Punch Drunk Love (2002)
Starring: Adam Sandler and Emily Watson

Well, I was going to say this is a "quirky" movie, but I decided that quirky would make the weirdness of it seem good. The weird aspects to this movie- the weird camera angles, the nowhere near normal characters, and the colors and weird sounds that pop up on the screen out of nowhere- for no reason, they're annoying more than anything else. It's easy to tell this was made by the same guy who made the God-awful, I wanted to shoot myself halfway thru it, Magnolia- a movie with no redeeming values whatsoever, and the movie that was almost as bad and pointless- Boogie Nights. Punch Drunk Love's only saving grace is Adam Sandler, even if his character is clearly a madman who belongs in a straight jacket.

Sandler plays a loser of sorts- Barry, a guy with 7 sisters who won't get off his back, and a business making what seems to be weird toilet plungers, and who knows what else. He shows us his insanity in the start of the film, by going off and kicking out 3 big sliding glass doors at his sister's birthday party...then, he tells one of his inlaws, a dentist, that he needs help and thinks this guy can help him. I'm a dentist, he tells Barry, wondering how on earth he can help him. Then, Barry tells him he cries sometimes out of the blue, for no reason...then, he proceeds to cry in front of the guy suddenly.

There's a strange scene outside of Barry's warehouse, where we see a car wrecking- flipping over and over, then suddenly it's gone...Don't ask me what on earth that was all about. A van pulls up and puts an organ on the ground by the edge of the road...and Barry picks it up and runs inside with it, playing with it every now and then throughout the film.

Barry starts collecting bar codes from healthy choice labels, you get so many airline miles for so many barcodes- he plans to spend thousands to get 1 million+ airline miles. He later starts screaming at some guy with the customer service line, because he wants to redeem the labels RIGHT NOW and fly to Hawaii.

Barry is lonely, so he calls a phone sex number, and that starts out this big blackmail backstory that makes very little sense itself. He ends up giving them his credit card number, social security number, birthdate, address, etc...and it turns out to be a scam where they can go find him and rob him blind.

Barry meets a woman played by Emily Watson- I don't even remember the character's name, but he falls for her in no time. He takes her to dinner, and he lies nonstop about the stuff she asks him...then, he gets up, goes into the bathroom and beats the hell out of it, so much that the manager tells him to leave, or he'll call the police. Barry ends up following Emily to Hawaii and tracks her down...

The movie, as you can probably tell so far, is insane. Barry does things no normal person does...he has no social skills, and why Watson's character falls for him- I have no idea. She holds him like he's a baby...he's all whining, apologizing for doing this or doing that.

4 men are sent from Utah- from the same guy that runs the phone sex scam outfit...they try to beat Barry up in one scene- and when he's running away, he's making these weird sounds as tho he's retarded. It was just odd the sounds he made when he ran...and he ends up jumping off some small bridge, landing on what seems to be concrete, then gets up and takes off again- like it was meant to be a comical scene, but it shouldn't have been funny at all.

So, that's pretty much most of the story. It wasn't very exciting, but it was enjoyable overall.

It's a good movie...as I said on my main site. It's not bad, it's not great, but it's entertaining enough.

As mentioned, Sandler's character is basically insane...same goes for Watson's character to a lesser degree. The artsy nonsense with weird camera moves/angles, strange sounds that popped out of nowhere, and the fact that none of the characters resembled any human beings any of us would know in real life...all of that stuff was fairly annoying and unnecessary in my opinion. This film definitely didn't deserve all the praise it got, and I think it only got that praise, because it was completely weird and off-the-wall like the other two films by this director. It's a good watch, but it's not the masterpiece it's made out to be.