"It's Not Not Vineland...": One Battle After Another (PTA, Pynchon, DiCaprio etc.)

Picking Up From: Paul Thomas Anderson: C or D?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feOQFKv2Lw4

I do love that they cast an actor with a perfectly Pynchonian real name for this, Chase Infiniti.

Her first role: name holding a lotta currency.

Adaption looking more "loose" than I want it to be. I want to see Zoyd's window jumping media spectacle under the bright lights of a hollywood budget! Trailers are self-serious by nature, hoping that's not representative of the end product.

I thought this was turning out to be not even loosely adapted, but who knows.

Most of the stuff in the trailer looks straight from the book plot-wise, also doesn’t seem that different in tone from IV?

In Vistavision, opening on IMAX screens:

No fear. #OneBattleAfterAnother only in theaters September 26. pic.twitter.com/YxBOcBID5h

— One Battle After Another (@onebattlemovie) June 30, 2025

:D

So, The Brutalist was the first film shot in Vistavision in 60+ years, and now there's another one?

Huh, interesting:

Over the next 12 months, five upcoming films are set to be shot in VistaVision. It's unclear if this signals a lasting revival or just a temporary trend, but for now, projects from Gerwig, Emerald Fennell, Paul Thomas Anderson, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Yorgos Lanthimos are slated for release in 2025 and 2026—all using VistaVision.

i just looked at the wikipedia for films shot in VistaVision and wow at the drop off between 1961 until now. what was even more shocking was that tarantino hadn't directed something on VistaVision!

I imagine sic knows the full score, but IIRC right now VistaVision film stock is easily available and surprisingly affordable compared to other types of celluloid, so it's the best option going for filmmakers who want to shoot on film.

you know i love you but omg you guys go from like zero to rabbithole in like 60 seconds lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQUPdVxZNPk

could we get a Fortnite collab with the extended PTAEU and if so, is Fiona Apple part of the PTAEU so I could play Fiona Apple in Fortnite

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film ‘ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER’ is getting a Fortnite collab. pic.twitter.com/JYKjQaC8ID

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) July 24, 2025

Interesting how the new trailer isn't emphasizing auteur quirk but just putting it out as an action movie with some comedy on the side.

it looks kinda tedious tbh

The latest trailer was better, at least.

I have a feeling it'll be a better Southwest crime/quirk/semi-noir film than Eddington was. But not as promising as Honey Don't.

Forgot that this is coming out next month, not November!

New poster for Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER starring Leonardo DiCaprio

In theaters on September 26th pic.twitter.com/Mh3ATimx00

— Matt Neglia (@NextBestPicture) August 19, 2025

oh i didnt realize it was that soon either! YAY

A note from Paul Thomas Anderson on the film formats available to see #OneBattleAfterAnother.

First Showing tickets on sale today, 8am PT. All tickets available next week. pic.twitter.com/oXAl44XZCS

— One Battle After Another (@onebattlemovie) September 3, 2025

Steven Spielberg says Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio's "One Battle After Another" is "really incredible."

“What an insane movie, oh my God. There is more action in the first hour of this than every other [PTA movie] put together... I have not seen a movie that is so… pic.twitter.com/B3owb5ptVN

— Variety (@Variety) September 8, 2025

The trailer didn't do much for me, but some of these early reactions (just read Demi Adejuyigbe's rave on Letterboxd) are getting me hyped.

Got tickets for a slightly early screening in two weeks, so we'll see what we do.

You go to the screening?

https://xcancel.com/davidehrlich/status/1965392516443930798

well well

I'm not a contrarian but both this early praise and those comparison points are making me side-eye slightly.

Definitely hyped for this.

At the very least it got me to a reread of Vineland, which continues to open up more and more each time.

I read it in May and was to my surprise pretty underwhelmed.

Ehlrich I usually tend to agree with so if he is hyped...but I dunno, the most recent trailer I saw in the theater actually made me less interested then the early ones

I'm rereading it now, and at this point think it might be the worst Pynchon. But I can see it turn into a good film.

For sure. Judicious pruning.

See, after my first read I thought it was pretty weak and my second least favorite Pynchon, just ahead of Bleeding Edge. But, I dunno, something opened up for me on this reread. Not so much plot-wise, but sentence construction wise and some of the descriptions of the landscape. Not terribly surprised though, most Pynchon fans I know report it taking multiple reads to really grok some of them.

I would appreciate a second reading in a few years; in May it felt ponderous like Pynchon rarely does.

On my first read - 10 years ago, 15?! - it became my favorite Pynchon book or at least in the running for that.

Earlier this year I started a re-read and … I couldn’t hang (maybe 25/30 percent through at the stopping point, i think the Vomitones are playing some huge party at a mansion), but recognized aspects of what I’d loved so much time the first time.

Maybe it felt that way because I’m revisiting in this year, of all years?!?

Will probably see the movie but am already preparing myself, mentally, for this to just be a totally separate thing from the book.

I mean, just two of the passages I noted this time:

"...plus flirters, deserters, wimps and pimps, speeding like bullets, grinning like chimps, above the heads of TV watchers, lovers under the overpasses, movies at malls letting out, bright gas-station oases in pure fluorescent spill, canopied beneath the palm trees, soon wrapped, down the corridors of the surface streets, in nocturnal smog, the adobe air, the smell of distant fireworks, the spilled, the broken world."

and

"and the crimes behind the world, the thousand bloody arroyos in the hinterlands of time that stretched somberly inland from the honky-tonk coast of now."

I reread it last fall, I think my fourth time through it in 30 yrs or so, and some of it doesn't work exactly but a lot of key aspects hit me harder now then ever because of *gestures toward everything*

I have greater hope for PTA doing this as more of an "inspired by" like he did with Sinclair's Oil! then doing a straight adaption like he did with Inherent Vice

xpost And to piggy-back on that, there are passages of the book that are as well-written and artful as anything he has ever written and spots that I had to read multiple times to just try and understand what was even going on.

It's jall the flashbacks... There's always flashbacks in a Pynchon-novel - Mason & Dixon is kinda one big flashback - but here they're piled on top of each other and at this point I'm struggling to get through it.

Yeah, the layered meta flashbacks do take some grokking ("oh wait, now this is from Takeshi's view not just DL talking about meeting him"), but that's part of the Pynchon trip so I try not to get hung up on it and ride it out. Usually dumps me back safely.

He, I do love the flashback that changes from DL to Takeshi without informing us that Takeshi has shown up to tell his part of the tale. It's more that the structure of the book is kinda simplistic compared to most of the others. A buildup to a point of no return, then flaschback flashback flashback flashback etc.

It's Pynchon's most succinct and clear statement of the never ending battle with reactionary forces that runs through all his books, especially the way they tempt and co-opt us all.

Oh, AFIpaws...They're getting a 70mm print. Not that a 70mm print lured me to Licorice Pizza, but decisions decisions.

Can't remember the last time I saw hype like this. (Other than Megalopolis obv.)

Actually maybe the last time was TWBB which I found disappointing.

when i saw the trailer in theaters a month or so ago i thought it was v funny & i for one am excited to see it

I want to like this so much, I would describe myself as terrified to see it.

xxp i just went back and rewatched the original TWBB trailer and that thing was absolute catnip for a college kid like me. new one has me wary but i'm genuinely tempted to try and catch a vistavision screening.

Just found out that this film is 2 hours and 40 minutes long, and has a rumored budget of around 150 million dollars. This will either win every Oscar there is, or flop so hard.

Got my tickets for the 28th, so hopefully will see it before I've seen every key moment revisited a dozen times on Twitter.

I just saw that showtimes are starting (at least in my city) on the afternoon of Thursday the 25th, so I may get to one of those.

theres a 70mm showing on the 24th here, tempting even as a non-PTA-fan

Saw a preview tonight. Bow to no one in my Pynchon fanboydom and usually think critics who dismiss his characters as cartoons are missing the point, but thought the Sean Penn character was… too cartoony. Maybe I had too high expectations but though it was v enjoyable I am a little underwhelmed…

That's what my reaction was to Inherent Vice, but I only saw it once.

My review is up here https://www.uncut.co.uk/reviews/one-battle-after-another-reviewed-sensational-dangerous-and-hysterical-take-on-pynchons-counterculture-yarn-151470/

going to see this on vistavision in LA next week

Dana Stevens loved it. I didn't go to last night's screening cuz it wasn't IMAX.

Planning to see this Sunday.

I don't think I've seen an IMAX screening since the days when IMAX theaters only showed nature documentaries. But I do want to see this on a nice screen. So I'm trying to figure out whether to prioritize 70mm vs. IMAX. I saw The Brutalist in 70mm and wasn't particularly impressed by the image quality (compared to a 35mm or digital print). Maybe IMAX is the way to go?

Having just seen it, it's...uneven.

I guess I'm glad I saw this, but I didn't care for it. To what extent might take some time to suss out. I'm pretty certain I'll never see it again, but there are bits that I'm sure will stick with me.

Man, this is why I love this place. Ive seen nothing but piety elsewhere, including from critics I know and trust.

Man, this is why I love this place. Ive seen nothing but piety elsewhere, including from critics I know and trust.

I watch it tomorrow morning

this place also has people who still watch Marvel movies so I take people's film recs/opinions here with the tiniest grain of salt

Your comment can go either way.

i’m seeing it on Saturday :D

The film melted during the third screening of one of the four VistaVision prints, at the Vista in Los Angeles.

uhhhh that’s unfortunate, I’m supposed to see it there monday

from what I’m seeing it seems like they were able to fix it and the rest of the film played normally

Sounds like the good old days at the Scala (the Kings Cross one) when that would happen all the time. Anyway this film sounds kind of bad but there's nothing else to do where I live so I may give it a shot next week. I'm sure you can sense the enthusiasm oozing out of this post.

Yeah, I assume there will be a few seconds at most missing from the scene, maybe less than one. You’ll definitely miss less than we did.

You’ll also enjoy seeing it in a crowd of people who are laughing a lot and politely applauding after set pieces, rather than reading a bunch of grumpy old farts who haven’t seen it and might never do.

We saw it tonight and thought it was a blast. Won't say more for now, but scope, verve, velocity, it's got it all. And the music is great.

Yeah, looking forward to discussion after more have seen it.

Seeing it Sunday. I tend to like ambitious PTA less than other people but I'm still cautiously hopeful.

(felt a bit weird appreciating the score in a film that is pro-human rights and contemptuous of imposed military masculinity, compared to my usual “why does the guy from the boring band make such good scores for films?”weird)

Not much of a spoiler, but Penn's character was so much like Erik Prince in appearance, cadence, and mannerisms, and the other (maybe unnamed) Izod guy sure reminded me of Peter Thiel. And I love how Penn dresses up for the Christmas Adventurers with skinny khakis, a la Tucker Carlson at the RNC, to go with his blue blazer.

The superlatives leading up to Phantom Thread's opening actually made me disengaged from the movie itself, but that happened less so here. Enjoyed this a lot.

Penn reminded me of Mike Flynn.

Relentlessly dazzling - the first 90 is as intense as a one-shot and never pauses. Entire film rides the moment, reminded me of Punch-Drunk Love in its bewildering cadence. Some great performances and it looks SO good.

Gonna watch in 90 minutes.

For once I’m going to see a big movie early enough to be part of the immediate conversation!

Relentlessly dazzling

Your rave and the rave reviews I've read since seeing it kind of get at the contradiction I've been juggling in my noggin'. There is a lot to like, from the performances to the filmmaking, I'm just not sure I liked the movie as much as appreciated the idea of it. Maybe it's because it's constantly nodding to a certain type of movie while subverting expectations through how the story is actually delivered/told? A weird one, that's for sure.

