gradually spilled into each other, my friends grilling them on their weird movie, and them all awkward except Hoffman who easily blended into either camp and patiently explained the movie to our mild fascination. He was a regular guy, a shaggy portly ginger with no need to flaunt an ego. That was his part of his strange power - no one expected what he could deliver. 

I mention this because the strangeness of it all clearly made an impression, this guy seemed more like a sound tech than an actor, like a technician or scholar of the craft rather than a star, so it was no surprise to see him holding a boom in Boogie Nights. I didn't like his needy character in that film, he reminded me of a joneser that used to hang on me the way he was hanging on Dirk Diggler, and didn't trust him onscreen until 1999's Talented Mr. Ripley when he teases Ripley on the boat, "How's the peepin', Tommy? How's the peepin'?" Finally I got it. He stole the shit out of that movie, not easy when Jude Law was already stealing it from Matt Damon before he even showed up. When I revisited Boogie Nights after that I no longer felt threatened as I had originally, feeling like he was trying to drag the hot arc of the film into Carson McCullers territory, compelling us to behold his naked redhead pale shoulders in the same frame as hunky Wahlberg, dewy-eyed Moore and voluptuous Heather Graham. Slowly, surely, he was transcending his awkward endomorphic persona to become a titan of the big screen, through sheer chops and balls. His hospice nurse in Magnolia (1999), eyes foggy with opiate nurturing, lighting Robards' invisible cigarette and helping that great actor confront his mortality (Robards died shortly after filming) was like a grounding slump-postured angel of compassion in the spastic orbit of a beautiful people dysfunctional family. You couldn't help but be awed.

I still haven't seen Capote, but he was the best thing by a landslide (as rock critic Lester Bangs) in Almost Famous, this time trying to drag that crappy under-drug-fueled film into something like real rock rather than letting it completely succumb to Crowe's clueless straight-edge pop dorkiness-- so in the opposite direction in which I used to feel he was dragging movies. And if not for his few outbursts like "Pig FUCK!" and a few great sessions in the dark with the hooch in The Master, god that film would have been a bore. In short, he was such a force that he could be counted on to steady nearly every roiling vessel of a film, steering shallowness towards the rocks of depth, and from maelstrom depth towards the rough but ready straits of genuine subversion energy. As his film career took off it became kind of off-putting to see him doing so well, knowing he was coming up in a film you were about to see was intimidating, scary, but ultimately gratifying, like getting Tolstoy wrapped up in your McDonalds.

Like so many OD-ed icons, one wonders if the rehab had lowered his tolerance to the dose he was used to, I presume, that killed him. Heroin is deadly that way I hear. I've never tried it, but I'm glad now I haven't. The year of that wrap party was the year I was struggling with the booze, it was killing me even as I was proclaiming I didn't have an addictive personality, and believing it as we put out feelers for heroin with boozed-up curiosity. That's the trouble with being artistic and into drugs, you can usually justify your usage by turning out art while high because it seems like a masterpiece, and it's fun. He was my age, 46, the same age Kurt Cobain: born 1967, the year of the Summer of Love. We'd been watching the world's beauty dwindle ever since. No wonder we're so discontent that we need to either be high or holding tight to our newly won sobriety like a life raft; Black Star has been closed now for 10 years at least, and whatever bar opened in its space also long closed, I'm sure, to be replace probably by a Chase branch. New York City may yet return to a place where art can thrive, and young people can live without having to retire to Bushwick once the bars close, but it will have to do it without this sweet Falstaff-Harry hybrid prince of actors, this exhibit A of the power of spirit and devotion to resonant craft to always trump size, shape, and pigmentation. Cinema didn't even know it needed him, but once it got a taste it needed more and more, and now it will need its own rehab counseling to come to terms with today's great loss. It won't get it.

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"In the words of my father... Oxnard." - Ghoulardi

For the average auteurist critic, deconstructing an opaque work like Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER (2012) tends to involve making connections to the topographical 'conscious' of the artists' life, while the geological 'unconscious' -- the subtextual kernel to which the artist himself is usually blind by definition -- tends to be ignored. And yet it's this exact lower strata where underpinnings are made clear, a strata linked inextricably not to the artist but to his parents. In other words, to understand THE MASTER don't look at at Paul Thomas Anderson, look at his father, Ghoulardi.

