Popeye (1980)

I still have the soundtrack on vinyl somewhere around here, but other than "He Needs Me" � so good Paul Thomas Anderson stole it for Punch-Drunk Love � I wish the songs still held any charm for me.

Throughout most of this sequence, draped like a ratty, comfy bathrobe over a rumpled bed, Anderson weaves a song called "He Needs Me," which was recorded by Shelley Duvall for Robert Altman's 1980 Popeye movie, of which I am a lonely admirer.

The film looks good and has its funny moments, but too often one senses Anderson straining to impress, whether by purloining (and misusing) a Harry Nilsson song from Altman's Popeye, or by tossing in yet another surreal, surprising or seemingly inexplicable narrative idiosyncrasy.

The evidence is both self-aware and incontrovertible: Anderson resuscitated Shelley Duvall’s rendition of Harry Nilsson’s “ He Needs Me ” from the 1980 Altman fiasco Popeye as theme song to 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love.

Like Carnal Knowledge (which some consider Nichols’s best film, written—interestingly enough—by Jules Feiffer, who also wrote Popeye , which some consider Altman’s worst film), Closer is self-consciously hip, and like the more organic We Don’t Live Here Anymore earlier this year, both play and film could just as easily have been called The Rules of the Game, because Marber and Nichols (like Larry Goss) generate considerable excitement from watching people betray each other.

The song “He Needs Me” from 1980’s Popeye — with its title phrase, artless and plangent, repeated over and over by Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl — has become something of a career-defining refrain for Paul Thomas Anderson, who made it a motif in 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love and whose films, again and again, are structured around unlikely couples who complement and complete each other.

I would also venture a guess that the director is a Popeye fan – having used an actual song from Robert Altman’s movie version in Punch-Drunk Love , he here casts Joaquin Phoenix as a squinting sailor-man who talks out of one side of his mouth and has a penchant for trying to solve things with fisticuffs.