Punch Drunk Love is a film for everyone who has ever kicked in a series of plate glass windows or destroyed a restruant bathroom, or those who have wanted to.

Everyone else, you just won't understand.

Average Adam Sandler fans, you won't understand.

To understand this movie you have to know where it is coming from, otherwise you'll just be as uncomfortable as a 60-year-old grandmother of 8 watching a live performance of the Rocky Horror Show amongst an audience of hairy drag queens and touchy-feely-neo-pagans.

Adam Sandler's Barry Egan feels the weight of the world and it has crushed him into a corner, where he hides from everyone because he's sure they're like he sees his sisters, overbearing, obnoxious, and loud. They'll treat you badly, they'll laugh at you. Then they'll do something nice for you, only to pull the rug out from under you later so that they can laugh at you some more. He lashes out at inanimate objects when he can no longer control his rage, and this puts him even more on the outside, and makes other people look at him like the freak that he is sure he is after years of emotional abuse from his sisters.

I'm not saying that I understand Barry from a point of view of having lived his family and home life, but I do understand the avoidance of people when all you hear is abrasiveness and stupidity (and when everyone on the road is a friggin moron).

Sandler is wonderfully counterpointed in this film by Luis Guzman as his co-worker and seemingly only friend, who is one of the few nice people to Barry, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a sleazy mattress salesman/phone sex business operator. However the films other star, Emily Watson who matches Sandler in mostly underplayed performance perforated by moments of high-emotion.

I would like to see the other side of this story, the story of Watson's Lena Leonard, I imagine that she is very much like Barry, and that in the times when she is out of frame her actions are much the same as his.

This is not Paul Thomas Anderson's best film (Magnolia, no matter what Kevin Smith says), but it is his shortest and most dense. Every moment is important, even the pauses. Small touches souch as the way the camera sometimes becomse erratic with Barry's swinging moods are perfectly done.

I give PunchDrunk Love a rating of Trunculent and declare it pleasant.

I love Skee-Ball so much I should be from New Jersey. I just wish that I were better at it. Ever since I injured my primary skee-balling arm in a horrible threshing incident I just haven't been the same. There was a time when they said I could be the finest player since Arte Skrunk, but now I am merely a footnote in the glorious sports history.

After playing tonight for the first time in many years I just have a few observations about the state of today's game here in Middle Tennessee.
1. The lanes have gotten shorter and made of plastic.
2. Call me oldfashioned, but 50,000 points for the center hole? 50 will do fine by me Sonny.
3. I beat both Tommy and Jason.
4. Chuck-E-Cheese is a giant rat and he runs and inhabits a pizza-place for children, does that strike anyone else as disturbing?
5. My tickets won't get me anything good, I wanted a small, clear plastic animal like they gave at Lake Winniepesokah for about 25 tickets. Though, I wouldn't mind having the Crocodile Hunter hand-held game from Tiger, 'cause dammit Tiger games RULE! Screw that Game-Boy advance crap!
6. I learned at Chuck-E-Cheese.com that all these years I could have been earning tokens for my grades, and by my calculations on the grade to token interface on the site, I could have made nearly 17 tokens in my four-and-a-half years of schoolin spread as it was across two grades. Finally I find that grades WERE good for something, and it's too late. I wonder if they would take all of my report cards at once?

Shower Shock Caffeinated Soap
Soap with caffeine infused in it! Believe it. A truly clean buzz...

Truly the world is a wonderful place, one in which you can bathe and recieve a buzz at the same time. Goodbye coffee, hello shower.

Been a while since Iast posted, and Tommy seems to be posting to BigStupidTommy.com regularly. He puts me to much shame.

Speaking of the WB's "Charmed" I saw the first episode that I would consider good the other day. I forget the plot now, which is probably for the best, but the writing and acting weren't too especially bad. The fact that Rose McGowan, Alyssa Milano and Holly Combs are hot doesn't hurt either. Tommy said my brain has probably just rotted from watching too much Charmed.

As I write this I am now watching charmed, and I just figured out who is playing the Egyptian witch or spirit or goddess, or whatnot, it's the redhead who was on Seaquest DSV and played Lana Lang on the Superboy series. Who thought it would be a good idea to cast a redhead as an ancient Egyptian spirit?

I moved the list of things I want for Christmas to my homepage.

Just came back from the Rocky Horror Picture Show an Nashville's TPAC. The most interesting thing about the entire show was the amount of elderly women in the audience and the surprisingly absent freak quotient.

I felt sorry for my friend Gunny since he was the only one shouting things and dancing besides the cast members. Gunny ran some elderly people off with his exclamations. One woman before the show on seeing one of the Transylvanians said "That one's a man." She seemed quite shocked.

Around a third of the audience left during the intermission. There may be a few less season ticket holders next year.

Juxtoposition is the word for the day children.

Good performance, I thought, though the sound kept going out on the microphones, and that is a bit distracting.

There were two Columbias during the show as well, I don't think the regular got to the theatre until late. I don't think the blue-hairs noticed though.

The regular Columbia was hot. Just an opinion.

A 12-year-old-or-so boy sat on the front row between his mother and father, and the expressions on his face were quite good. I'm guessing the parents will have some explaining to do tonight.

I just wish that I had worn my cassock as I did to the halloween party I went to though. Maybe it would have loosened the older women up to see a priest getting into the play and shouting obscenities.