I just re-watched THE MASTER (2012) today, and while the first time it mainly left me irritable (too stuffy in the theater), this time, on the safety of my own couch, paying only marginal attention, I thought of my own late father, Jim Kuersten, and of Paul Thomas Anderson's late father, Ernie Anderson, aka Ghoulardi, a Cleveland horror movie host of some legendary renown from the mid-60s. I knew the name, but figured he was just a Vaudeville schtick-jiving Mockula ala mein own Dr. Shock (with daughter Bubbles, below) on Channel 17, my favorite as a child in Wilmington, Philadelphia.

 

But as I researched Ghoulardi on Wiki, my eyes started widening and the pieces of the MASTER plan puzzle popped into place. He was beyond any mere horror-host pigeonholing, apparently. Ghoulardi was a maniacal anarchist, blowing up models and toys the kids sent in, live on air. He used a lot of free-associative beatnik slang of his own invention, like 'stay sick!'  He played his own surf rock intros (he was a direct inspiration for the look and sound of The Cramps), and ranted against suburban towns like Parma (Par-ma) with its polka music fetish. He had a pet raven named Oxnard. He smoked on air. He aroused the ire of the higher-ups. It was all broadcast live, and he said whatever the hell popped into his head. Not a lot of it survives. But the T-shirts live on. 

Watching THE MASTER this second time I could see some of Ghoulardi in the Satanic twists of Freddie Quell's forehead and in the cult-building improv 'making it up as he goes along' prowess of Lancaster Dodd. Anderson's cult might have been of young, crazy Cleveland mid-60s proto-punks rather than serious-minded adult proto-Scientologists, but it was a cult nonetheless. As Cleveland.com remembers: "Ghoulardi came before all the things we identify with the 1960s: the Kennedy assassination, the Beatles, Vietnam, civil unrest... Ghoulardi was the last Beatnik from the '50s and had this wisecracking irreverent attitude..." Check out this, one of the few surviving clips of the great Ghoulardi in action:



Listen to that deep, resonant Charles Middleton-ish voice! Do you hear a touch of Lancaster Dodd's deep croak? Most interesting is the knowledge that he had trouble memorizing his lines so just made it all up as he went, live on air, which is how Dodd's son describes his dad's methodology. And Ghoulardi was a chronic challenger to authority, standing up to the big wigs at his local TV station, and regularly doing crazy things like driving a motorcycle through the offices.

 Here's what Paul Thomas Anderson said about his dad in an interview, as reported in WIKI

"He was in the Navy stationed mainly in Guam. I don't think he did any fighting. I think he was trying - he was fixing airplanes and knew just where the beer was stashed and played the saxophone in bands and stuff like that. You know, every picture I have of him [shows] a beer in his hand. Every single picture from the war he's got - so he was pretty good about probably finding ways to get out of fighting. But again, you know, we never really talked that much about it."

In other words, Ernie Anderson was a wild man, a ballsy, deep-voiced iconoclast, a trickster, the father as wild man. He later became the announcer for most of ABC's programming and promos. And some of that fine work can be heard here. 


I know it's weird to write about a father on mother's day, but I was just on the phone with my mom to wish her a happy one, with THE MASTER paused on the first big 'session' between Dodd and Freddie. My own dad died of cancer a year and a half ago, and I never got to visit him in the hospital; he never would have wanted me to, either. He despised soap operatics. Our true good-bye was watching and rhapsodizing over Lumet's LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962), the highballs making him merry and open, and both of us enraptured by the pure ballsy artistry of every aspect of the film. I'm sure I'll think of him whenever I next see it again, which I hope is soon. I don't have any recordings of my dad, but he lives on in whispered pro-golf announcers, and old horror movies for me, which we used to make fun of together in a ritual of wit-honing.

My dad was fierce, tall and with a booming Wellesian voice, a drinker. He was larger than life, and he drank right up until the end, like a superstar. The doctors were amazed his metastasized cancer hadn't killed him years earlier, they theorized the booze was keeping him alive.  He fell and broke his ankle mixing a drink and had to be hospitalized, since his bones were shot because of chemo. And of course being in the hospital meant no booze. He was dead in a matter of days. I've hated doctors ever since, worse than Kate Hepburn's character does in LONG DAY'S JOURNEY.  I still smoke, because fuck living forever like my 107 year-old granny, and when I feel my big Wellesian dad's archetypal energy alive in a film I tend to love that film as if it were my father's ghost. I want to avenge it against the Claudius critics and shout it from this blog's parapets. 

