Greatest Paul Thomas Anderson movie

I love Hard Eight, it's a very intense character driven crime drama with excellent performance by Philip Baker Hall, Goop and John C. Reilly. All his other movies that followed had bad pacing and a too much convoluted story line. Which seems to be the constant problem with PTA's writing and editing abilities. There will be Blood and The Master were quite good but I hardly ever watched them again because they just drag on and lose focus. Boogie Nights because of Wahlberg is unwatchable to me.

PTA makes the same old mistakes that any director/writer/editor makes. They are too precious about footage they film and scenes they write.

I adored everything up to and including Punch Drunk Love but his dark, heavy, leaden directorial choices are increasingly tiresome. The Phantom Thread was the final straw. Though I appreciate him doing doing different work to that of his peers and I will always check out his latest.

It is a vast pity that James Franco did not give him one of the William Faulkner or John Steinbeck novels he optioned (and made into terrible films) to adapt and direct.

I don't think he's made a single bad film. Contrary to r2 Punch-drunk Love was my favorite for a long time but I think Phantom Thread has claimed that mantle. I very much need to re-watch The Master though

I Have Sufficient: The Vivian Vance Story.

Boogie Nights is still a fantastic watch.

The idea of writing/directing a sprawling epic on the LA porn industry is weird, but the fact that it's a truly great movie which stands the test of time is weirder still.

I forgot about The Master, which I did appreciate and found interesting. Philip Seymour Hoffman grounded the film in reality. An actorly and mannered performer like Daniel Day-Lewis has a different effect, he kind of floats in and around PTA's complication scenarios and never seems like a real recognisable human.

Most PTA fans love that, when methody people like DDL and Joaquin Phoenix become part of the scenery and a sort of element of the movie rather than a character, but I find them really hard to watch.

There will be Blood is so overrrated. When it came out, there was all this over the top "Greatest movie ever made" BS. It's just okay

Magnolia is hands down, one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen. It’s quiet, crazy, dark, joyful, and sad. And the performances, especially of William H Macy and Julianne Moore, are spectacular. I can rematch it over and over, and find new things each time. Check out the trivia section of IMDB’s Magnolia page, to get an idea of exactly the attention to detail, that went into making this movie. Just incredible.

Magnolia is a shitty rip-off of Short Cuts.

1. There Will Be Blood

2. The Master

3. Phantom Thread

I saw Boogie Nights when I was 17 and thought it was one of the best movies I've ever seen.

I ended up seeing Hard Eight later and was pleasantly surprised that Goop can actually act. You actually felt for her character and identified with her in a way (for me at least)

It really does take a talented writer/director to wrangle a good performance out of an actor.

PTA did that with Goop.

I love 'em all except Inherent Vice. They said it was an unfilmable nove and PTA proved them right.

Goop has been good in quite few movies. Flesh And Bone, The Royal Tenenbaums, Two Lovers, Sylvia.

BLACK SWAN

[quote]R9 Magnolia is a shitty rip-off of Short Cuts.

Your BUTT is a shitty tip-off of Short Cuts!

r9 And Boogie Nights is a beat-for-beat pastiche of Goodfellas...

How lucky was he that COVID hit and overshadowed Fiona Apple exposing what a piece of shit he is? It got buried even in favor of "funny" headlines about them and Tarantino doing coke together. It'll probably come up again when he next movie is out.

There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece. I still want my time back from watching The Master. Even genius has an off day.

There Will Be Blood is a boring, cliché misanthrope tale that's been told a thousand times before. Oh, how shocking that he becomes a killer!! Yawn.

None.

He's a charlatan who's fooled people into thinking he's this brilliant auteur. Why do you think he's (poorly) written so many characters like that? He attached himself to likes of Robert Altman and Jonahtan Demme, so people just assumed he was on that level. You could point to everyone of his films and realize it's just a lesser pseudo-remake of a better film.

This is acting, but Sean Penn was exactly like that. Palled around with Nicholson, Brando, even Bukowski, and soon people were fooled into thinking he was this once-in-a-generation talent. It's all bullshit. Apparently he's in Anderson's next film. Perfect pairing.

PTA is a master of the closing moments of a film. The final scene in both Magnolia and The Master make me cry every time.

Magnolia used to be one of my favorite movies of all time, but I was floored by There Will Be Blood. Seeing it in the theatre makes the experience different. My sister and I will still scream "I've abandoned my child! I've abandoned my boy!!" to her cat from time to time.

