Blossoms & Blood

I looked forward to Paul Thomas Anderson's "Blossoms and Blood" (2003), available on the "Punch-Drunk Love" DVD, only to find a bunch of alternate shot and/or deleted scenes from the film collaged together with the harmonium soundtrack from the movie.

If you see it advertised on the DVD, it's not really worth making a fuss over. See it if you can, especially if you loved the film, but it's not as entertaining or odd as that hilarious "Mattress Man" commercial, which is also on the DVD!

No idea why I love this movie but I do. It was very different and kind of quiet to the point of you are watching his actions more than his dialogue and it just worked! Really impressed with it!

I bought the DVD of the brilliant 'Punch Drunk Love' and included on the bonus material disc is a feature title 'Blossoms and Blood'. I am a very big fan of PTA so as any respecting fan would do I viewed this special feature expecting to see something great. The feature is basically a collection of alternate takes and deleted material from the film which are compiled and matched with the Jon Brion song "Here We Go" in this plot-less but very interesting short film. This short piece also features more Jeremy Blake artwork that was not included in the film. Worth a watch but nothing to rave about.

Essentially the offcuts from 'Punch-Drunk Love (2002)', 'Blossoms & Blood (2003)' more-or-less distills the story of Paul Thomas Anderson's best movie into twelve minutes all while using material deemed unfit for the full film. It's much calmer than its counterpart, told entirely with the ethereal stylings of the artistic interludes that occur sporadically throughout that picture (and with none of its chaotic anxiety). There does come a point at which the experience starts to lose its grip on your attention, feeling sort of like something that plays on loop projected on a white-washed wall at an art museum that you look at for a bit and then saunter away from before it actually hits its reset point. That doesn't dampen the effectiveness of this experiment, though, as it's a neat little way to present deleted scenes and alternate takes while forming a pseudo narrative of its own. It's a nice change of pace, but it undeniably lacks substance and impact when compared to the so-called real deal. It's perhaps as good as it could have been, and it definitely has a distinct effect that's worth experiencing, but it's difficult to claim that it's anything much more significant than a suitably strange Blu-ray bonus feature.