This comes out of left field, but the whole movie brought to mind a bizarro-world Wes Anderson. Secret clubs, schemes, capers, password hijinx, disguises, etc. Plus its uneasy balance of ridiculousness, stylized melodrama and encroaching real-world menace.

Well I think in those qualities it closely resembles Inherent Vice, for obvious reasons!
Mine wasn’t intended as a rave, more a catalog of what I liked about the film. Not quite sure where I’ll land on it.

Yeah, I wasn't a fan of Inherent Vice, but like you my thoughts on this one are a lot more unsettled.

Maybe I just don't like Pynchon, lol.

dr. strangelove was the comparison that came to mind. utter, blinding rage transmogrified into absurd humor. it's too bleak not to laugh. i thought the ending was a little pat.

The ending with Leo is a little pat, and the ending with Penn is a little redundant.

i think my favorite thing the movie does, which i assume is from pynchon but i haven't read enough to know for sure, is tease out the insanity inherent in the baroque, layered socio-political power structures that emerge from and mirror the twisted minds of men who invent obstructions to protect themselves from what they most fear and desire

Random question but is it a very loud movie? Someone wants to take me to IMAX but I’m not sure my ears can take three hours of ACTION NOISES, which is what some of these reviews make it sound like.

I loved Phantom Thread and the one with the Haim girl, but absolutely hated Vice and Master, mostly for Phoenix. But this doesn’t look like any of those.

No, it isn't.

The middle section of the film might get loud.

Three guns and car crashes, but not nonstop or anything.

Sitting in the cinema waiting for this to start. Bad clock management…I missed lunch and only had time for a food court egg roll. Can this movie survive hangry?

Didn't go the other night because it would have been too early to eat before and too late to eat after.

i actually ate one of the vista vision prints

Didn't go the other night because it would have been too early to eat before and too late to eat after.

― Jordan s/t (Jordan)

haha, same problem. I resolved the dilemma by hitting a 10:40 a.m. show this morning.

Would have liked an intermission vs. missing two spots for a whizz

I have thoughts!

Please unleash them!

I’m seeing an 11:45 am show with friends, so I’m thinking big breakfast and snuggling a cliff bar into the theater. Immediately after we’re having an early dinner nearby.

Man, I simply cannot spell anymore

I got up at 5:30 and my flight was delayed three hours so had not eaten anything when the movie got out at 5pm. Just since we’re logging.

I hate eating before movies because 1) food coma or 2) I've also had a bad meal that made me miss 90% of a movie once.

And for long movies, I usually strategically consume a small or medium coffee like an hour or two beforehand and if possible during to keep me awake without needing to run to the bathroom. (Large coffees beforehand is a bad idea for that reason.)

Will probably see this in VistaVision in the next week or two, ideally sooner before the print gets banged up but it's a tough weekend to schedule things.

We went to a dinnertime show and smuggled in negronis and bought a big bucket of popcorn, that got me through the movie fine.

I survived on a mostly empty stomach and, for a third, full bladder.

I’m seeing an 11:45 am show with friends, so I’m thinking big breakfast and snuggling a cliff bar into the theater. Immediately after we’re having an early dinner nearby.

This is a shocking early dinner.

i adore early dinners. like 4-5 pm. snack a little later. n.b. i'm in bed by 9 almost every night. no idea why i'm sharing this on the new pta movie thread.

Kind of ironic that Assata Shakur just died ...

Y'all need to watch more 10 a.m. movies.

Get out in tine for lunch, have the rest of the day

The ending with Leo is a little pat, and the ending with Penn is a little redundant.

I enjoyed this a lot.

Seeing it tomorrow afternoon.

I'm kind of curious if the movie will work for right-wing and even alt-right audiences. Not a spoiler because it's literally the first second of the movie, but I was uncomfortable at the start because if Antifa was the single organization the right makes it out to be, this is kind of what they would look and act like. And Penn's the main villain but, again, drawn in a way that might not alienate a Mike Flynn. Curious to see reviews as they come out (and I assume Armond White will do a year-end "HIM...better than...ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER."

I didn't see Eddington. Did anyone? Was there any right wing reaction to that one?

Yes. I doubt it. What reaction were you imagining?

Dunno, I heard it was politically ambiguous by design, but don't know how successful it was on that front, so don't know if any "side" ultimately claimed it as their own.

Oh, hey, Armond's checked in predictably:

...That passion play is faultlessly enacted by DiCaprio (a whiz at divided consciousness, as in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Penn (who stresses right-wing racist ambivalence just as he stressed gay self-righteousness in Milk), and Taylor (who makes black female pathology a secondary sexual trait as when firing a machine gun while pregnant — a lewd signifier that outdoes everything in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners).

Anderson intentionally provokes the bloodlust of his woke confreres (and Gen Z viewers who know nothing about the Sixties) by celebrating the insipid, heretical, and violent activities of the liberal past and present. Anderson’s title lacks Pynchon’s pith but daydreams a culture of never-ending political obstruction and pandemonium. It is the year’s most irresponsible movie.

In re the ending, I thought Penn’s was kind of silly, but it was worth it to see him act with the smushed face. And I know it was the corniest thing in the movie, but ending with “American Girl” totally got me.

White’s review is what I’d expect. The movie is going to do good box office this weekend, and the right is going to freak out about it promoting left-wing terrorism.

Pynchon's pith.

Jim Hoberman (who didn't like Licorice Pizza) loved this. FWIW he also loved Inherent Vice.

There's been roughly a one up, one down pattern for me when it comes to Anderson's narrative features - the ones I generally like or love a lot alternated with ones that either left me cold or felt uneven and disappointing. (The exception is There Will Be Blood and The Master, back-to-back films that Anderson knocked out of the park IMHO, though I have definite preference for There Will Be Blood.) With that in mind, I hope this one continues the pattern.

i’m seeing this tomorrow

all you grumpy neckbeards better watch out

need to absorb it and maybe see it again but had a great time with this on first viewing. Very pynchonian in to (obviously) with sharp swerves from the cartoonish to sheer dread. Felt some impatience with maybe short shrift given to the characters, it seemed there was no space for anything to breath, but that might clear up for me on subsequent viewings. Thrilling stuff. “I’m gonna have to get kinetic.”

Pynchonion *in tone* that is

Also, really felt a lot of Kubrick in this, Strangelove…but also Eyes Wide Shut somehow.

Hmm, I can see that a little. Also, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in its shaggy California-ness.

So! My review!.

Good review! I agree that the Christmas Adventurers Club is the weakest link in the chain — the white supremacist militants' hideout that Willa is briefly taken to is a more effective embodiment of the idea.

Thanks! In retrospect the performances around the edges attracted me more than DiCaprio's solid turn and Penn's affectations, notably del Toro and James Raterman's.

Yeah, 'tic' was the word I was thinking re Penn as well. Not the best.

I agree that the Christmas Adventurers Club is the weakest link in the chain — the white supremacist militants' hideout that Willa is briefly taken to is a more effective embodiment of the idea.

i think you need both...the 1776 guys are definitely down the chain of power from the CAC. If anything this is what I was getting at with the EWS comparison...how does one effectively portray capital-p Power?

The following of commands, I'd say.

Glad you mentioned “ruthless aide Danvers (James Raterman, who in interrogation has the bland mien of an office park manager). I’d been meaning to look up his name/character. Thought he was fantastic at being an unreadable and unpredictable interrogator.

I guess Raterman knows what he’s doing!

Armond White probably probably doesn't realise that when he says about this movie, that it mocks civility and romanticizes political violence, then that sounds like a 5 star endorsement review to me!

Glad you mentioned “ruthless aide Danvers (James Raterman, who in interrogation has the bland mien of an office park manager). I’d been meaning to look up his name/character. Thought he was fantastic at being an unreadable and unpredictable interrogator.

― the way out of (Eazy),

To answer ryan's question again, THIS is what power looks like.

Yeah he was outstanding, terrifying

All the para-military police guys were good, great faces.

is a more effective embodiment of the idea.

Disagreeing here, too: we see nothing of the second group’s ideology, organisation, or operations, so the film says nothing about the idea. Not that it’s needed: we know these people exist, and the group’s plot purpose is clearly explicated.

But the Adventurers Club are completely written through as one of the main concerns of the text: organisations, and how they can enhance and support individuals’ will into a collective reality — but are susceptible to any weak link of an individual. The French 75 are achieving their goals, causing disruption and spreading their message, until Perfidia’s own ego puts her in a place where her non-revolutionary desire can be leveraged against the group. The underground’s codes and structures sustain beyond the specific group of the French 75, but two decades of functionality founder upon upon one broken stoner. The Sisters provide shelter and funding to those in need, but the worn-down conviction of their leadership has left them without active empathy, and perhaps this lack of awareness beyond their daily operations is what makes them so vulnerable to invasion.

Baktan Cross expands in our viewing, out and out, over and over, until nearly every business and resident in the town is revealed to be a successful aspect of a secret, smooth-running, supportive underground of its own. But it’s entirely dependent on the vision, strategy and unflappable adaptability of the sensei — there are no cells with their own leaders, every decision is passed up to or handed down from him.

And the Adventurer’s Club might seem overblown, on the nose, camp or absurd (ahem ahem Pynchonian) — but the fact of this being made before, yet released after, Trump’s re-election simply underscores that they’re entirely believable. Project 75 is succeeding at deconstructing the government and societal guardrails just eight months in, let alone sixteen years. Their white supremacist utopia having no grander enacting than unbothered formal-dress weddings at home, and anonymous business-park offices by unremarkable rivers, is on par with the absence of aspirations we see in the realised conspiracies around us. Does Tim Smith look like Gavin Newsom, or like Pete Hegseth?

And perhaps most relevant of all, they are not touched at all by the failure of their one rotted plank, and manage to remove him within weeks. That’s what makes the second Penn ending key, as “implausible” as his reappearance on the road might feel in the moment.

(apologies for any typos or erroneous autocorrex, thumbing on a bus)

need to absorb it and maybe see it again but had a great time with this on first viewing. Very pynchonian in to (obviously) with sharp swerves from the cartoonish to sheer dread. Felt some impatience with maybe short shrift given to the characters, it seemed there was no space for anything to breath, but that might clear up for me on subsequent viewings. Thrilling stuff. “I’m gonna have to get kinetic.”

One of the phenomena we've grappled with here and elsewhere -- think of The Death of Stalin -- is how much of evil is enough, what attitude to take towards evil. It depends, right? Seeing the CAC once in alternating medium and closeup shots, with their piss-elegant racism, was enough for me.

I had no problem with Lockjaw's denouement.

It’s something the book is really good on: the agents of the system and also the system itself are senescent, demented, laughable — but they will get you anyway. idk everything with them landed at my screening

Speaking of that and the lockjaw ending, the biggest laugh of the whole film was when he reappeared on the road. I think that and his demise are inspired

The reiteration of their bland meetings, with varying personnel and in different boring spaces, delineates the breadth and smallness of their conspiracy for me.

xp

the agents of the system and also the system itself are senescent, demented, laughable — but they will get you anyway. idk everything with them landed at my screening

Yeah, this is the Pynchon theme, right? The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice (haven't yet read GR).