Ernie Anderson died of cancer in 1997, the year BOOGIE NIGHTS came out, the year I was first struggling to get sober. Paul Thomas was there for it all, sitting beside his dad's bed ala Phillip Seymour Hoffman in his 1999 film MAGNOLIA (see here for an analysis of this in context with Edward G. Robinson's death scene in SOYLENT GREEN).  Anderson wasn't around for his dad's Ghoulardi phase, as it was over by the time he was born. He did get to see it on the VHS tapes that are around in circulation and pieces of which are on youtube (and above): "What I do and what he did is so different, but he hated authority and he wanted to stir things up. And I hope my work always has that kind of spirit."

It does. Tell your parents to turn blue, he'd say. "Stay sick and turn blue." That must be a weird thing for PT to hear on a tape made by his own late father, but it's a weirdness the same late father left him equipped to handle. As a result PTA's films fly past the maudlin sand traps and safety-first water hazards of most films about flawed or dying fathers, and straight into the hole of modern myth. There's no stern moral or tsk-tsking in a PTA film. No matter how vile some figures are (such as the incestuous talk show host in MAGNOLIA), Paul just shows them forgiveness, because he respects wild men. It's pretty clear in studying the Ernie Anderson story just where PT's love of wild man Screamin' Jay Hawkins-esque energy comes from.

There's also the sense Ernie was a partier, like my own dad, like me, like Jason Robards and his dad in LONG DAY'S, and of course Freddie Quell, who always has a drink in his navy hand, and knows alcohol for what it is, the last true line of defense against the void, as well as the void itself, the mirror through which the artist may behold the Medusa Muse of Mortality without turning to stone. If, in the end, it stones you just the same, at least you get to pick your frozen pose. 

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One last coincidence: my dad always joked he was going to retire... to Oxnard. I forget why. He loved that name. It wasn't related to Ghoulardi's use of it, to my knowledge. We never lived anywhere near Cleveland, but he too loved its crazy name. Oxnard. He joked he wanted to retire there, and I needed to make money to pay for it. "You gotta earn a lot of money so I can retire in Oxnard," he'd say. I didn't. Oxnard exists now only in my memory.

(See also Great Dads of the 70s: Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights)

(and my initial post on The Master - Butler of Orbs 
and the The Master's Questions Answered by the I Ching)

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The Fury of a Thousand Bronsons!

In honor of Moon in the Gutter's Paul Thomas Anderson blogathon, here's one of my early from the 2007 Academy Award era... a bold pronouncement that NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD indicated a return of the repressed wild man archetype, i.e. the force sought by the Men's Movement:

(originally posted in Bright Lights After Dark 3/08)

We’ve had the Night of the Iguana, the Day of the Locust and since around 1989, we’ve had the years of the disaffected sheep. Now I’d say 2007 Oscar Night heralds the Age of the Wildman.

We’ve got two movies up for big awards that seem of wed together already by primal masculine force: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Both have been supplying many men who have seen them with some missing nutrient in their diets.. they’ve been starving for it without even knowing it was missing.

What is this wild man force and how did we lose it? We had it in Jim Morrison, Robert Bly, Ken Kesey, Nicholson, Brando, Robards– we lost it in the blinding Tom Cruise flash and lo, there was pouffy hair and loud jackets and closeted queers confusing straight dudes into thinking wearing eye liner was punk rock. Then came the 1990s, dot-coms and a crushing need to stay edgy even with two kids and six figures. But let’s face it, the masculine archetype fisher king is going to lie around in defeat eventually, it’s the nature of the seasons. The only difference is in the spring-back -- how far down you hold the Nerf ball under the water before it shoots up again. The longer man festers in his cubicle the louder the explosion when the Iron John yang energy comes hammering up out of the ground in great black oil sperm of my vengeance-style bit torrents and old-testament oratory.

It should have been the year of Josh Brolin as well as Daniel Day Lewis tonight at Oscar time, but I think Brolin has those old and comfortable voters a little confused; he’s like an accusatory ghost from a time the academy had thought long dead and buried in a Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson VHS clamshell boxfire.

