Do you find the characters in Paul Thomas Anderson films likeable?

PTA often creates extravagant characters with unpredictable behaviour, does this make you enjoy the film more? Or do you find them irritating?

I think PTA does a great job of creating morally complex characters that are hard to pass judgement on one way or the other. Freddie Quel and Lancaster Dodd from The Master for instance, are not necessarily good people but PTA does a great job allowing us to sympathize with them anyway. Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood is one of the most villainous movie characters in cinematic history and yet we understand the root of his awfulness and kind of feel bad for him in scenes like the confession to his lost brother around around the campfire. Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia is disgustingly sexist and yet manages a sympathetic turn as well. Dirk Diggler actually flips this turn, becoming a drug addled mess bent on armed robbery... and we're kind of heartbroken about it.

He's pretty much the best character director alive as far as I'm concerned. Very hard to be annoyed by unique characters portrayed by talented actors in great movies.

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I'm not sure I'd call them unpredictable (relatively, at least), I think some scenes are unpredictable (e.g. the frogs in magnolia) but it's a stretch in my mind to say the characters seem to act randomly. I wouldn't say they were very predictable though.

As far as likable, yes, and I agree with Redwell that PTA is very gifted in this way.

Magnolia is one of my favorite movies of all time precisely because it makes me care about so many people in such a short amount of time. The film is constantly spinning plates and never sticking to one character for too long, but there's a confluence of the individual tensions felt by each and it melds so wonderfully.

I'm terrible at keeping a ton of ideas in my head at any one point, which is why I find magnolia's ability to force my mind to keep every character in my head at the same time so wonderfully addictive.

A clumsy and cliche analogy for this is that the characters in Magnolia are individual notes that form a chord. Which is massively helped by the relatively short focus on each and switching back and forth.

On the flip side, when there's fewer characters, I don't get this feeling and look elsewhere for meaning. I still loved Blood for the dramatic arc, but I didn't find enough in Punch Drunk Love to really fall for it. Lena is one of the few PTA characters I didn't like.

I only two I like of his I really love. There Will Be Blood and Magnolia. I liked Plainview 1000x more than Eli. I liked H.G., and a few others... In Magnolia, I had a lot of empathy for some of the characters, including Tom Cruise. He appears to be a jerk, but once you realize his childhood, it's understandable.

Extravagant characters often form the canvas for some of the best films...God, the characters in Magnolia are a mess, but consistently fascinating.

When I think about my moral compass, I think "What Would Daniel Plainview Do?"

I love every single characters in Hard Eight and it was a very awesome movie. PTA surprise me on this one.

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They're very likable on screen. I love spending time with PTA's characters, because they are interesting to observe. Not sure if that would be the case in real life, though.