Pynchon has always been his own comic/abaurdist flavor of noir, while (for me) miraculously never losing the almost gnostic paranoid dark heart of the matter. Not sure yet where I land on PTA’s CAC but I do keep thinking about it…

Noir def. The other genre that always comes to mind is lovecraft style weird fiction, esp in the later books the They of political paranoia is talked about as this this vast unknowable intelligence out there, an insane Old One (when I reread some lovecraft stories a number of years ago I got this in the other direction in a bathetic way, like why is this beyond the limits of mortal understanding superbeing orchestrating a cover-up and forging documents lol)

Also I’m just gonna say it Leo is really good in this. He is just good these days I’m afraid. Penn is also good (understanding the assignment as the kids used to say), del toro and Taylor the standouts but I like all the performances

But the Adventurers Club are completely written through as one of the main concerns of the text: organisations, and how they can enhance and support individuals’ will into a collective reality — but are susceptible to any weak link of an individual.

Conceptually sure, but imo the Adventurers Club scenes are a little too goofy to convey their menace. I think that’s a tonal choice by Anderson, and maybe a case of him being overly deferential to Pynchon, but to me they felt a little out of step. Not a big objection, just if I have to pick a part of the movie that didn’t quite work for me I’d go there.

Ive no objection to Scrunchy Face these days. He brings the movie starness.

It’s a very funny movie, so the goofiness didn’t detract for me: it (and returning to different lineups of Adventurers) underlines how pathetic each of these people and their hate is, and that even in banding together, they’re absurdly exclusionary.

The underground’s mission is focused on advancing the populace, and their codes are constructed to protect the ability to work on that, and derived from expressing it (Gil! Scott! Heron!). The sensei speaks in plain language to his group, and is trusted. The club can only discuss their mission in hidden bunkers, and force each other / themselves to use pathetic kayfabe language as signifiers of their commitment.

(on the latter, viz. maga.)

Deft on the left, for sure. Also I had no idea Dijon was in the movie.

Would the movie have worked if the first 45 minutes was expanded to feature length, and it was sort of told in two halves?

I think it works fine as is, I don't know that the early section needed to be longer. (Apart from the departure of Teyana Taylor, obviously.)

pvmic incoming but:

yo this movie fucking RULES

saw it this morning & completely swept me away, i havent read Vineland but damn if a lifelong obsession with Weathermen, Black Panthers & SLA and 60s counterculture weirdos didnt ground me for almost 3 hours of pure enjoyment

i dug the hell out of it

Love this era of Leo!!

and my god that finally car chase was as exciting as Mad Max x Vanishing Point, just incredibly staged and SO tense ugh just great great great

and the ending made me cry so much

Aw, so glad you loved it

That car chase is really something, he found a whole new way to film one. And the payoff wow.

My son and I just got back from it. A really unusual film, the non-stop unspooling, labyrinthine movement felt very new to me. The whole movie looked incredible, especially those scary rollercoaster shots. I liked how it had this slightly exaggerated view of the world that made it feel like it was one step ahead in the future. The film that kept coming to mind as I watched it was Children of Men.

Yes, the uncertainty of whether this is set in a “now” or the future is fantastically done.

Would the movie have worked if the first 45 minutes was expanded to feature length, and it was sort of told in two halves?

“Would the movie have worked if it was boring and sucked” is a question that probably requires work on the part of the asker, rather than outsourcing it.

Uh oh now I'm hyped to see it tomorrow

more things i enjoyed:

I loved how despite being set contemprarily, the way very 60’s/70’s era locations were being used, so that the bank heist has this very recognizable Patty Hearst/SLA/Hibernia Bank feel … or Alanna Haim in the oldtime-style grocery store with eye-line high shelves so that you CAN see across the store & clock the dude at the entrance

Like it’s not just an anachronism chosen for a look it’s doing a lot of storytelling for you too

And that rollercoaster car chase was so fucking sick
The cuts between the rearview & those terrific low-angle forward views where the camera is at road level … like it’s Spielberg Duel but also that’s George Miller putting cameras on car fenders to immerse you in the speed & imminent danger over ever crest. Car chases are so often so poorly edited and/or unimaginative that it really makes you sit up in your seat when a guy like PTA who’s best work has largely been in rooms can pull such a creative & beautifully, referential & VISCERAL rabbit out of his hat like this

Oh and dont think I wasnt tracking Sacramento streets in that early French75 car chase…the way they were just ripping down I Street smashing through traffic was cool as hell (well til it wasnt)

SPOILERS: I'm not sure it was a great movie, but it's a movie we maybe need now and I liked it very, very much.

As a massive fan of Vineland, I was worried the movie would not use enough of the book, but the movie updated and amplified certain elements of the book. It takes Pynchon's perhaps abstract capital "F" Fascism and makes it very real and current instead of some 60s thing. The shots of the immigrants in cages really hit home. Like Moodles, I thought of Children of Men at one point.

On the other hand, the movie deemphasizes one of the main themes of the book: the incestuous relationship between the underground and the fascists pursuing them. The Teyana Taylor character in the book has a larger role than in the movie and the movie doesn't really address why she does what she does while the book spends a lot of time on this. They touch on it slightly when the Regina Hall character is dismissive of Teyana Taylor's betrayals, then ends up betraying the cause as well.

God damn Teyana Taylor was amazing in this. Viva la revolution, indeed. Benicio del Toro was really good. I was slightly disappointed we didn't get a scene of him using some kung fu, but it's probably better we didn't. The car chases and accidents early on when the bank robbery goes bad were so visceral and the very different ones at the end were such an interesting and tense take on the car chase.

At one point my wife called DiCaprio, "The Little Lebowski."

Like it’s not just an anachronism chosen for a look it’s doing a lot of storytelling for you too

And pay phones and land lines!

We saw it last night and loved it too. The nearly 3 hours flew by. Lockjaw is a great movie villain and Penn plays him like a psycho Popeye.

The whole password thing was a funny take on the kind of maddening call center interactions we've all had.

I liked it as a sendup of the way those revolutionary cells often had incredibly bureaucratic structures and rules carried over from “normal life” and amplified in very bizarre ways

I loved this, top notch performances all around.

One thing which bothered me a little bit, why Lockjaw would want to work for the CAC after his attempted assassination. Did he not see Smith was the assassin or did he think it was a random shooting?

He had never met Smith, presumably

Yeah, maybe. I couldn’t recall if he had met him. Having half your face shot off I would’ve thought would him a bit wary, though maybe he thought it was antifa!

I thought he had met him in the first CAC meeting? I think it's a measure of Lockjaw's desire to be a "superior man".

I thought the password scenes kind of went on too long, but there was some payoff when Willa finally ends her roadside standoff with Bob and gives him a hug without him knowing the password.

fun movie. can’t help himself with the cartoonishness in places

good year for movies

He did say the password when he saw Willa on the road, the next line is "Will no longer be so damn relevant" which he rattled off very quickly (I think he just said "will no longer be relevant")

this was exceptional. I haven't read Vineland since it was published so it is very vague to me, had to refresh my memory with wikipedia and yeah, loosely based is right. Lockjaw actually reminded me of Tyrone Slothrop from GR than anything else.

Re the password stuff

Worth appreciating that this has gags about pronouns and noise triggers that aren’t total cringe, hardly a given from a 55yo rich white dude who hires Jonny greenwood & was doing ironic racism bits in his last film

liked it as one of the modern era elements of the story’s stress-dream propulsion: 2 factor authentication and trying to find a charger while malevolent soldier-cops close in

The book is so much about the Reagan 80s (& pta’s known for period pieces) so I was a bit surprised this was supposedly set contemporaneously but as ppl have noted it’s not really fixed in time, the prologue isn’t the 60s but it isn’t 15 years ago either, lots of modern

whoops, ok why not leave it there. Lots of modern.

I liked the scene when Leo winds up in the hospital and the triage nurse recognizes him and suggests he needs insulin.

Re the loose nature of time: I was thinking of the star wars “used universe” thing - del toro’s car with the automatic seatbelts are 1995 coded but they have iphones; the different colors of CA license plates. Things of that nature.

Just the way the camera follows del Toro as he walks around his "compound."

yeah i love the hospital scene! xpost

Yes there is a lot of older tech explicitly because it’s harder for the surveillance state, I don’t know how to read the ending where pat has an iPhone, but it feels in keeping with the end of the book where ppl are neutralised but together and what to do next

I read it as it's not his battle anymore, and it's time for the next generation to lead the way.

I get that but the fact that they seem to still live together complicates things a bit there right? Just taking the story literally?

the very final scene was actually the only scene that I thought was kind of a let down, seemed a bit glib and hollywood.

Apparently his past of blowing things up was a no harm, no foul situation once his nemesis was gone.

Re the phones, DiCaprio said this in an interview:

Paul writes things in a very sort of untraditional way with what you might’ve expected with his sixteen years later, post being a revolutionary, what that father-daughter dynamic is like. The obvious way to have portrayed that is father and daughter getting along, but it’s an immediate disconnect of generations. This character is completely off the grid, offline, paranoid about society, and there were a lot of conversations of whether his daughter would have a phone.

There was this sort of almost sci-fi world that Paul imagined at one point to get around technology. Like, what if there were no cell phones in this movie? And we met Chase in real life, and of course, she’s on social media, she’s on TikTok. If we’re going to portray the gap and the miscommunication between these two generations, she has to betray him by having a smartphone.

the five films PTA recommended as accompanying viewing:

- running on empty
- midnight run
- the searchers
- the battle of algiers
- the french connection

can def see bits of each of these in OBAO

Running on Empty is on TCM this weekend. A watchable, implausible parents-on-the-lam flick with a wonderful performance by River PHoenix.

Worth appreciating that this has gags about pronouns and noise triggers that aren’t total cringe

This was the one scene that didn't work for me, the one where the daughter's friends show up. It felt weirdly necessary as a movie of our times, but the jokes felt familiar.

(But one off scene in a movie this long makes it nitpicking. And it gave them some zingers for the trailer and ads to let people know there's comedy with the action.)

it also "humanizes" Bob for the right wing asses in the audience

That whole section with Benicio’s “Latino Harriet Tubman” situation is probably my favorite section of the film and really beautifully updates Pynchon’s text to right now.

LD: That was Benicio’s suggestion and Paul loved it. We all loved it. It was really energizing. Like we said, it had us talk to locals, like, “How would they hypothetically operate an extraction?”

PTA: I might have been noodling around with this for twenty years, but Benicio came in to work on his sequence, and he [helped write] the best sequence in the movie in a day and a night. Together at dinner. So, it was always evolving. We had our premise, we had our story points, we had our characters, but there was room for discovery. Within reason.

i loved how Sensei introduced everyone in the house to Bob - just a beautiful humanizing layer amid that chaos of Bob’s panic

Yeah my wife and I were talking about that, it was a great bit of humanizing for everyone.

also: do we think that small pink backpack attached to Bob’s duffle was stuff for Willa?

I’m easy like that but biggest laughs for me were Leo diving to the ground in the dojo and falling off the building and hitting every proverbial branch on the way down. He’s a good physical comedian.

Had a dream about this movie last night!

this ruled

Nice review here (that I would have appreciated more if I had seen more PTA movies, but still)

https://www.theringer.com/2025/09/24/movies/one-battle-after-another-movie-review-paul-thomas-anderson

I thought he had met him in the first CAC meeting?

No, we first meet Smith in the house-bunker CAC meeting.

liked the scene when Leo winds up in the hospital and the triage nurse recognizes him and suggests he needs insulin.