I'm the fan that thinks all of his films are great, and its hard to pick a favorite, but Inherent Vice was truly unwatchable. Just total shit. Boogie Nights is a great film but it drags too much and becomes a bit of a mess in its final third.

Forgive my compromised sense of humor, but I did want to correct r20 about who Sean Penn is. He's one of our finest actors.

[quote]There Will Be Blood is a boring, cliché misanthrope tale that's been told a thousand times before. Oh, how shocking that he becomes a killer!! Yawn.

TWBB was when the worm turned for me. The movie was like a dull metal ball whirling through the air with nothing to anchor is. Not DDL. Certainly not Dano.

r22 Ha, well played.

I forgot to mention Bradley Cooper is also in it. He fully applies to this as well. Hilarious.

"Phantom Thread" played a one week Oscar qualifying run in NY in December. Sold out first Saturday morning show, people leaving , I heard everything from WTF was that to amazing but I got most hated it.. A complete stranger approached me while I was waiting for my friend in the mens room and asked I could explain it to him.

r25 I hope you told him "it's the director trying to absolve himself from being an abusive, narcissistic scumbag".

The films all seem arty and gauzy and free floating in a mindless sort of way.

Fun to watch for a bit.

When it’s over, nothing.

I have no idea who he is beyond Maya Rudolph's husband.

And any interest diminished when I saw he directed Goop.

r28 He never married her. They'll split eventually and the next much-younger chick he's with (one of those ugly HAIM sisters?), he'll quickly marry. It happens all the time. He's probably always cheated on her.

I truly thought I would hate There Will Be Blood. I can't even remember why I watched it. But, man, I was fucking engrossed. One of my all time favorites.

I like Boogie Nights and Magnolia as well.

Maya and Goop were childhood friends growing up in Santa Monica.

My favorite is There Will Be Blood, but Magnolia is a masterpiece.

I really enjoyed Boogie Nights, but the camera work gave me whiplash. I also didn't care for the last 5 minutes.

[quote]You could point to everyone of his films and realize it's just a lesser pseudo-remake of a better film.

The Master is a rip-off of which film, then?

I get that Boogie Nights hits many of the same beats that Goodfellas does, but you get that with many American epics from the 1970s onward. The Godfather, Heaven's Gate, Days of Heaven, Apocalypse Now, and plenty of others have a very similar feel because of a shared narrative structure. When it's done badly, it's Dances With Wolves or Braveheart. I think PTA does it well in There Will Be Blood and The Master.

If there's room for Tarantino to borrow entire films wholesale (i.e. Blazing Saddles plus a couple dozen spaghetti Westerns for Django, as just one of 9 examples) then there's room for PTA to give us his take on the Altman-Scorsese-Coppola-etc. style epic.

Because of I think of tonally similar films with the same beats, it's Days Of Heaven and Apocalypse now. FFS.

r33 Tarantino sucks too, darling.

I was never a particularly big fan but I stopped watching his films altogether after There Will Be Blood...Oh boy, what an unwatchable mess that one was. And DDL's gotta be the hammiest actor who ever ham'd.

The only actor with 3 Best Actor Oscars is hammy 🙄

Yes, and the fact that he has three Oscars just proves my point, since the Academy usually goes for über-hammy performances over more subtle ones. The only time DDL didn't totally stink up the screen was in In The Name of The Father.

Not even 40 posts in and we're already at the "the fact that a movie or film has won awards and was critically acclaimed PROVES it's awful" point.

Not even 40 posts and we're already at "Oscars = quality" insanity.

An Oscar doesn't guarantee quality, but an actor winning an Oscar also doesn't "prove" that he's terrible.

You're trying too hard to start a fight.

He was handsome, yet he married plain Maya. I question his judgement.

[quote]The only actor with 3 Best Actor Oscars is hammy

Hammy is a style. Most British actors tend to overindulge because what is necessary onstage is uuuge on the cinematic screen: Hopkins, Burton, DDL, Rylance, Branagh.

Theatre trained American actors can be quite hammy too. The only thing is critics and audiences laugh at Al Pacino when he chews furniture, but they praise the Brits when they does the same. Typical colonial mentality.

How big is his dick? Do you see what I see?

Maya looks so proud that she nailed a white guy

Maya was hot when she was younger. In her first years on SNL. She now looks like your usual mother-of-4.

[quote]R38 the fact that he has three Oscars just proves my point, since the Academy usually goes for über-hammy performances over more subtle ones.

No one in Hollywood likes you, Glenn. Just accept it.