Alright, an easy one today. After my revisiting of PT Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love last night and with There Will Be Blood getting massive critical acclaim and Oscar nods, I thought it appropriate today to rank PT Anderson’s directorial films.
PT Anderson in my opinion is maybe the best American director working today; certainly in the top 5 anyway. He seems to be very versatile with a perfect eye for cinema. It’s unfortunate he only releases a film once every fifth blue moon. On the other hand, maybe that’s why his films are so great – he takes the time to craft them to what he wants them to be. Not what Hollywood thinks they should be. Anyway, on to the list…
This is not including his TV stuff or the early, short works that later became films (Cigarettes and Coffee or The Dirk Diggler Story).
5) Hard Eight
3) tie: Punch Drunk Love
3) tie: There Will Be Blood
2) Magnolia
1) Boogie Nights
Discuss.
Looks like I’m going to have to get my hands on Hard Eight. I’ve loved all four of his movies I have watched. All would be 9/10 or higher for me.
4. Punch Drunk Love
3. Magnolia
2. Boogie Nights
1. There Will Be Blood
Yep, the clear winner for me is There Will Be Blood. It’s part of my “triple threat” this year that includes No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James. I think 20 years from now, the consensus from critics and general movie lovers alike will be that all three are masterpieces. Truly brilliant.
If P.T. Anderson’s best is yet to come, then, wow… I really look forward to it.
I’m with you Jonathan. Still haven’t seen Hard Eight and my list is identical to yours. Sweet.
1 There Will Be Blood
2 Boogie Nights
3 Hard Eight
Punch Drunk Love and Magnolia can slug it out for last.
I’ll always have a soft spot for Boogie Nights, but the sheer ambition and outright guts it took to bring There Will Be Blood to life in the manner it was brought gives it the crown.
1) Hard Eight
2) Punch-Drunk Love
3) Boogie Nights
4) There Will Be Blood
5) Magnolia
almost a mirror opposite of yours, Andrew
Funny thing is, with this list, it’s impossible to be wrong in your order. ALL his movies are wonderful.
Wow, I’m not even going to try…OK, I am:
1. Magnolia
2. There Will Be Blood
3. Boogie Nights
4. Punch Drunk Love
5. Hard Eight
(but really it is close to a 5-way tie).
This is a tough call, but I think my list would look like Kurt’s, although maybe There Will Be Blood would be close to overtaking #1. I don’t really know; they are all pretty good to me. Anderson is one of my favorite directors working today.
I have yet to see There Will Be Blood, although I have seen the rest. I loved Boogie Nights. As to Punch Drunk Love, it is probably second favourite Anderson film. I must confess that I was simply turned off by Magnolia. I just didn’t get it, even with strange tastes in movies.
1. boogie nights
2. punch drunk
3. sydney
4. there will be blood for old men
5. magnolia – I’ve never figured this film out. Every scene puzzles me. Frogs, singing, kid pissing his pants, dental work hmm.
All his films are about the protagonist learning the ins and outs of some industry. Porn movies, gambling, oil drilling, pudding contests, quiz game shows.
I love them all, but to rank them, I’d have to say:
1. Magnolia
2. Boogie Nights
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Punch Drunk Love
5. Sydney/Hard Eight
ok Kurt we have exact mirror opposite lists which explains something of our differing views of the value of There Will Be Blood. I agree with you on virtually ever other subject, but this, oh boy.
@rot – funny how you can agree on a filmmaker, yet in entirely different ways. Is it that Magnolia is the most ‘artificial’ of the bunch? That technique-wise it breaks the fourth-wall (so to speak) more than any of his other films, potentially limiting an emotional or empathic response to the film as a whole? (Obviously this is not a problem for me, I think the film works smashingly.)
I am convinced P.T.A. will be the one to crack my top ten films of all time with something he makes, the talent is there, he just has not quite achieved it yet.
Magnolia is his worst because it is his most ambitious and never fulfills what it promises, it sets high expectations with the introduction and can never inject the significance it supposes into the interrelationships of the characters it spends upwards to three hours doing. it is a film with great moments, and I can say the same of There Will Be Blood, but as a story, as something with a beginning middle and end and serving some ultimate purpose both films fail to satisfy. I dont think it is the technical aspects I have a problem with, Magnolia is very fluid filmmaking, and admirable on a technical level, it is, like There Will be Blood, full of sound and fury signifying nothing… its trying to manufacture something that should have been there already in the story. P.T.A. could use all the fluid filmmaking in the world on the script of P.S. I Love You and it will still be that script.
Just came back from seeing …Blood.
1. Boogie Nights
2. There Will Be Blood
3. Magnolia
4. Hard Eight
5. Punch Drunk Love
@rot. I really think that THERE WILL BE BLOOD is the film of which you speak. We’ll speak again when you get a chance to view the movie a second time!