It’s not that she recognises him herself, the entire extraction with intake nurse and insulin and duty nurse and linked bathroom has been set up by the sensei.

the jokes felt familiar

This is also setting up how much Bob will fuck up the codeword contact calls. He genuinely is asking about his daughter’s friend because he wants to get the pronouns right, but he’s so paranoid and bad at talking and self-loathing that he makes any awkwardness of his own everyone else’s problem. He is incapable of modulating verbally from that scene until the domestic coda, where he has become able to express parental concern without lashing out, and to make it clear Willa’s free to make her own decisions despite his concern.

That makes sense. Thanks for that!

two of those CAC guys look exactly alike to me. Tony Goldwin and the other one.

This kicked my ass.

Lining up for a second run at this tomorrow night

two of those CAC guys look exactly alike to me

I was kinda setting someone up to get the two confused, with my Hegseth / Newsom ref upthread :)

btw Kev ppl are queuing up literally around the block 100 minutes before showtime, if picking favoured seats is important to you and time isn’t

\m/

two of those CAC guys look exactly alike to me. Tony Goldwin and the other one.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Sunday, September 28, 2025 9:53 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

sic really interesting posts about how this movie portrays power and its fragility (or lack thereof)

Random question but is it a very loud movie? Someone wants to take me to IMAX but I’m not sure my ears can take three hours of ACTION NOISES, which is what some of these reviews make it sound like.

Saw it in 70mm IMAX - the diegetic sound wasn't noticeably louder than usual, but the score was VERY loud, lots of booming low end that you could feel.

thank you!

Funny there’s a loudness convo, last night’s showing I went to was VERY loud, they should have rolled the treble off

Going to this tonight!

Lining up for a second run at this tomorrow night

This is the first movie in a long time that I want to see again on the big (or bigger) screen. Didn't see it in 70mm, might do that this week.

I've been thinking about seeing it again. I don't think there's 70mm showings near me, is it still worth seeing in IMAX if not 70mm?

Definitely will be going again, this time with my wife (first time was with a friend).

To my surprise, I have no interest watching it again: I got too full the first time. Maybe at home during awards season.

Like I originally posted, my response to this was mixed, but it's still settling in and I'm still thinking about it, which is typically ultimately a positive. Which I think I was/am on the film, *despite* not wanting to see it again? And yet, I sort of do want to see it again, but at the same time I'm not sure how much more I would get out of it on a second viewing, at least so soon.

Hmm, come to think of it there are only a couple of PTA films I've seen more than once, even though I would more or less recommend them all to someone. Ideally someone like Criterion would put out a big box like they just did with Wes Anderson, but I think rights issues alone would make that unlikely.

Two other random movies this one brought to mind were "Raising Arizona" and maybe also that (seen by no one?) goofy bike messenger movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Shannon (the latter another intense twitchy actor I could imagine in the Penn role, were he a bit older/shorter).

Speaking of actors, were a number of the small peripheral roles in this played by non-actors? It gave a lot of the scenes a stolen shot vibe.

i loved how Sensei introduced everyone in the house to Bob - just a beautiful humanizing layer amid that chaos of Bob’s panic

― werewolves of laudanum (VegemiteGrrl), Sunday, 28 September 2025 18:18 (yesterday)

And also that for Bob this is a world ending catastrophe, for St. Carlos, it is just a Friday night, it really is just one battle after another.

I loved it, I was wary cuz I love the novel and didn't love PTA's last Pynchon adaptation but this, as lots of people have pointed out, is more like Pynchon fan-fiction (complementary). It is always going to be a little slight compared to the novels, but that's fine.

The ending was maybe too upbeat? But also the needle-drop there absolutely pierced me.

Jim Downey with maybe the funniest line & delivery in all of American cinema.

Saw it in IMAX, which isn't my preferred premium format but thought it looked & sounded great, the car-chase had me nearly queasy, which I am sure was the point.

I vastly preferred this to PTA’s Inherent Vice, though in fairness I should watch that again at some point

The ending was maybe too upbeat? But also the needle-drop there absolutely pierced me.

Same. I grinned, couldn't help it. It definitely felt like a Hollywood ending, but I didn't mind, it was kind of a gift to the characters and the audience.

And subversive in its own right, on the nose irony aside, with proud dad sending off his revolutionary daughter into battle to the beat of that particular American anthem. Like, "go get 'em, girl! Don't forget your gas mask!"

I know Anderson has been referencing a bunch of movies and filmmakers in interviews, from The Searchers to Midnight Run. Has he mentioned Costa-Gavras yet?

I mostly want to see this again because it felt like there was a ton going on with the cinematography and editing, but I couldn't really focus on that because I was trying to take in the actual plot.

Like I originally posted, my response to this was mixed, but it's still settling in and I'm still thinking about it, which is typically ultimately a positive. Which I think I was/am on the film, *despite* not wanting to see it again? And yet, I sort of do want to see it again, but at the same time I'm not sure how much more I would get out of it on a second viewing, at least so soon.

Was waiting for another twist here but still 10/10 vintage JiC post, excited to see what happens next

otm

need JiC’s eddington take next

Ha! That's easy, no interest in seeing that one, sorry.

Speaking of actors, were a number of the small peripheral roles in this played by non-actors? It gave a lot of the scenes a stolen shot vibe.

Yeah, the nurse in the hospital, the scary interrogator linked up above, and I forget others I've seen mentioned.

he gave it in this thread already

also: do we think that small pink backpack attached to Bob’s duffle was stuff for Willa?

I wondered if it was meant to suggest that he hadn’t updated his abandoned-toilet go-bag in ten years, so it was still a tiny kiddie backpack for her, or that he had updated, but he’s so shambolic that he just tied a bunch of stuff he forgot on the outside in another bag. Either works.

xp re JiC

this movie was everything Eddington wanted to be and failed miserably at.

I also thought it was way better than Vineland, at least the 180 pages or so of Vineland I could get through before giving up.

agree with the positive vibes here. so glad PTA made another straight up exciting movie again

I’m finding myself casually trying to talk coworkers and friends into seeing this

so glad PTA made another straight up exciting movie again

https://i.ibb.co/qMdGDHKh/IMG-0209.jpg

and maybe also that (seen by no one?) goofy bike messenger movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Shannon (the latter another intense twitchy actor I could imagine in the Penn role, were he a bit older/shorter).

I saw it: Premium Rush. Weird comparison, but I get it!

xp lol. and i do like Licorice Pizza and that scene in particular!

for a second I thought this was a reference to The Bikeriders, which certainly featured Michael Shannon and others being twitchy and weird

xp

unlike, say, ILX

I'm not aware of Michael Shannon being twitchy and weird on here, although it would be fun to get him to drop by for some REM stanning, he'd fit right in!

will never understand people shrugging at Inherent Vice...one of the great melancholy hangout movies. maybe still his best.

excited to see this again today, since my feeble brain has trouble processing everything on first viewing.

Yeah Inherent Vice is one of my deep faves!

This new film has sparked lots of PTA discussion on the wider internet, which means I am now learning just how hated Inherent Vice is. It is an uneven film and Joaquin Phoenix has a fair amount of clunky or overly mumbly moments, but I come back to it quite often because it has such a good vibe overall and plenty of great scenes.

I still need to watch Inherent Vice, it's the only PTA I haven't seen. I was ostensibly waiting to read the book first, but I got about halfway through the book and drifted away from it and haven't gotten around to the movie.

But we did rewatch Hard Eight the night after seeing OBAA, which was really interesting to go back to. Both a much smaller film and a rougher one in many ways, but it's notable how much of his thing is already present — the fractured quasi-family relationships, the problematic-but-loving father figure, and especially the way it uses music and the energy of the cinematography.

With Inherent Vice I think it’s partly just that I love the book so much as its own thing

I fell for PTA with Hard Eight more than Boogie Nights. More traditionally '90s indie, but I thought, if this guy can get the performance he did from Philip Baker Hall, then he's a talent.

Liked it. It's better than Vineland, I think. As people have pointed out, the last car chase is incredible. I also thought Steven Lockjaw was amazing. Yeah, Sean Penn is overacting, but at least in a different way than he usually does, and the costuming and hair was incredible. He looked like Jack from the Tekken games, and one of those old ones where he was really blocky and pixely.

I don't think it's a masterpiece or anything, and if it wins the Oscar it's a step down from Anora, but there's a lot of good things in it. And it's a better Pynchon adaptation than Inherent Vice, I think. PTA never found a way to translate the aesthetics of a Pynchon novel, so it makes more sense to more roughly turn it into an action film. Especially when the book is as fragmented and unsatisfying as Vineland. If he did the same thing with The Crying Of Lot 49 I wouldn't accept it.

xp yeah Philip Baker Hall is great. At least as deserving of an Oscar nod as Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights, but PTA didn't yet have the hype sufficient to propel that.

He looked like Jack from the Tekken games, and one of those old ones where he was really blocky and pixely.

lol amazing pull

Anyone else think Penn resembled Martin Short in some abstract way?

I had the same thought, I'll never read a Pynchon book and most Americans will never read any book, so good on him to make something so palatable (though I'm writing that from a bubble of letterboxd etc).

I really liked it, it's in the better half of PTA films for me but falls short of his very best like Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood. FWIW I think Licorice Pizza is by far his worst film so I was pretty cautious going into this one.

Honestly hearing about the Vistavision screwiness and dislike of $27.50 tickets and $12 parking and disinterest in being an AMC member means I just went to see it at a strip mall AMC and 100% enjoyed the plain regular digital screening. I wouldn't worry too much about seeing it in some other format to be honest.

Inherent Vice for me is like Long Goodbye crossed with Fear & Loathing, the stoned paranoid fuckup vibes are so perfect & epic I coukd watch it forever

i have not ever understood why ppl dont like it

fkn squares, man

I should give Pynchon more tries, but I always leaned toward Dale Peck's assessment:

The US literary world can be divided into two camps: those who think Thomas Pynchon is a very clever guy, and those who also think he’s a great writer. As it happens, I’m of the former camp. While I admit that Pynchon’s writing is packed with all sorts of ideas, ultimately the novels strike me as more crudités than smorgasbord: the appetisers keep coming (and coming, and coming), but the main course never arrives. Pynchon’s hallmarks are his tentacular – I might almost say his amorphous – prose, which can and does snare just about any philosophical concept or pop cultural phenomenon in its grasp; and his sense of satire, which can be awfully funny if your taste runs to broad humor.

The cartoon names and the reality of the immigrant camps and the police state here was a successful balance, rather than the performances being as cartoonish as the names. (And again, I say this saying I should give Pynchon more tries now that I'm grown up.)

Anyone else think Penn resembled Martin Short in some abstract way?

I know what you mean, like his movements were out of Clifford (yet he looks the bad guy from Avatar).

I really thought those were the least connectable films I could have said in the same sentence but just read the beginning of Clifford takes place in the year 2050, so...

Penn has had that burly doorstop HGH RFK Jr. look going on for a while now, right? He didn't beef up for this role?

I came to Pynchon after having first read Infinite Jest, and I was like, oh I see. (They're very different writers, but no way to escape Pynchon's shadow on that book in particular and DFW in general.)

I agree with Peck inasmuch as I prefer Pynchon in cracker-sized portions (Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice).

Penn's performance mostly just reminded me of Vince McMahon.

That same build!

I’ve seen the McMahon comparison pop up in a few places and yes, 100%.

When watching I kept thinking that Sean Penn really went hard for this role for sure, hitting the gym, embedding with platoons, etc.

He really worked those upper lip muscles.

the walk was hilarious

just read a critic say Jim Varney lol

Inherent Vice for me is like Long Goodbye crossed with Fear & Loathing, the stoned paranoid fuckup vibes are so perfect & epic I coukd watch it forever

i have not ever understood why ppl dont like it

so thoroughly otm. his best movie. some scenes in it (doc lighting a joint with sasha’s name written inside it and her image/memory flickering both to the surface of his mind and the film like a double exposure) are just staggering filmmaking

complemented by Josh Brolin and a banana.

