This just about completes my collection of major Paul Thomas Anderson films, with Magnolia and Boogie Nights already being part of it. It's sort of odd that there are two writer-director Paul Andersons who are both well known at the same time in history, and that their filmographies and talents are so different; the more infamous Paul W.S. Anderson is a pretty good director (Event Horizon) but an absolutely atrocious writer (Alien Vs. Predator). Paul Thomas Anderson, however, is great at both--and certainly these three films bear no resemblance to those W.S. has directed.

This one bears the same overall feeling of Anderson's other films--a sort of hopeful reality, mixed with darkness and grit of events spun out of control and beyond the primarily well-meaning protagonists who are occasionally responsible for their predicaments, but never particularly deserve them. This time we open on Philip Baker Hall (present in all three films, I might add) as Sydney (the original title of the film) offering a cup of coffee and a cigarette to John C. Reilly (also present in all three films) as John Finnegan, who is slumped outside a diner with his head between his needs, obviously despondent. The exchange feels a little rough; I almost felt like I was reading through someone's big awesome indie script; dialogue was both terse and sparse, and felt a little unnaturally so. But, this disappeared pretty quickly. Sydney offers John $50 to live on, which John does not immediately accept--thinking Sydney is either trying to pick him up or trick him in some way. Sydney is gruff, but decent, clearly meaning well with the offer, but not one to take "no," for an answer or really any "lip."

He eventually convinces John to come with him to Las Vegas, so that he can show him a trick using a rate card in a casino to rack up credit and get a room and so on, and once he's into the room, John has now taken on a strong appreciation for Sydney's kindness to him, and follows him around like a faithful dog--but not an irritating one. Sydney clearly appreciates him and wants these good things for him, as well as for many people around him--including the waitress Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) who he asks not to flirt with him, saying that it isn't necessary and tipping her generously not to do so as she does with other tables. John has taken a shine to her, of course, and Sydney carefully orchestrates a meeting for the two of them, as she agrees that he is "cute" in the way he follows Sydney and orders the same drinks as him.

Eventually John picks up a friend in the Casino, Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) who is a little rougher and more foul-mouthed than the rest of them. He makes lewd comments about the waitresses and women in the room, and gets into a philosophical debate when Sydney asks him not to make those comments from his table. Jimmy argues that it's normal, expected and even flattering to the waitresses to hear his comments, and Sydney simply asks that they not come from that table. Sydney does not like Jimmy an awful lot.

After Sydney gets Clementine and John into the same room together, events begin to unfold as I previously mentioned--we begin to learn more about where these characters have come from, their pasts spilling out and new events twisting and contorting to remove the amiable happy-go-lucky sort of feeling they had previously in life, but without removing hope from the film itself.

I really don't want to say too much, as the rest of the events really were surprisingly twisting, as compared to the early part of the film. Certainly we hold Sydney in doubt (who could be that generous?) and wonder what he's up to, and whether John, clearly not the brightest person on earth, even if he is a decent enough guy most of the time, is going to be able to maintain a life like this as a perpetual loser of sorts.

All four main cast members are absolutely mesmerizing in their roles, even if certainly Reilly's, at the least, is extremely typical of him as an actor. This doesn't come too much into play though, as they are all so believable and Anderson has written such a great movie, that it sort of falls by the wayside. Also appearing briefly is Philip Seymour Hoffman (to my "annoyance"--he, too, is a regular in Anderson's movies, and everytime I hear "Paul Thomas Anderson regular" and "Philip" I have to stop and think which one they're referring to, and now he's in all three, so I don't even have that separation...oh well) in a wonderfully excitable small role as a loud, obnoxious gambler, who encourages Sydney to make a bet at a craps table, which he reluctantly does--on the same bet Jimmy remembers him for, $2,000 on the hard eight (two fours, if you're unfamiliar).

The end result? As with his other films, Hard Eight is absolutely worth seeing. And now, I look forward eagerly to There Will Be Blood, Anderson's latest film, especially with Daniel Day-Lewis and Kevin J. O'Connor in it.

