I had the chance to see Punch Drunk Love yes­ter­day. Admittedly, it was the most painful movie I’ve ever seen. At quite a few points I felt an urge to stand up and walk out of the room, and I might have done so had Aaron not been there. This was the first and only movie to ever, ever make me want a hap­py end­ing. I fig­ured that if I had to sit through some aching­ly sad and awk­ward scenes then I should be reward­ed with a sati­at­ing denoue­ment. Some scenes were char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly Anderson, such as the hand-held shot tak­en with Barry peek­ing around a cor­ner, or the slow, wispy grunts of the occu­pants of a car as it spins from a col­li­sion. I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked a door mount­ed cam­era shot which ends off in a shud­der as the door swings shut. It felt like Anderson was exper­i­ment­ing with this film, plac­ing less empha­sis on rela­tion­al devel­op­ment and more on char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. I would­n’t com­plete­ly agree that Sandler has bro­ken out of his type­cast, since his old Waterboy char­ac­ters were sim­ply slight­ly tweaked for this movie. He was the right per­son for the role though, and cast­ing made a good call with him and Emily Watson. On the whole, the movie was enjoy­able, but I’m not sure if I’d be able to sit through it again.