YES <3

It was over the top but roided out racist colonels with a thing for getting sexually humiliated probably would develop some tics along the way

this absolutely ruled. amazing pacing. felt like it was 90 minutes long

i can't remember much of the movie besides, like, the smell of the ocean in venice beach, but the novel inherent vice was such a great and haunting entertainment and it found its way right into my heart. i'm a small potatoes guy when it comes to reading attention span so i haven't done the longer pynchons yet (except gravity's rainbow) but i just have to say my god he is an undeniably great writer and dale peck has a pecker up his butt.

i'm going to rural western colorado for the weekend and i think we're gonna see this out there - should be a trip tbh. you guys got me way psyched.

just read a critic say Jim Varney lol

This is the brooding, twisted Ernest reboot

Gravity's Rainbow is the best book ever.

I rewatched Knife's Out the other day, and had forgotten how it had a great Gravity's Rainbow joke.

Gretchen Felker-Martin’s review is good:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/139949721

The slog of revolutionary action is the film’s backbone, the volatile mixture of selflessness, self-aggrandizement, anger, despair, and conviction which produces revolutionary fighters and drives them to keep pushing the boulder up the hill. The passing of revolution’s torch from the passionate but selfish Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and the increasingly complacent Pat to their daughter, Charlene, is just one more extension of the film’s preoccupation with the libidinal nature of both state violence and armed rebellion. Rebellion is hot-blooded and horny, a desperate assertion and re-assertion of life’s fundamental value and the glorious release of freedom. Empire is brittle. Stagnant. Self-destructive. It cuts and culls without planting. It lives in cubicles and bunkers, in conference rooms and air-conditioned SUVs. That Anderson and cinematographer Michael Bauman have created perhaps the richest tapestry of different shades of white I’ve ever seen in a film can hardly be an accident.

Another good description of the penn performance in that review too

Thinking about the different models shown in the film, I agree with discussion upthread about Sergio's whole aid network — it seemed pragmatic and clever, adaptable and survivalist, and crucially built on people caring about each other. He was the actual most capable person in the whole movie, but he did it with a whole community of support.

sic can you say more about how perfidia's "non-revolutionary desire can be leveraged against the group"? i don't see this - her desires all seem revolutionary, anti-authoritarian etc to me

like, i don't see her as a "rotten plank" or a weak link, except to the extent that she got caught

Well, she does name names, no?

Really liked it...apart from the soppy letter.

Well, she does name names, no?

Which is kind of a motif. *Everyone* in this movie, when caught, names-names. Perfidia, Regina Hall, Gringo Coyote, Willa's friends ... everyone turns rat when the screws get tightened.

lol at the distribution of Google user ratings.

https://i.imgur.com/Go1H0Lx.png

Oh boy https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/sep/29/jezebels-race-kink-and-cardi-b-in-one-battle-after-another-black-women-are-still-stereotypes-paul-thomas-anderson

She got Junglepussy's name wrong in the original draft lol credible

JiC otm! yeah everybody names names. i thought sic was talking about something else, but i wasn't sure what

a more plausible explanation would have been that her commitment to the cause made it necessary to put the revolution first? Ie, the same reasoning male ideologues have been using to justify neglecting their families for time immemorial? But no, Anderson went for extreme horniness instead. This is a choice.

i didn't read perfidia's walkout scene as a manifestation of horniness at all. i read it as perfidia feeling trapped by this new mother role she had, and particularly by pat's neediness for her to play it, all amplified by a determination to live as a revolutionary, a non-traditional, non-conformist, anti-establishment woman. i've never been in this position but it's not hard to believe that many women have been in this place, black, white, horny or not - trying to square those two worlds

and like, even if you're not a revolutionary

I think Perfidia's character is a thrill seeker who runs away when consequences come around

or that too - i mean there are a lot of different reasons she feels what she feels. "horny" pretty far down the list

her mom asks pat skeptically - "what are you going to do about this baby?" and he has no answer bless him, probably the first he's really thought about it

the jealousy she felt for newborn Willa is a very real thing -Mothering isn’t something that just magically happens to a woman when she becomes pregnant. It ain’t fairydust. when those “natural motherhood” feelings don’t come It can be deeply isolating! like it was for Perfidia. and so she sought more selfish, destructive ways to stay connected, to feel her power & feel like she was desired. And naming names puts Lockjaw on the trail of the 75 and keeps him focused on her, and thus away from Willa. She’s still sacrificing the biggest part of herself. It’s not nothing.

I thought it was really good to show mothering like this because while women talk about it among themselves, the culture at large doesnt talk about it nearly enough.

The mothering jealousy and the conflicts to live as a revolutionary after giving birth were tightly packed within a minute so it was a hard to give this concrete read The Guardian article (which is just this v Guardian middle class angle) is placing on it.

VegemiteGrrl otm.

The Guardian article raises some fair questions, but I'm not sure she lands very sturdy critiques. (It's kind of funny to criticize PTA for naming Junglepussy after herself.)

Happy to see fellow Vicers pop up on the thread. We will start a movement.

Second viewing the “kinetic” pleasures are strong with this movie—and that kinetic line indeed seems to announce Anderson’s own intentions here. Love it.

The “naming names” really is persistent and I’m not sure what to make of it. Second viewing overall felt less, uh, approving of the revolutionaries. Jungle Pussy’s fear and horror at the gunshot, interrupting her performance, really struck me this time.

I took the movie's tone as broadly sympathetic to the revolutionary ideals but wary of means and motives.

So this is playing at the 4DX theater here, and I'm kind of tempted to go. That's the theater where the seats move around in sync with the film and they squirt water in your face at strategic moments. This seems like a weirdly good movie for it.

This film is overwhelming enough but go, report back, I want to know what the car chase is like in 4DX.

barftastic!

In the book, the Perfidia character (called Frenesi) very clearly gets postnatal depression, and it's not really connected to anything, but kinda one of my favorite little parts of the book. I like that they kept it in the film. It can happen to everyone, having children suck. It's the best thing in the world, but it's so awful.

“Let’s take a selfie”

Loved the second watch, but was on the edge of my seat the whole time again. Has anyone asked whether “Chase Infiniti” might be a pseudonym for one of PTA’s and Maya Rudolph’s kids?

“here’s this white guy, didn’t do any of the work, i did all the work, and now he’s swanning around like parenthood is the greatest thing ever, well time to let him do the work if he really loves being a dad so much”

speaking of work what “work” does lockjaw ever actually do. granted he mobilizes entire units, assassinates people, goes on immigration sweeps but all that is cover for his own personal issues - flexing his power of command to board up the holes in his psyche

Chase infinity is absolutely not one of their kids

"Infiniti uses her middle name as her surname. She was named after the Batman Forever (1995) character Chase Meridian, played by Nicole Kidman, and Buzz Lightyear's line "To infinity and beyond" from Toy Story (1995).[2]"

One of PTA and Rudolph's kids *is* in the movie, tho, as one of the weed-growing nuns.

ah, fair enough, I thought he might have been being coy about “waiting” for the right actor

the jokes felt familiar

This is also setting up how much Bob will fuck up the codeword contact calls. He genuinely is asking about his daughter’s friend because he wants to get the pronouns right, but he’s so paranoid and bad at talking and self-loathing that he makes any awkwardness of his own everyone else’s problem. He is incapable of modulating verbally from that scene until the domestic coda, where he has become able to express parental concern without lashing out, and to make it clear Willa’s free to make her own decisions despite his concern.

― fall of the house of urrsher (sic), Sunday, September 28, 2025 6:32 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think this is the right read of this scene, which I found extremely funny. “you cool??” his admonishment of the kid for knocking like a cop was great

we’re all familiar with the uptight conservative dad trope and i think this movie did an admirable job of characterising a “lefty crank jerk dad who is also kind of adorable” - an archetype with a lot of real world examples ime

yeah he’s just a shut-in crank. lots of real world examples indeed. . .

I’ve seen some call him “conservative”, which is not correct. he’s grown complacent, and isolated, but his politics are clearly still radical

I can totally imagine Hegseth watching a reel of just Sean Penn parts of this and finding it an utter inspiration, including the ending.

going to see this again for a 2nd time this afternoon :)

posters itt singularly propping up hollywood

Meant to say I thought there was at least one scene in this which had been temp-scored with “Pyramid Song” so PTA asked Jonny to write another with similar vibes. Not a complaint!

Yep, very similar piano chords!

Bit near the end was very like "burn the witch" also

xxpost yeah i noticed that on this rewatch

anyway my big takeaway from this 2nd watch is that it still rules

def need to rewatch this week. it seems like an endlessly rewatchable movie

i want to see it once a week

Coppola weighs in:

I went a few days ago to a theater in Rome so I could see Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER with a big audience. The fact that my hearing’s not so good, and the subtitles were in Italian, made the experience challenging. I am a fan of PTA’s unique films, beginning of course with BOOGIE NIGHTS, and one of my all-time favorites, PUNCH DRUNK LOVE, along with PHANTOM THREAD, THE MASTER, and recently LICORICE PIZZA. Something I love about his films is that he allows you to form your own opinions without diminishing his own.

Much like a Kubrick film, I would like to see this a second time…

I love the fact that it was an action story set in what’s really going on in America today, a fictional thriller with a setting that is the real thing. I think one of my misunderstandings came from Sean Penn’s character “Lockjaw” and not being sure exactly who he was. His weird name made me link him immediately to Kubrick’s General Buck Turdgidson as played by George C. Scott, a military type but lower level so he could rise through up the ranks, making Colonel and not the big chief of all military matters.

For me, after one audience viewing, I felt that just as things were getting going, there came a 16-year pause. Although now that I know that, for subsequent viewings, I will be able to enjoy focusing on the characters and all the memorable performances of Leo, Sean, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Tony Goldwyn and Chase Infiniti.

It’s a film I want to see a second time: the problem with my hearing no doubt played a part in my confusion on certain things, but then the film emerged into the love story that it is; father and his one daughter, and as you can imagine, very moving to me.

there came a 16-year pause

Francis awakens, Rip Van Winkle-esque, to realize he's sitting at the bottom of a thoroughly risen sea.

Any movie that loses its pacing after a dazzling opening can now be "Just as things were getting going, there came a 16-year pause."

Except it didn’t lose its pacing at all idk wtf Coppola’s on about

He actually says he liked the father-daughter story. Sounds like it was all just a lot for him to keep up with.

Megalopolis director declares PTA film "hard to follow"

lol

Just had a student in my film class remark that OBAA is the film Megalopolis wanted to be.

my wife heard a resoundingly positive review of this on one of her podcasts the other day and was thinking “oh we should get tickets!” right up until the part where she was reminded it was a PTA film and was like BIG NOPE

just wanted to share that

lol - she didn't even like Boogie Nights or something like that? there's quite a few films to parse

you should tell her that PTA films are good!

Last (x) Movies you are going to Avoid

I think the Coppola complaint was more about getting your head into the web of relationships and then the reset button is pressed, with only 3-4 characters continuing and two of those with different names! As someone who struggles at times with faces and relationships I can empathise - the second viewing was a much greater pleasure with all of that stuff bedded in beforehand

if any film could get away with a title card 45 minutes in it’s this one

3 back to back title cards with calligraphy decoration, each one showing for 30 seconds, accompanied by organ music or gtfo

I think the Coppola complaint was more about not being able to hear the dialogue because he’s deaf, and not being able to read the subtitles because he doesn’t speak the language, but I only think that because it’s what he typed

(and also specifically says he thinks he’ll track all that better on rewatch as Matt did)

Reflecting more on it I thought of Potemkin and Faulkner. The former as a film depicting groups of people fighting each other to get things to go their way. In that sense, re-watching to track characters feels a bit besides the point to me, even if the film gradually has to zone in on specific characters there wasn't this shape, or much psychology, to them.

