Paul Thomas Anderson

PT Anderson’s first masterpiece. “I don’t know where to put things, you know? I really do have love to give! I just don’t know where to put it” So laments a quiz kid named Donnie Smith, and so began my personal obsession with this astounding film and a two decades…

“We have a sinner with us here who wishes for salvation!” In the fifteen years since the release of this double Oscar winning film (and 140th on the www.imdb.com chart of the 250 greatest films of all time), Paul Dano would follow his snake oil salesman routine here with an…

“Think you can be a pervert and not pay for it?” Two decades this film has been in my life. Two Paul Thomas Anderson dominated decades of astonishing films, and there are many arguments to be made that this is in fact his finest ever creation. Our own punch drunk…

I have grown to distaste the early films of Paul Thomas Anderson, for as much undeniable passion is channeled in his neurotic Mise-en-scène, his affect for excess and insecure control is so unrestrained that, as charming in its naivety as it can be, exudes such grandiloquence the young Paul finds…

Teenage Employments in Pre-AIDS New York (Note: this will be a series of three posts. Here’s part two. There’s an important context for these reminiscences, one I’ve written of elsewhere, but shouldn’t presume any given reader would already know: my parents were bohemians, artists, leftist refuseniks against the mainstream —…

Ask 100 writers on the difference between story and plot and you’ll get 101 different opinions. Here’s how I define the two: plot is whatever the characters consciously concern themselves with. Story is a layer deeper: the characters’ emotional journeys witnessed from our privileged perspective as the audience. While story…