"One Battle After Another"
Paul Thomas Anderson's new action comedy is basically "Big Lebowski" fan fiction with Leonardo DiCaprio capably taking on Jeff Bridges' role of The Dude.
Here’s the opening of my new movie review in Taki’s Magazine:
One Battle After Another is a brainless but fun action comedy by Paul Thomas Anderson, who has a penchant for coming up with bad titles for good movies, like his There Will Be Blood. Even in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, this slapdash tale of a gang of 1970s-style leftist terrorists has been attracting insanely bloodthirsty reviews from ecstatic critics. For instance, Ty Burr exclaims in The Washington Post:
Some movies come along at exactly the moment they’re needed…. [A] strike team of radical activists descends on a border detainment facility by night. They corral the soldiers on duty into a cage at gunpoint, cut the chains holding the gates closed and herd more than 100 men, women and children into a waiting truck to be whisked off to a sanctuary city. The most ferocious member of the crew is a striking Black woman; her White boyfriend [Leonard DiCaprio] is the demolitions expert charged with setting off diversionary explosions…. Whether or not you agree with the tactics of the French 75…it’s bracing to see an overt act of resistance at this particular juncture in American history.
The French 75? What kind of name is that for Marxist bank robbers? (Like everything in P.T. Anderson movies, it’s borrowed from another movie: It’s the name of a cocktail served at Rick’s Café in Casablanca.)
Similarly, Manohla Dargis exults in The New York Times:
There are few filmmakers working today who are as skilled as Anderson, and fewer still who could—with the image of a heavily pregnant Black revolutionary firing a machine gun—create a cry from the heart that’s also a crystallizing image of resistance. It’s one for the ages, wild and thrilling, and every bit as American as the red, white and blue.
In the actual movie, however, DiCaprio’s character looks appalled by his girlfriend recklessly endangering their unborn child in the manner that so excites the NYT critic. Anderson has four children with longtime Saturday Night Live favorite Maya Rudolph. I strongly doubt that Maya practiced tommy-gunning the pigs while pregnant.
Anderson isn’t an intellectual, he’s a creative showman. Not surprisingly, he’s less enthusiastic for leftist murderers than are many of his brainier admirers.
Read the whole thing there.
The French 75 was a quick firing artillery piece developed at the end of the 19th century and used heavily in the Great War. Sounds like the limousine terrorists would be more familiar with the cocktail though.
Steve's review sure doesn't make it sound like a fun action comedy at all...based on the reactions of the critics cited in the piece, it appears it's galvanizing to leftists in their persistent efforts to justify violence against politics they don't like, which is implicitly endorsing violence against supporters of politics in opposition to the left. Like me.
Pre-election I was pretty negative about what the future might look like, even with a Trump win. His first few months in office were fun and pushed some of the negativity away, but now I'm back to recognizing things are going to be ugly.