I would like to see it again, but I am not expecting much to change… it is not a film rich in nuance. It is very… functional. characters are uncomplicated, the story does not wander about, it checks off the symptoms of ambition and greed, the ‘people’ around DDL are pretty faceless, it is an actor shadowboxing for two and a half hours. I like it better than Magnolia because there is no aspiration to offset failure, its a flat line, whereas Magnolia is a plummet from ridicuously high heights with what I consider the best opening sequence of a film ever.
@rot – I agree about the characters. Daniel Plainview hates people, I know because he says “I hate people” several times in the film. Then he goes crazy and screams a lot and puts a napkin on his head.
When people say it’s a great performance I don’t disagree. But I think more than a great performance it’s a show offy performance. He says a lot with voice modulation and body language. When he’s putting on a front you know he’s putting on a front but the few times he’s sincere you know he’s sincere.
I like Danny Boy Lewis but I prefer Casey Affleck or Brad Pitt in Assassination or James Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones in No Country (2007 will be remembered as the year of long unwieldy titles).
I prefer Paul Dano in the There Will Be Blood.
I would still give the Oscar to DDL, especially for the fact that he makes so much out of so little. He works the character, you remove him from the equation and I think people will start to see fast that there is not a whole lot going on in this film… by his very presence DDL directs the attention away from it, and I think people could watch mesmerized as he spent two hours picking his teeth. If Gangs of New York had DDL in virtually every scene you would have the same fanfare that is bestowed on There Will Be Blood, I truly think people are willing to overlook the lackluster qualities of a film if a performance overcompensates… there is this gnawing sense that ‘hey I am being entertained so the film must be good’. TWBB functions so that DDL can perform, and it is the performance that is great, not the stage on which he does it.
@rot – “He works the character, you remove him from the equation and I think people will start to see fast that there is not a whole lot going on in this film…”
Apply that same thought to David Thewlis in Mike Leigh’s NAKED and you get the same result. (yes, I picked that film intentionally to see your response!)
1) There Will Be Blood
2) Punch Drunk Love
Sizeable gap
3) Hard Eight
4) Boogie Nights
Unescapable chasm
5) Magnolia
Rot says:
“characters are uncomplicated, the story does not wander about, it checks off the symptoms of ambition and greed, the ‘people’ around DDL are pretty faceless, it is an actor shadowboxing for two and a half hours”
EXACTLY.
@Kurt, actually I brought up Naked in my previous rant so you are baiting me with my own argument
first of all, as much I love Thewlis’ performance in Naked, the film would still work without him (although this is a bit different case because the script was largely improvised by the actors, so this is supposing there was a Naked script and the actor could be changed). First of all, Naked is about more than Johnny though I admit he is largely the attraction for me, but it is dialectic, it is him playing off of the other characters, some complex (his old girlfriend and her roommate, even Bryan has a complexity which comes through in his conflicted issues about his wife and his ‘future’), some are archetypal such as the sadistic Jeremy, whose story parallels Johnny’s and comes to a climatic head at the end. Johnny is a conflicted character and this conflict is nuanced in the way he cuts down the people around him, there is no speech where he says ‘I hate people’, and his hate is fairly sophisticated, because he is not nihilistic or purely selfish elitist, he is a frustrated Idealist who rages against the naive optimism he himself holds. That alone is more complex and profound then anything in TWBB… but what also separates the two is Johnny’s thread is contrasted with that of Jeremy, and there is a critique of Thatcher’s England in this subtext, but on a purely basic level it has more dynamism than that of TWBB where the priest and Daniel are virtually the same, Naked gives you a counterpoint to appreciate how damaged yet humane Johnny is in the face of true nihilism. You must see how Naked is rich with nuance that speaks of the complexity of human emotions and relationships, and how purely functional the same kind of ‘character study’ TWBB affords: it tells rather than shows, it denies Daniel an arc, a counterpoint. Daniel monologues, Johnny dialogues; Daniel’s actions can entirely be linked to a handful of cliche notions of capitalist ambition; Johnny fluctuates according to the context of the situation, and hints at a deeper personal history (including in his breakdown, sexual or physical abuse, once held idealism, and higher education – something Thewlis researched intensely).
Does anyone know if Danny Boy Lewis related to Danny Boyle?
Adding this since nobody else has it in this order.
1. Magnolia
2. TWBB
3. Punch Drunk Love
4. Boogie Nights
5. Hard Eight
I’m also going to say there’s a pretty big gap between 3 and 4 for me, even though Boogie and Hard Eight are respectively quite good and decent. Those first three are just in the 9.5+/10 realm for me.