Well this film inspired me to watch THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS tonight and I feel my life is richer for it

Wonderful take from Adam Nayman

https://www.theringer.com/2025/09/24/movies/one-battle-after-another-movie-review-paul-thomas-anderson

I think PTA films are quite diverse. I don't think this film is much like Magnolia, or Hard Eight, or Boogie Nights, and I don't think those films are much like each other either. So when people say they don't like his films, I'm not sure what they're saying; he's not like Wes Anderson, with a very strong directorial aesthetic stamp.

I suppose if one didn't like*any* of his film then PTA would be the unifying factor

i really enjoyed this. impressive tone-mixing between the realistic/scary and the heightened/goofy, which worked for me but i can see how other people might rub up against that element.

the one element i wasn't sure about was the greenwood score. i've liked his scores in the past (especially phantom thread) but this felt a little greenwood by the numbers and also a bit overbearing (which seems to be a trend in film scoring right now). might change my opinion on a second viewing.

maybe this was discussed upthread but is there any consensus about when this movie takes place? i had read that after the flash-forward it's supposed to be the near future, but there's nothing futuristic (the trackers are presented like a futuristic element but could easily exist now), and the french 75 group felt like something out of the '70s. i'm guessing the answer is just "it's vague and doesn't really matter," which is fine

I took the later scenes to be "the present" more or less, which puts the earlier scenes in the late 2000s. But also it kind of makes the point that it doesn't particularly matter when it does the "16 years later, not much had changed" stitch.

one review i read placed the first part of the movie during the obama administration. based on what, i'm not sure.

unless it's just subtracting back 16 years from the present

Also no real effort to age anyone up or down to my eyes, tho you see the effect of the intervening years on bob/pat in other ways (p funny that they say he’s 42 in the present day) lockjaw looks exactly the same in both sections

Bob said he was born in the 80s at one point.

yeah 26-year-old Bob has white hair in his beard, which would have been trivial to touch up if they had any interest in distinguishing ages

what time is it?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/flavor_flav_made_the_clock_his_signature_accessory.jpg

Bob said he was born in the 80s at one point.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, October 2, 2025 10:05 AM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

wasn’t this at the police station? I think that was meant to be understood as him not providing them information

Also no real effort to age anyone up or down to my eyes, tho you see the effect of the intervening years on bob/pat in other ways (p funny that they say he’s 42 in the present day) lockjaw looks exactly the same in both sections

― GY!BP (wins), Thursday, October 2, 2025 10:02 AM (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I liked that they didn’t really bother aging people up or down. wasn’t really distracting at all. when did he say he was 42 though? I must have forgotten that

what time is it?

Time doesn't exist, yet it controls us anyway.

If Bob is telling the truth about being 42 and born in the '80s, the second part of the movie could be anywhere from 2022 to 2031. I sort of like the idea that it's a little bit into the future. But of course that still implies that the first part takes place in 2006-15.

Ultimately, I think it doesnt matter, and one reason I prefer OBAA to Eddington as far as movies that are "about" the present historical moment is that OBAA is less specific in its references. That ambiguity also subtly conveys that some of the things that make the movie feel oddly topical have in fact been part of American history for many years: "Sixteen years later, the world had changed very little."

wasn’t this at the police station? I think that was meant to be understood as him not providing them information

― brony james (k3vin k.), Thursday, 2 October 2025 bookmarkflaglink

He was playing around with his name to the cops but don't remember them asking him his age.

idk when it comes up, but someone (Leo or otherwise) def says he's 42 at some point.

the thing that helps OBAA is that even while it’s contemporary, it’s fictionalized to the point where you don’t need to fixate on “when” it’s happening really?
it’s just a handwavey Then and a handwavey Now … and the movie contains enough plot & character to situate you & let the action of the movie carry you

or at least that’s why it works for me

i think it would be a very different & less successful movie if it were trying to ground itself in 2020’s or whenever “period-specific detail” too much.

and the throwback 70’s elements i think nicely (and gently) evoke the Pynchon of it all, again without getting super bogged down

one reason I prefer OBAA to Eddington as far as movies that are "about" the present historical moment is that OBAA is less specific in its references. That ambiguity also subtly conveys that some of the things that make the movie feel oddly topical have in fact been part of American history for many years: "Sixteen years later, the world had changed very little."

I also prefer OBBA qua movie, but I think Eddington's specificity is one of its strengths...the data center in the closing credits is, to my mind, a more credible and specific operating force--uh let's say its more "material"--than the the amorphous ideological caricature of the CAC.

I mean it’s adapting an 80s novel, the point is it’s always now, over and over. The film is entirely present tense, in the moment, more or less continuous. There are days and nights but few (any?) ellipses apart from Perfidia’s trial.

Yeah asking when this is taking place or characters’ age is really missing the point

oh and her whole pregnancy, I guess I’m overstating it as usual

i really am not fixated on the time period and am happy with it being an ambiguous now, but it is funny that the diegetic pop songs in the later period of the movie (that i remember - mo bamba and shut up and dance) are not particularly current. i feel like shut up and dance might still get played at a high school dance now but mo bamba seems unlikely

Yeah, I think this movie is designed to be ambiguous/timeless. Contemporary cell phones and flip phones and land lines and pay phones all sharing the same space/world. Iirc I came across something jokingly praising PTA for daring to make a movie with cell phones in it at all, something his pal/peer Tarantino (for example) has managed to avoid. Incidentally, I saw a claim that none of Tarantino, Coens, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Scorsese or Spielberg have made a movie set in the present day since smartphones were invented? I haven't checked.

Speaking of which, it reminds me of that brilliant bit in "Death Proof" when the car chase in this very '70s-styled film spills out onto the main road, and suddenly this retro movie collides (literally and figuratively) with all these modern mini vans and whatnot.

he uses pay phones and shitty cell phones bc he's paranoid about being tracked. again, not arguing against it being vague timewise but that's not just an artistic touch.

ncidentally, I saw a claim that none of Tarantino, Coens, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Scorsese or Spielberg have made a movie set in the present day since smartphones were invented? I haven't checked.

Seems to be true of everyone but the Coens, since Burn After Reading came out a year after the iPhone was released (though was filmed only a few months later). Also, Honey Don't! is set in the present-day if you're counting the solo films. There is some debate about when Fantastic Mr. Fox takes place, though.

Weren't there cellphones in Kill Bill?

the fact that payphones barely exist at all in present day did make that stick out but I didn't overthink it

The Departed makes fantastic use of mid-2000s technology (hidden texting).

There's a cellphone in Death Proof. Green light from a little screen and rain is pouring down outside, it's very beautiful. Very unlike a smartphone.

Weren't there cellphones in Kill Bill?

― whimsical skeedaddler (Moodles), Thursday, October 2, 2025 1:40 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

there’s a cell phone in pulp fiction!

Bob specifically uses a 1G cellphone because Billy Goat briefs him to sixteen years earlier; that one’s not paranoia, as shown by Lockjaw’s kidnap squad immediately getting a trace on Willa’s phone during the escape.

there’s a cell phone in pulp fiction!

Are you posting to me on a cellular phone?! I don’t know you, who is this, don’t come here, I’m logging off! PRANK ILX0R, PRANK ILX0R!

what i really want to know is what model phonecharger that is and what voltage and where would he purchase it do you think and would he have paid cash idk its pretty interesting

jk i do not want to know this also rmde

It was even a charging CRADLE which made my eyes bug a little

what a great movie no tricks baby just straight hollywood magic

They fooled you that's the con

fool me once shame on you

"semen demon" ended me btw

that was actually the *one* moment I thought was a bit too wink-wink. it is a great line delivery though

I couldn't understand how PTA figured out my gay online name

the editing, the timing, the way lockjaw has built his pathetic little story up, everything

later you realise that the top brass has just been toying with him

you’re like i can’t believe he just said that, is that something these guys say, is that a thing with them?? like a supposedly real phenomenon they have developed slang for

i love the christmas adventurers club they seem like great guys

this was a great film in broad strokes but also in detail like dicaprios style of communication with young latino men

also I love that the Christmas Adventurers note that they recently lost a dear member last name KRINGLE lmao

btw salute to pta who couldve done some sneaky both sides bs with the politics of this film but he absolutely did not he played it straight and told it like it is

fun fact: the mansion for the second Christmas Adventurers meeting is in Sacramento: it’s the mansion Reagan preferred to live in back when he was first Governor of California, (chosen over the actual Governors mansion - before they built a whole new mansion even further out of town) — and if there are tunnels under that mansion to the Capitol that’s at least a 3 mile walk lol

another nice detail dicaprio has a tunnel and then del toro has a tunnel too fascism has altered the built environment its made sneaks out of everyone, and then christmas adventurers have a tunnel theyre for sure sneaks bigtime

lol xp more tunnels

i love the way Benicio drops down that trap door and the rug unrolls so perfectly overtop

just delightful

That got applause in both my screenings

haa there were three people at my theater

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us0mySGpH4w

how did they get the whole cast together for this???

Del Toro deserves another Oscar, what a year for him.

hes so good, the coolest guy

Courage, lagoon

i did the fist in hand marital arts bow to the screen

that YT thing I posted is pretty skippable btw

blessing my tv remote sensei style now

Was it here or somewhere else that I read the "Latino Harriet Tubman" scenario was all Benicio's idea?

it was posted upthread, wild shit got to love the collaboration

That got applause in both my screenings

― fall of the house of urrsher (sic), Thursday, October 2, 2025 5:33 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

think this is the second time you or someone else has mentioned applause during a movie, not a fan of that behavior personally! there were a couple of moments in my screening where some scattered claps broke out but they were quickly shushed

shushing is worse than applause imo

I didn’t do the shushing! though movie theaters should be quiet except for spontaneous sounds like laughter and gasps, so I support shushing

First screening, audience silence n a Friday night. Second screening on a Tuesday night, a fair bit of scattered laughter throughout, some a bit performative I thought. Mostly for the Christmas Adventurer stuff.

clapping is fine, perhaps an isolated HELL YEAH
no chatting or phone noises

My theater had maybe 10 people, including one person drunkenly talking through the last hour of the film. Clapping would've been a substantial improvement.

i love the way Benicio drops down that trap door and the rug unrolls so perfectly overtop

thats what the youth calls "wes anderson coded"

fp'ed you for that

lol. Shame PRA didn’t get Richard Ayoade to be one of the French 75.

PTA!

Paul Thomwes Anderson

there's an instagram reel going around where del toro talks about how much he listened to Can while filming this movie.

this man truly is a sensei

There's a whole bunch of viral videos from what looks like the same sitdown session of him and DiCaprio getting interviewed by a revolving door of journalists. I was kind of surprised that one of them showed del Toro picking the Rolling Stone's Tattoo You as his all-time favorite album - I don't know any Stones fans who would even think of picking it as their favorite Stones album, let alone their favorite of all-time - but regardless, I always got the impression del Toro had a huge love for rock music. The one time I found myself standing right next to him in Manhattan (tall guy, it was definitely him when we looked right at each other), he was wearing a cap and a blazer...and what was clearly a black T-shirt adorned with the cover art of Black Sabbath's fourth album.