Men who have grown soft with unearned privilege will probably not like Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD and are probably the reason Brolin’s not even nominated. The return of the true king is never welcomed by the pretender to the throne. The haters thought this sort of mustachioed hombre long vanished. Now he’s back, covered in the dirt used to bury him, but his eyes are burning through the dust with the fire of a thousand Bronsons!

I guess part of it for both Brolin and Lewis is that they’ve been away from Hollywood for awhile, Lewis cobbling in Italy and Brolin wandering through Ireland with his young 'uns. Stay in Tinseltown too long and even the noblest of men can turn into needy eaters in need of a good Camille Paglia-style beatdown. Lewis and Brolin have the sense to wander out into the desert when they sense themselves growing soft with money and fame. This wandering away from civilization and its tiresome trappings for communion with the wildness of nature — this was once part of something known as the Men’s Movement, around the late 1980s--early 1990s. It was a time when men went into the woods to beat drums and howl and shed their tired sad sack personae; a time before the age of Irony, before changing times made masculinity and fatherhood something to hide the way witches had to hide from the inquisition. Well, we see now that the wildman was just in orbit – he’s returned with the tick-tock precision of Daniel Plainview’s oil pumps!

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as you can tell by my vigorous enthusiasm, I was totally hoping for something that actually did happen the following year with films like THE WRESTLER and has since vanished as the Coens went back to torturing wusses and the Rom-Coms and Cera-Eisenbergs have flooded the gates, but they're out there.... come back wildmen! So later in 2008 I wrote a piece riffing on Manny Farber's White Elephant art vs. Termite Art: THE TERMITES OF PLAINVIEW:

The few critics and artists who dismiss THERE WILL BE BLOOD as undeserving of its hype–due to story weaknesses or hammy acting, usually–tend to be the ones who are “trying” to be different, and so would pay less respect to the fearless soul searchers, explorers, depth-sounders and kamikaze love hipsters like Welles and Godard, Gondry, Ray, Hawks, Tarantino, Baumbach and Martel, and more to the “workmanlike” mapper precision of the Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Spielberg, Ford, Truffaut, Hitchcock, Payne–those who perfect the lines and feel out new fissures in the rock that the explorers have excavated, that Manny Farber’s termites have eaten through. For fans of the mappers, the gaping plot holes, inconsistencies of style and meaning and haphazard story construction of the explorers–the ungodly mess, in short–can be unforgivable. For we lovers of the explorers, any story holes can be stepped over without the smallest break in our stride as we follow the brave deep into the cinematic danger zone; we'd rather get lost in the woods than a lovely elaborate hedge maze.  There’s some that try to control it, quench it, put it out, and there’s some that go wild-eyed and giggling, cooing and tittering like the late beloved Richard Widmark.

A unique example to discuss of a mapper and explorer rolled into one would be John Huston. His films tend to be adaptations of classic “explorer” works: UNDER THE VOLCANO is a fine example of Huston being too busy getting period details of 1933 Mexico down, polishing up the quaint old cars and setting his actors to staggering just so, that he misses the thrust of Lowry’s novel, which is as an apocalyptic mirage of one man’s drunken dying soul bleeding into those around him and its reflection in the tide of fascism and blah blah. One mustn’t put modern in with the classical, or must one?


A “classic” example of the explorer vs. mapper would be Welles’ MACBETH vs. Olivier’s HAMLET (both 1948). Olivier’s film (left) is a stunning masterwork with each line of text lovingly orated and the deep shadow lines visible all the way in the back of the cavernous sets. There’s plenty of deep focus expressionism for those who like that sort of thing, but not enough to drown the bard in Ophelia’s bathwater, so to speak. Welles’ MACBETH on the other hand is a roaring, sweaty delirious fever dream-catastrophe where a good chunk of the dialogue tends to be inaudible under scratchy recording and thick brogues (Welles famously pre-recorded the dialogue and monologues and made his actors lip-sync). Just take a look below at that outrageous hat!