I only own a handful of romantic comedies (at least, making exceptions for the ones that are masquerading as other things, like Shaun of the Dead) despite the fact that I'm a softie at heart, and have difficulty shrugging at romantic sentiment. I've seen far, far more than a handful through the clever use of leaving the television on, but since I stopped watching television around three years ago, I've seen very, very few of them. Grand, artsy romances, sure, broken and twisted ones--absolutely. Movies that have romance? Oh yes. But straight-on romantic comedy based around a gimmick? Not in some years now.

But, as you might guess from this context, yes, that's what we have here. We open to find Pamela Drury (Rachel Griffiths) as successful journalist, working on an article on modern girls, and their desires, aspirations and dreams, with awards piled up to the point of eye-rolling clutter on her part, and self-affirmations taped all around her bathroom. We pan down to see a photo of a handsome devil, and soon we see him in person, across a dinner table. He doesn't quite look as airbrushed, he seems a little nervous, and is talking about how normally if he approached a woman she'd think he was a sleaze, but he wasn't, and it was completely normal for people to use personal advertisements (...aha!) and so on and so forth, rambling on and on. We cut to hear the familiar sounds of sex, panning across the clothes strewn across the floor and on up to Pamela....still in her dress, drinking straight from the bottle and watching porn. Clever, I must say. Certainly not what we are expecting (even as we are not particularly enthused about who she was just with), and even more a bit of a feminist inversion of overall expectation, which was a very pleasant surprise.

She begins going through the boxes littering her apartment, and begins tossing off photos one by one from a pile--"misogynist...loser...dental surgeon..." and so on, until she finally rests on Robert Dickson, and wonders how she ever let him go. We next see her in the park with her friend Terri, pushing her son in a stroller. Pamela is bemoaning her single life, saying she "should have been married with two kids by now," with Terri looking at her like she's grown a third arm as she says this. "But, you hate kids," she tells her. "What has that got to do with it?" Pamela says, holding Terri's son Otto in her lap in the most amusingly ignorant sort of way--at arm's length and not very carefully. We can see that this Pamela is not, for all her desire, terribly well-suited to the family life as she is.

She meets someone in the course of her work is an attractive man with a good outlook who happens to know and appreciate her writing. She decides to ask him out, and manages to discover him with a woman and children. Terribly depressed, she finds the best solution is to just end everything, because she is infused with the societal belief that family is the goal of life. She fails--of course, this is a romantic comedy--in a fairly amusing fashion, and spends most of the next day rather surly; she ends up wandering away from an evangelical survey taker, angrily, and does not see the car that hits her. She's not sure what has happened when she opens her eyes to see herself looking down and asking if she's all right.

Strangely, she has run herself over. This woman is her; the same name, appearance, and they even share memories as they test each other's recollection of events. Only this Pamela didn't turn Robert down, and is now Pamela Dickson, with three children. Drury finds herself unexpectedly left alone in this life she has been wishing for, with Pamela Dickson no longer anywhere to be found.

What's interesting here (the essential plot was re-used in the Nicolas Cage flick The Family Man, which, yes, I did see, and enjoyed well enough) is that we're seeing it from a female protagonist's point of view, and the hardships of the relationship she has wandered into the middle of are not simple, easily overcome, or changed simply by her fresh outlook. We can see that it's not the perfect solution to her life; she's used to being her own woman, and it's difficult to lose almost all of that to four other people in her life. It doesn't play out exactly how you might expect, though it all makes perfect sense in the end for the characters.

Certainly my favourite part of the plot is that this alternate universe is never explained or clarified; it's not necessary for Don Cheadle to mysteriously appear and "offer" Pamela this other life, she just stumbles into it with no warning. What some writers don't seem to understand is that simple fact--this is not something we expect to happen. As long as you show that the characters are thoroughly mystified by it, we don't need to know why it happened or who caused it or anything like that. What matters is that it DID happen in the film--let's move on.

As with most romantic comedies, though, it's not a movie I'm jumping up and down to suggest people just "need" to see. There's nothing terribly new here, but it's quite entertaining, and I'm a sucker for Aussie accents. Yes, Rachel is in her natural element this time--unlike her more famous role as Brenda on Six Feet Under--and is not hiding behind an accent that is not hers (though it's sort of mind-bending when you're used to her having an American accent and you keep thinking she's screwing up her actual one, when, it's her actual one) and we get to just revel in a good actor playing with simple material. Without a huge gigantic message or serious drama behind it (though there's a very interesting tug-of-war between individuality and family here that doesn't seem to get addressed often--it seems to be one or the other, despite the fact that the balance is more relevant to reality) she can just get into the part. I think I found myself at one point thinking more of whether Pamela Drury could easily masquerade as mother than whether Rachel was successfully acting the part. A few moments later I realized I'd been neatly drawn into the world and was thoroughly pleased--that's the best feeling, when you are just drawn in, even if it's just a pleasant diversion.