FWIW, in those same videos, DiCaprio picked Stevie Wonder's Innervisions. He's a really big Stevie Wonder fan and got him to play "Heaven Is 10 Zillion Light Years Away" after sending a request, possibly at a 2015 show in Calgary - Wonder generally hasn't played that at his concerts since the 1970s.

tattoo you is a genuinely bizarre choice

I actually like that album and think it's very good, especially for something that was pieced together from old leftovers just to clear the vaults, but I used to get shit for liking it myself. You know how AIM (AOL Messenger...RIP) used to show what you were listening to when you were playing something off iTunes? I was listening to "Start Me Up" and out of the blue someone messages me and says "that song SUCKS."

I guess it’s one of those things where your first encounter with an artist is the one which sticks with you. He was 14 when Tattoo You came out so probably made a big impression on him then.

Del Toro is obviously magical but on second watch it’s really Leo's incredible manic/comic desperation in that scene that balances it. He’s just so good in that whole sequence. When he breaks down in frustrated sobbing on the phone!

incredible extended meltdown for sure he just will not get it together for a good chunk of the film

I guess it’s one of those things where your first encounter with an artist is the one which sticks with you. He was 14 when Tattoo You came out so probably made a big impression on him then.

― Dan Worsley, Friday, October 3, 2025 10:57 AM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

that was my thought too and im sure its true, but if its your favorite album then the stones have to be one of your favorite bands in which case youve gotten into their other stuff and simply must acknowledge that much of it is clearly better

I can see a Sonny Rollins fan preferring Tattoo You. Rollins delivers some genuinely great solos on that album.

i imagine he wouldve picked a sonny rollins album in that case

true

incredible extended meltdown

Between this and "Wolf of Wall Street," Leo has mastered the art of the phone breakdown.

there's an instagram reel going around where del toro talks about how much he listened to Can while filming this movie.

here it is

he learnt about them from Inherent Vice

Shame PTA didn’t get Richard Ayoade to be one of the French 75.

fewer English transphobes in American films please

I have a vision of a stoned Benicio zoning out to "Worried About You."

Pretty good write up.

https://4columns.org/pinkerton-nick/one-battle-after-another

Interesting review, I don't completely disagree with it, but it feels like part of this cultural allergy to firmly taking a side rather than endlessly mining the nuances of both sides. Anderson clearly dispatches with those kinds of subtleties, which I think is why so many people are connecting with this film, but is also why certain types of critics feel uneasy about it.

yeah i don't know why it's supposed to be a bad thing that perfidia isn't actively pursuing lockjaw sexually. the film makes it clear that she gets off on dominating him, without being obsessed by him - that isn't enough? if the complaint is that the Good Guys are too good and the Bad Guys too bad, well 1) perfidia has plenty of compromising character flaws and 2) i guess, like Moodles, i don't mind stories with clear good and bad guys. in the era of ICE this is realistic!

as a pop cinema provocation, it lacks a single standout sequence to stand alongside Roddy Piper and Keith David’s endless alleyway brawl in Carpenter’s film

this is just objectively wrong? the car chase, the escape/phone charger quest are both complex, visceral, bravura moments

I can see a Sonny Rollins fan preferring Tattoo You. Rollins delivers some genuinely great solos on that album.

― birdistheword, Friday, October 3, 2025 10:06 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

how did i not know this

His solo on "Neighbors"!

Jim Downey with maybe the funniest line & delivery in all of American cinema.

if you're referring to the semen demon line - it was as if PTA cast him solely based on his past Sandler movie work and new he'd deliver that with absolute perfection.

I’d believe Downey was cast because his politics aren’t drastically different from the character’s.

Good long PTA/Leo conversation:

We got quite lucky with some of that stuff on this film. We shot underneath a freeway underpass, forty feet from the border of Tijuana, while we were raiding the immigration camp. I couldn’t tell the real immigrants who were sneaking across the border from the background artists that we’d hired. No one could. I’d watch them walk in the back of a scene and think, Is that a background cross or is that somebody really crossing? And it would be people that were really crossing the border.

I guess it’s one of those things where your first encounter with an artist is the one which sticks with you. He was 14 when Tattoo You came out so probably made a big impression on him then.

I was going to say, this was the first full Stones album I ever heard (if you dont' count Big Hits/High Tide) and I loved it, and I still think the first side is fucking awesome and the cover art is rad. This album is unfairly maligned. Start me Up does not suck, who the fuck seriously thinks that?

xp I almost expect Steve Martin to (jokingly) chime in and say he did it first with “Bowfinger.”

Also I agree, “Start Me Up” does not suck, but it wasn’t a surprising take coming from the guy in question.

The album is not fairly maligned!

Unfairly either!

for the record im not even maligning it its just not nearly their best work

Tattoo You is really good, and I dug way into it when the anniversary set came out. "Heaven" is the first dream pop song, obviously. And what better to ring in Windows 95 than "Start Me Up"?

I might feel differently (either way!) about it if I was a teenager when it came out. But when I started listening to the Stones it was (and kind of still is) pretty much accepted as fact that like Sticky Fingers, Exile, Let it Bleed were the best Stones albums and their very decent albums from a little further down were just not as talked about.

I can't imagine being a big fan of their halcyon albums and not being utterly sick of them these days.

Some Girls is very much canon (and my favorite Stones album).

I think Some Girls is very much the best of the albums from that later-on period, but I don't think it's considered as great as the Mick Taylor records by too many people.

Well, they're wrong.

"yeah i don't know why it's supposed to be a bad thing that perfidia isn't actively pursuing lockjaw sexually. the film makes it clear that she gets off on dominating him, without being obsessed by him - that isn't enough?"

I think the deviation from the book (as written by Pinkerton) makes more sense to me than following your desires then giving everyone up. But I am not sure such scenario can be stood up on a screen so a viewer can extract sense out of it.

I think Perfidia being a willing participant is important to the book (and Pynchon's entire remit). It shows that the seductive side of Fascism is omnipresent and even it's fiercest opponents are susceptible. It's also a commentary on the 60s radical > 80s yuppie transition and is echoed in Prairie's musings at the end of the novel. The "One Battle After Another" is not just with the forces of Fascism but with ourselves.

The movie obliquely deals with this by showing that such betrayals are endemic, even amongst those, like Regina Hall's character, who condemned Perfidia.

Another significant departure from the novel is the fact that Perfidia, unlike Frenesi, does not return in the present day. This means there is no reckoning with or forgiveness for her betrayal (of her comrades or Zoyd/Bob for leaving). I guess the letter is an attempt to fulfill this function.

That said, I don't fault the movie for eliding the subtleties of these themes. It's necessarily a different thing.

Definitely passes Magnolia in terms of it being PTA’s most personal film.

Really want to see this again in either 70 or VistaVision.

feel like perfidias seduction by fascism was pretty clear in the movie maybe not as explicit as in the book but i didnt read the book

i think i owned it for like 20 years tho so i basically read it

Definitely passes Magnolia in terms of it being PTA’s most personal film.

Hmm, in what sense, would you say?

White man with mixed family coming to terms with maybe not having done enough to make the future better for his children.

ghetto pat did a lot tbf

felt like this was his most freewheeling least uptight movie, it was more likable for it, like i like a lot of his movies but i dont like like them like i do some peoples movies

i also liked that the (non-Vineland readers aside) audience is probably going into that final part expecting Bob (or possibly a surprise Perfidia) to show up at the last minute and save the day. instead it's pretty much all Willa's grit and determination that gets herself out of the situation.

can't comment on how it compares to Vineland since i haven't read it.

The end of Vineland is really weird. In a way Reagan saves the day. Or perhaps some zombies do.

I have to say I don't remember a single thing about Vineland, which I haven't read since it was published

I finished it the other day, and I misremembered anyway. It's not zombies.

This movie needed more Thanatoids

And a crossover with the Godzilla universe.

It’s not not zombies

Jim Downey with maybe the funniest line & delivery in all of American cinema.

very funny, but i laughed harder at benicio del toro's final line, holding eye contact with the cop as he said "a few small beers"

i was also wondering if the skateboarder rooftop scene was an homage to the ET bike escape scene. it's been 30 years since i've seen it but the tracking felt familiar.

no sick ollie into the moon tho

I had the same thought. PTA shot and lit it with the same sense of wonder.

forgot to mention Mary Poppins as well.

felt like this was his most freewheeling least uptight movie, it was more likable for it,

https://i.ibb.co/G4F588V9/ezgif-7c33943cef805b.gif

i didnt watch that one, just the gif even i dont like the loping kid

Probably didn’t have on his father’s acting jeans

it's freewheeling and likable iirc but I haven't seen it on the big screen in at least ten days

counted on my fingers and it's ten days today and was a 97-foot screen

The truck sequence in Licorice Pizza is great (and Bradley Cooper was hilarious), but otherwise the movie left me cold.

Agree - it’s his “Panic Room”

hard disagree! Licorice Pizza is imo incredibly sentimental — it’s just sentimental about ppl that are “unlikeable” or whatever

anyway it rules

Yeah licorice pizza rules

The truck sequence in Licorice Pizza is great (and Bradley Cooper was hilarious), but otherwise the movie left me cold.

― birdistheword, Saturday, October 4, 2025 4:23 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm, except the truck sequence is the worst part

What?? Why????

you guys are cooked

that’s regarding the Tattoo You comments, I’m guessing

Licorice Pizza was bland at best and a huge letdown from a filmmaker of his stature.

"letdown" and "stature" saddles him with too much expectation, which is an audience problem not a filmmaker problem. "Bland," ehhh, maybe, chacun a son gout and all. I liked it well enough but it'll be years before I'm interested in a rewatch.

the two leads have no charisma or chemistry for one.

no argument there

Look, his most similar movie to LP- Punch Drunk Love, I love! Paul is definitely my favorite living/working director. I'm so happy with the reception to One Battle.

His films are hit-or-miss for me but while some may appear heavily indebted to other filmmakers, they’re generally unlike anything else that’s out there. So even when they do little for me, I’m glad they exist - good or not, they’re at least a sign that highly personal and idiosyncratic filmmaking can still command moderately high budgets, A-list stars and relatively broad attention.

I watched it again

- First scene of the movie Pat's already running, anxious, late to the action

- The great car chase - this time I realised that the Christmas Adventurer's Club guy who winds up smashing into Willa's car... he doesn't even realise she's in front of him. How would he know? All he knows is that he caught up to Lockjaw, and nobody else is in the car (presuming he went down to check on the wreck, which it seems he is about to). Pretty sure he's just tooling along feeling pretty good! Maybe gunning it a little because why not, it's the open desert, and he just did his nation proud. But Willa sees this car behind her and... she has no idea who's in it. How could she? But she thinks he's following her. I mean - he's not. He's a baddie but he has no idea that's her. So you've got a "chase" where the chaser doesn't realise who he's chasing, and the chasee doesn't realise he's not actually a chaser. But she's in action mode now, some latent Perfidia genes have kicked in, and she decides to take what is under the circumstances frankly a pretty drastic decision! Guy stumbles out of the car. She shouts the passwords. He's like idk what you're talking about. She shoots him once. He goes for his gun. So she shoots him dead. And then she screams. (I think that's how it goes)

- Regina Hall (Deandra) when she's facing the interrogator, he says hey, you're in a lose-lose-maybe-get-to-live situation. He wants to know where Pat/Bob is. She says she doesn't know. And he's like you know how many people have sat right where you're sitting and swore they didn't know? Later you see her getting led away, with a tear on her cheek, and I the first time I saw the movie I thought, right, well, I guess she squawked, just like everybody else. But... she actually didn't know where he was, right? So.. I guess she got bumped off? :/

- I did think Bob and Willa would have at least had to move to a safe location after all this went down

- The movie seems pretty careful to delineate that Pefidia is only going along with Lockjaw's fantasies because otherwise he'll blow the French 75 out of the water. When he catches her in the toilet planting explosives he says as much. She doesn't mind toying with him along the way but I don't get any sense she actually loves him in any way

- On the other hand, one thing that didn't work for me so well was the DNA test scene in the church. It's kind of a set piece for Penn and Infiniti and Penn's just this maelstrom of petty anger which is, yknow fine and fits the story but the movie seems to want to make something of the question about whether Lockjaw "loved" Perfidia and I'm like.. who cares

Anyway totally fun to see again, was nice to soak in the details without the psychic overhead of following the narrative. Absolutely OTM about how physical it all is, how much PTA seems to love motion and weight. How many times did a car door slam shut of its own accord because of the way the car turned and accelerated?? Leo scrambling up onto a loading dock and barging into a bunch of crates.