Welles plays Macbeth like someone just waking up in the drunk tank after a three-day meth binge. Soldiers cast in hand-me-downs from Republic studios old serials seem to drip down from their weird cavern pathways onto him, like expressionist maggots from a Polanski skyway. Welles shivers with horror like he's hoping if he acts like its a nightmare he'll wake up and have blood-free hands. His Macbeth bellows great lungfuls of melodious brogue, hallucinating Banquos hither an yon. He chews so much scenery he gets woozy and seems about to fall over into the witches’ bubbling pot at any second, but I’ll order Ham on Welles over Hamlet Olivier any day. There’s mad genius power with Welles; his is the termite art that never stops to count the receipts or weigh the meanings but rather plunges reckless through the walls until all is black and sweet silence. Daniel Plainview and THERE WILL BE BLOOD are like that, and for the Olivier loving mappers of the world, that's just too long-haired, indulgent, and reckless.

And God do I hate Olivier's short bangs in all his Shakespeare stuff. He looks like Sting's queer older brother, but not in a good way. HAMLET's photography is brilliant however and every word spoken goes down like a hundred dollar bottle of anything. If Victor Mature as Doc Holliday were here, good Sirs, then perhaps he could finish. I can't remember the rest! 

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Great Acid Movies #25: PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (2002)

Casting Adam Sandler in PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE was a gutsy move for director-writer Paul Thomas Anderson. Instead of uniting Jersey boys (Sandler's demographic) and cineaste hipsters (Anderson's) both groups stayed away in droves, snuffing the film's chances for box office recognition. A mad meditation on color, love, music and maturity, the 2002 film comes sandwiched between Anderson's better received epics MAGNOLIA and THERE WILL BE BLOOD. But it's no boondoggle; it's a gem and all it takes to see the luster is to get over yourself for hating HAPPY GILMORE.

Exploring the agony of having seven nagging older sisters, the ecstasy of first love in Hawaii, anger management and coming clean about porn addiction, PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE is really about sound and color and if you can key into that then the brilliance, the love and the redemption flow unstoppably all over your pants. Even if you saw it once and didn't like it, I'd say toss your expectations and sit in it, without expectations, one more time.

In the beginning it seems that Anderson's film is following the same Lynchian framework of ERASERHEAD -- the isolated everyman in a strange landscape of alienating industrial sounds and soul crushing neighbors and bullying relatives --but it's no nightmare. It's a fable or a light show, or a concert in words, and if casual Anderson fans tend to skip over this film in order to focus on his "big canvas" pictures, they miss the heart and soul of the Anderson auteur persona. Unlike his mentor Robert Altman, who can get bogged down in his actors' improv thesping, Anderson is a track-shot formalist at heart and in LOVE the cast may be small but this isn't a HARD EIGHT-style Sundancing chamber piece, it's a candy colored dazzler of lyrsergic intensity and late 1960s optimism still simmering in the deep recesses of even the most repressed dork's heart of hearts.

Anderson guides you, via Barry's shocking blue suit, to experience the movie as pure cinematic color. He even advises in the DVD gatefold:

Get Barry’s suit blue, blue blue. Don’t be shy. Get Barry’s shirt white. Don’t be afraid to let it bloom a bit. Turn up the contrast! Make sure your blacks are black and listen to loud.

PT loves long beautifully-constructed tracking shots, and here they take on a poetic abstraction, sometimes quite literally dissolving into the brilliant color morphing video art work of Jeremy Blake. That kind of pure cinematic abstract art is often misunderstood by mallrat American audiences trained by lackluster public school art programs to look dismally or obliviously on attempts to fuse abstract poetry and surrealism into mainstream movies (they line up to see FANTASIA during its re-release, but promptly get restless and fall asleep, and who can blame them?). Adam Sandler and art are, to the great majority of filmgoers in this country, mutually exclusive. Art is what bores you at museums while you wait it out til cocktail hour; Sandler is what you watch way, way after cocktail hour, after dinner, after the parents have gone to bed and your townie friends show up with a case of beer... and probably fucking Slim Jims. If they bring some tabs of acid too, though, you'll want PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE to split the difference... suddenly Adam Sandler sulking through the abstract parts of FANTASIA begins to make perfect... whoa, is that... a... why does he have a harmonium on his desk, man? Far out.

This is Anderson's tale of Kafka-Lynch insanity but it carries the low key sense of redemption that can be found only in Val Lewton's shadowy compassion. Like Lewton, Anderson has an ability to be patient with his self-centered characters, leading them and loving them unto awakening and transformation. A comparison for the visual style would have to be the Coen Brothers, but the Coens' love is much harsher and deriding. Anderson's sibling expression on the other hand is that of a loving older brother: if there's some need to poke fun and be cruel, it's always with an inevitable beatific and benevolent purpose (forcing the younger sibling to stand up for himself, for example) and very protective. To put it very broadly, Anderson's movies are older brother mentorships, inspiring awareness of love and self-reliance, ala Nicholas Ray or Altman, while the Coen Brothers are witty formalist meditations that inspire awareness of existential mortality and the inevitable crunch crunch of death's jaws, ala Aldrich or Kubrick.