I bought this movie despite some extraordinarily mixed reviews, especially considering the cast we're dealing with. At least, I seem to recall reviews being mixed, I could be wrong.

The first thing that struck me was how cold, spartan and restrained the film is. Most of the sounds we hear, outside occasional ambient ones, are within the frame only. No one says anything from offscreen except, at most, in simple conversation. Lines are short and to the point, yet still feel natural. It's almost sterile, but, no, it isn't Kubrick, it's more a feeling of...inevitability? Everything seems to run just how it should, in spite of the kind of people we're dealing with, in spite of the unusual circumstances, in spite of the many, many possibilities that could factor into such a situation. Yet, still, there's definitely life in it. Despite the basic subject matter, even throughout there's a sense of love and hope, even as things are reeled off that should destroy or at least decrease that feeling. There is no major excitement here; no great big chases or shootouts or big, burly FBI agents (Matt Craven plays the lead agent, and is a quiet, average sort of guy). No big heroes or monstrous villains.

While I am in some ways reluctant to reveal the nature of the plot, the great majority of the movie IS centered on it, so it's difficult to avoid. Wayne Hays (Robert Redford) is a successful businessman married to Eileen Hays (Helen Mirren) who leaves for work one morning, promising his wife to be home at six, and he doesn't show. Eileen calls him angrily hoping he's on the way, apologizes to their guests for his absence and then sits alone waiting for him to return. When the hours stretch too far for her, she calls the police and reports him missing. They soon find his car, no signs of struggle or break-in, with the paper he stopped to get sitting in the back with his bag.

Now we are back to that morning, and we see what Wayne saw--a man approaches his car and introduces himself as Arnold Mack (Willem DaFoe), saying he knew Wayne years ago. He has a manilla envelope and says he was told to show the contents to Wayne. Inside are pictures of Eileen at their pool, which, of course, is not something Wayne is happy to see. Arnold uses this as leverage to kidnap Wayne, and now we know for certain where it is he went that morning. The rest of the movie follows Arnold leading Wayne to a cabin in the woods where his employers are waiting to ransom him, and the parallel of Eileen and the two grown children who make up Wayne's family as they try to meet the demands and process that Arnold requires. We see repeatedly signs that this story is further ahead, as multiple days are spoken of and gone through, while Arnold and wayne are still making their way through the woods that first day. They discuss their pasts on a low level, but nothing terribly revealing about Wayne comes out--or even all that revealing about Arnold.

Even in Eileen's story, while we learn that Wayne had an affair with an employee which has ended--and then that it continued in some fashion afterward, we still don't learn an awful lot about the characters. Yet, these three are so stellar at their craft, we feel we know and care about all three--yes, three--of them very honestly. Where the story goes from here, as I say, feels inevitable, yet is not necessarily what you do or do not expect. It simply is, by virtue of this cold, quiet, minimalistic approach to the plot, writing and filming. It moves fairly quickly, despite the seemingly slow pacing. It's an interesting balance, as things continue to happen yet it seems to be moving in real time at the same time. Perhaps it's a balance between the two timelines, but it feels more like it was just exquisitely crafted; it feels as if someone crossed a movie like In the Bedroom with Ransom, maintained the essential feel of In the Bedroom, as a serious, well-acted, quiet drama, but kept the sort of hopeful, "it's just a movie, even though it feels pretty real," sort of tone that most engaging big-budget thrillers hold. We don't ever feel patronized as viewers, like they're trying to perfectly explain the process of kidnapping and negotiating to us, or like the characters are bigger-than-life caricatures instead of actual characters, yet we don't get that oppressive feeling that a realistic drama tends to have. It was very interesting to see and feel this, and I was quiet pleased--even if I am biased by my appreciation of Willem DaFoe and Robert Redford--and now Helen Mirren, who I don't belive I had seen an awful lot of before--though I do have Gosford Park to look forward to still.