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Punch Drunk Love


            As humans, we sometimes crave to be like those on the Hollywood silver screen. Something better, more exciting, glamorous, and more important. There are filmmakers who attempt to take the ordinary life and portray it as being important or even aesthetic on the big screen, but many attempts are made in vein, as the storyline commonly glorifies the characters too much. Very few successfully transform a human story into the type of film that purely portrays just that. Humanism. Punch Drunk Love makes it ok to be normal. Instead of glorifying the human spirit, Anderson, in a way, picks on our shortfalls and emphasizes them, so we can see the good in them. .
             Punch Drunk Love tells the story of Barry Eagan, (played with soul-soaked presence by Adam Sandler) a toilet-brush salesman with a slight anger management and crying problem, which seems to have arisen from the way in which his seven sisters treat him. Taunting him verbally as a child seems to have had an effect on him, as you witness him tearing up a restaurant bathroom, smashing his sister's glass doors and buying copious amounts of pudding to aid in gaining frequent flyer miles and taking advantage of a loophole in the company's marketing terms. Rather intelligent actually.
             The opening sequence of the film establishes the off-centered rollercoaster that soon departs, as there are no opening credits and the first shot is Barry seated at a desk to the far left of the screen in an empty garage. This emphasizes the fact that we have actually been thrown right into the middle of someone's story. Like Anderson has just opened a window into his characters lives and we are just looking through it for a couple of hours. The movie has no real beginning or end, just a portion of a much bigger life that we are viewing. Soon after, he meets Lena Leonard (played with devilish cuteness by Emily Watson) who falls in love with him instantly for no apparent reason.


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