That sort of tough love of an older brother for a younger sister or brother is felt especially deeply in PUNCH-DRUNK, which chronicles the "coming out" of one of L.A's more deeply hidden sweet souls. As friendly to our cause as that arc is, it's nonetheless the visual landscape of the film that merits the lysergic connection. The pinks and blues and whites and deep black silhouettes are all the sort of stuff many directors use to hide the flimsy material but in PUNCH-DRUNK's case it is the material; the style shapes and frames and focuses and blurs until we recognize that pure art is the way to shift attention from the banal blinders-on crawl of drab social reality into the liquid present where life is a continually moving, breathing changing force expressing itself constantly through the air, the stars and the sea and every random song select or spin of the roulette wheel. So when you see PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE even stone cold sober you can follow Anderson's breadcrumb trail right into that same candy colored universe of egoless nonjudgmental acceptance of all life as it is right here right now. In short, watching this movie gets you totally "TOASTED" on art, love, and a dizzying array of overlapping dialogue by the seven sisters, who make the witches of MACBETH seem like Girls Gone Wild.

The sisters are just one facet of this film which hold massive hidden depth within its seemingly "quirky indie" surface. They all talk simultaneously while saying different relevant things, like a maddening Greek chorus with everyone on the wrong page of the script. There's parts in this film that go by so fast they're easy to miss the first time around: the sparkling modern kitchen and nanny with baby in the house of the conniving sex chat blackmailer "Georgia" is something I want to see again, for example. Her contented, housewife status attests to the previous scams she's pulled with the mystically named "Mattress Man" (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). As said dark father/older brother figure, Hoffman is also worth seeing several times to get all the great, blustery David Mamet-ish expletive/repetitive venom. Hoffman is the evil version of Burt Reynolds in BOOGIE NIGHTS or the Frank Mackey Tom Cruise character grown old and portly. From a lysergi-mythic vantage point, Mattress Man is seen not as a dark father per se, but more an older brother, the one whom appoints himself the villain that must be faced/stood up to in order to "earn" the passage into manhood and marriage. Brevity prevents me from gushing in length about the always revealing Emily Watson, perfectly cast as the patient love interest, eyes sparkling with undisguised love and fascination with violence.

Lastly, what can you say about Sandler in this film, other than he finally finds a role that will use his Nicholas Ray-little-boy-lost rage for good rather than the evil? I'll confess I'm way too highbrow to have seen even a single Sandler movie other than this one (I went to high school with too many boys like him to feel anything but lunchroom nausea at the very thought of BILLY MADISON), but after seeing LOVE a second time, I'm seriously considering throwing HAPPY GILMORE or something onto my cue.

You o snobby reader needn't get that drastic. Just open your heart and forgive Sandler his schnooky trespasses and dig on his big triumph that may have slipped you by one way or another. More importantly, if you've seen it once, you haven't really seen it. Anderson redeemed Mark Wahlberg (BOOGIE NIGHTS) and Tom Cruise (MAGNOLIA), and you're only a hold-out in the waiting room of ignorance if you can't finally come in and admit he's done the same for Sandler. So ignore the "misfire" tags of those critics too hung up on expectations to dig a low-key candy-colored classic in their midst... I mean it should be a Valentine's Day essential! It's a movie that you can't help but connect to your own life, it helps you remember that you too are capable of true love and redemption. I mean yeah, it's a tripper movie about a total square, man. But dig, he's got cajones now. El hombre has the love in his life; he's a man at last; he's encountered the eternal maturation flower of the third eye open. He's let his spirit fly and crunch at will. It ain't got drugs, but the movie itself is one giant candy tab... just turn up the contrast, crank up the volume and Anderson'll take you there... to the Loveland, where redemption comes in bright colored sheets, preferably displayed at eye level in the center aisle... and the music is so good you need to play it loud, or else you haven't even really seen it



Read my very special Andrew Sarris blogathon overview on Paul Thomas Anderson here

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