LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Punch-Drunk Love: Barry Egan
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Punch-Drunk Love [P]roves to be an extremely appropriate title for Anderson's fourth outing. It has surprising swirls of violence, it veers around in a dangerous fashion like an inebriated driver, but it's mostly a love story. To its credit, all of the elements work in that same dangerous palette of feeling. The jokes sometimes feel like jabs in the gut. And though Hollywood has trained the audience to view the protagonist of any picture as their safe zone, this picture won't allow that lazy comfort. There's no telling when Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) will explode and smash something nearby -he does so early in the picture.
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Punch-Drunk Love is not typical Superbit fare, but the higher bit rate does beautifully present cinematographer Robert Elswit's striking colors, including the Jeremy Blake art. While the sound mix is mostly unobtrusive, there are some vivid moments that are well rendered in DTS. Unlike the majority of Superbit DVDs, there are some extra features on a second disc, and they're as much experiential as informational. A 12-minute piece, "Blossoms & Blood," compiles some alternate takes of events in the Barry-Lena relationship accompanied by Jon Brion's music, and 12 scopitones and a 2.5-minute segment showcase more art and music. There are ... two unremarkable alternate scenes plus a mock commercial for Philip Seymour Hoffman's Mattress Man character that will make you wince and probably laugh. --David Horiuchi
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The genesis of Punch-Drunk Love came two years ago in a Time magazine article about David Phillips, a University of California civil engineer who stumbled upon a lucrative frequent-flyer promotion. Phillips had accumulated 1.25 million miles by purchasing 12,150 cups of Healthy Choice pudding for a mere $3000. Writer/Director Paul Thomas Anderson asked to meet with Phillips, an encounter that provided initial inspiration for the character of Barry Egan.
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The moments that work best in “Punch-Drunk Love” are when PTA ratchets up the anxiety in his scenes so much that actually, it’s actually hard to breathe. You feel the anus-tightening tension whenever Barry is around one of his malicious sisters, with those years of torment leaving him raw and prone to disaster. Or the phone sex scenes, which get considerably more furious as the extortion gets deeper. Or take the moments of pure joy, like when Barry finds a loophole in a Healthy Choice pudding frequent flyer promotion, and proceeds to buy up all the pudding in his town so he can visit Lena on her Hawaiian business trip. Or even the best scene, which has the two oddly uncoordinated lovers trying out some pillow talk that is hilariously violent in its imagery. “Punch-Drunk Love” is such a menagerie of different rhythms and ideas (often simply culminating into bursts of color onscreen), that when PTA unearths a Shelley Duvall song (!) from the 1980 film “Popeye,” to underscore Barry’s trip to Hawaii, it seems to fit naturally into the grand design of this wild, untamed beast of a motion picture.
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"Punch-Drunk Love" is a bit of a departure for both Anderson and Sandler. Anderson, usually known for his three-hour long opuses, such as "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia", delivers a short-and-sweet romantic comedy that clocks in at just over an hour-and-a-half. And though it is a typical 'boy meets girl' story, Anderson throws in his usual off-the-wall touches, black humor, and penchant for creating memorable scenes. For example, the film opens up with an almost surreal scene in which Barry witnesses a spectacular car crash and has a harmonium dropped off on the sidewalk in front of him. Another scene has a lonely Barry calling up a vulgar phone sex operator for mere conversation. And when Lena and Barry are reunited in Hawaii, their silhouettes unforgettably intermingle with the shadows of brisk passersby.
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Punch-Drunk Love is the strange story of Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), a young, unformed man whose mercurial personality has been shaped by growing up with seven cloying, clawing sisters who can't let a moment go by without controlling and degrading him. Led by May Lynn Rajskub (Road Trip, HBO's phenomenal Mr. Show), Barry's sisters are an unpleasant bunch. They treat their little brother like a child, insulting him to his face and in public, and occasionally his sadness and rage get the best of him. He cannot express his true feelings to his sisters, due to obvious insecurity issues, and the only way he gets any kind of emotional release is through spontaneous bursts of violence. We never learn much about his sisters' lives or what the Egans were like growing up; all we know is that Barry's sisters have tormented him his entire life, and when we meet him, he's about to come into his own and stand up for himself.
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