I spaced on the details / who knew what, but the Adventurer guy surely wanted to take out Willa after being told to “make it clean … so we could eat off its floor, it’s so clean” meaning eliminate Lockjaw and everyone else involved. How he knew Willa was driving the bounty hunter’s car, I don’t recall, but he must have followed Lockjaw’s path to catch up with his van like he did.

- I feel bad that Willa's granny doesn't know her, and her path of resistance

- There is a real arc of retreat - getting back on defense - to events. You start with the French 75, however shambolically, on offense. 16 years later, though "very little had changed" quite a lot had changed - these people had been routed, scattered, sent up into the hills, simply trying to protect themselves and others from very active raids, violence, deportation

I was confused during the car chase as well as far as who knew what and how they knew it, and just let it go afterwards.

emotionally it was very straightforward but the second time through i was like waaaaait a minute

re the car chase: yeah it’s such a good subversion of the trope because all the tension comes from, ok no one knows who they’re after or who they’re chasing but shit is so fucking crazy what WILL happen if anyone irl catches up to anyone else!?!

imo i thought Willa assumes a 1776 creep is after her … like she’s scared enough & prob smart enough to think that someone’s coming after her after that whole shootout at the ..ranch?… , even if they’re not she’s right to be paranoid as fuck

Christmas Adventurer guy who kills Lockjaw is I think thinking he’s tailing the Bounty Hunter because even though he vouched for him in the meeting, the clear implication is he’s not “pure” or whatever so expendable also & he has to fully clean house? or that was what i got

and then Bob doesnt know who the fuck he’s chasing lol

this was awesome. longest-lasting post-movie buzz i have felt in a long time.

saw it in imax 70mm, was glorious

I was confused during the car chase as well as far as who knew what and how they knew it, and just let it go afterwards.

― the way out of (Eazy), Sunday, October 5, 2025 4:48 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

the part I didn’t understand was at the end, when willa was yelling the code words at bob when she could clearly see and hear it was him

Maybe she thought Bob had betrayed her like her mom?

or maybe she's been in a car for the past hour and has been kidnapped etc and is uh a little stressed from that

being chased etc

yeah she was in shock. she had almost been raped & killed and moments before she had shot and killed a guy who she had never even met before

speaking of the 1776 hideout, the second time around it seemed clear to me that Avanti (the tracker) was sitting in his car, about to leave, and notices all these dudes start to pull up, one by one... way more than you need to kill a handcuffed girl. that was the trigger for him. they were going to rape her.

i was really glad for the josh password gag when we finally see josh, he was old not young! i don't know why that made me so happy.

From Willa’s perspective, the lack of trust is an impact of the violence done to her. It’s so humanizing: this awesome kid who freed herself and escaped an awful situation is, despite appearances, still a vulnerable kid.

From Bob’s perspective, I think this last moment is a continuation of the impact of his inability to remember codewords.

There’s a nice motif here, related to social formalities, manners, and social connections. Can’t quite tease it out, but thinking that Bob consistently fails at formal/formalized tasks/greetings/language, and circumvents these, repeatedly, by appealing to shared history, trust, and deep humanistic connections (with Perfidia, on the phone with the French 75 handler, interacting with Sensei Sergio and his family). Meanwhile, Lockjaw’s position and function assures him both positional respect and sycophancy of his troops, but he’s eager to further ingratiate himself into the formality of relationships with CAC, which leads to … eh, y’know. Humans being humans together = good; humans creating hierarchies = bad to very bad.

xxp hadn't even registered that but makes complete sense!

Re Josh, maybe because the jokes about safe spaces seemed like a shot at snowflake youngsters?

comrade josh was a great gag

I guess I can accept the “shock” explanation, but it didn’t quite work for me

Re Josh, maybe because the jokes about safe spaces seemed like a shot at snowflake youngsters?

― assert (matttkkkk), Monday, October 6, 2025 6:50 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes, that was it. i forgot about that. this movie was relentless.

that was the trigger for him. they were going to rape her.

didn’t read it this way, especially as they’re immediately preparing the boat to dump her body, but will think of it next time.

Avanti is already opposed to killing the girl, on principle, and I think contemptuous of himself for agreeing to deliver her. He asked for only his day rate as a point of honour — not taking additional blood money for his compromise — and when every single sentence from the 1776 includes a racial slur, it makes him actively conscious of how he’s lied to himself about being complicit. He didn’t want to kill the kid; the kid is about to be killed because of him, and by these fuckheads, who are not doing it as the straight business transaction that he’s not-convinced himself he’s engaged in, but weighted with a specific attitude toward mixed-race people that he’s subtly picking up on; he corrects his moral error.

(btw Tracer I haven’t had time to get on a browser and go back to answer yr question abt Perfidia but I want to!)

agree with all of that. imo he swallows it all until he sees the guys traipsing in one by one. but it works without that reading anyway, and that’s how i saw it the first time around

yeah i think I align w sic’s reading of Avanti — but Tracer’s interpretation feels plausible also.

and Willa started out in the care of a French75-er who she implicitly trusted becaise she was told to and got captured so after each of her one-battle-after-another she’s internalized that after a shit ton of traumatizing horrors as don’t trust AN Y ONE
and is SO scared and SO in shock that she is completely in defensive protection mode

like she just shot a dude dead that she didn’t even know! what if Bob isnt who he says he is either? everything is on the table for her to be justifiably hysterically paranoid. her brain is probably screaming like an air raid siren

yeah, Willa’s hysterical fear and uncertainty of Bob in that moment was completely real to me, Lockjaw shows her he is her father by blood, then sentences her to death.

When Bob arrives after the shooting, Willa has to ask for the code words, everything she has thought was true has been blown to pieces, and she is absolutely needs to know who he says he is.

There were several moments that got me chocked up in this film and Bob saying, It’s me, it’s your Dad was one of them

totally. jfc

yeah, that one got me. he's spent her entire life trying to protect Willa and now he's standing there with her holding a gun to him.

imagine trying to explain to someone, who had never seen one, what a PTA movie is like

i don’t think i had ever seen one before this!

Phantom Thread also explores power games but at the most microscopic level.

yeah but it's sooooo different

this felt the most like Punch Drunk Love to me I dunno why

The violence in this movie is interesting. It's sort of an action movie, but I don't think protagonist (?) Bob ever effectively engages in violence. Or, frankly, does much at all. Fireworks. Bombs, mentioned, offscreen. Hotwiring a car. Getting tased. Shooting at a guy from a very long distance and wildly missing. An allyship with a karate instructor who never throws a punch. Hotwiring another car.

Another thought: there are lots of tunnels in this movie, like in Pynchon's work generally. Behind Bob's house. St. Carlos's immigrants. In the basement of the CAC meeting room. Can't help but wonder if the odd white softness of the tunnel in the CAC house (after the banana pancake scene, which is probably a ref to Pirate Prentice) is supposed to be reminiscent of the Project Reise architecture section.

And the gas is surely Zyklon-B, right?

(Sorry, hit submit too early. All of the last few refs are from Gravity's Rainbow).

Oh, good catch on the banana pancakes!

for some reason the way they choreographed the latino skaters effortlessly jumping across the rooftops was the funniest thing i’ve ever seen and i was giggling for five minutes afterwards

A film-critic friend on Facebook said the skateboarders reminded her of Larry Clark’s “Wassup Rockers” and that felt SO otm

The great car chase - this time I realised that the Christmas Adventurer's Club guy who winds up smashing into Willa's car... he doesn't even realise she's in front of him. How would he know? All he knows is that he caught up to Lockjaw, and nobody else is in the car (presuming he went down to check on the wreck, which it seems he is about to). Pretty sure he's just tooling along feeling pretty good! Maybe gunning it a little because why not, it's the open desert, and he just did his nation proud. But Willa sees this car behind her and... she has no idea who's in it. How could she? But she thinks he's following her. I mean - he's not. He's a baddie but he has no idea that's her.

not necessarily disputing your logic here, and i defer to your second viewing wisdom, but imo he was sent to assassinate both the father and daughter (“clean enough to eat off of”) and the ways his car’s accelerations were edited felt like they were responding to hers?

idgi that take either. either sic hasn't seen a PTA movie, or sic is secretly sixteen and then ILX has a bigger problem.

xpost even if Willa were part of his assignment, and I don’t think she was, there’s just no way he could know he’s following her I don’t think? you’re right that it does seem as though he is chasing her but the movie develops (or deepens) a kind of dream logic at that point, the heat shimmering up off the road, and I think we’re really in her head, she feels hunted by everyone. Even Deandra might have been in on it, the way she put a finger to her lips and scarpered just before the troops came in and arrested her. But I honestly do think that CAC fella is just tooling along

“Freedom! When you have it, you take it for granted. And when you miss it, boom - it’s gone”

I don't recall the actual sequence but the CAC guy is absolutely after Willa. The "cleaning" conversation is you have to get rid of Lockjaw, the "so clean you can eat off it" is getting rid of Willa as well.

Based on some reddit sleuthing, it appears that the CAC guy knows the bounty hunter as it is mentioned in one of the CAC scenes. When he saw Willa wasn’t in the SUV and sees the bounty hunter's car, he assumes Lockjaw handed her off. Does he also go to the 1776 hide out and find everyone dead? I can't remember, but I like that it isn't completely spelled out.

she's just been put through the most traumatic 24 hours of her life - who wouldn't think a car flooring it behind is after you?!

I liked how disorienting and confusing the car chase was, I assume that was by design, since the details don't really matter. For example, I, too, thought the dude's task was to kill Lockjaw *and* Willa, though how he knew where they were on the open road, or why he would even need to kill Willa after killing Lockjaw, you got me. All the other soldiers commanded by Lockjaw for his very personal quest to capture this one teen girl, they must have been wondering wtf was going on as well.

Yeah. I kept thinking "Spielberg."

Chiming in late, but finally saw this Sunday in 70mm. Absolutely thrilling and definitely exceeded my expectations. So many great sequences and performances. Not a whole lot to add to what's been covered here already, but Infiniti was so good in this.

i think my favorite scene was leo desperately trying to charge his phone while del toro led him through various rooms

saw this in vistavision btw. real nice

also the car chase was so intense despite/BECAUSE of how it wasn't filmed in any sort of normal cinematic way. the undulating road

I keep returning to the rooftop escape scene with Bob and the kids: one of those sequences enriched by the callback (E.T.) while its own thing. It has grandeur, grace, and, thanks to huffing Bob, laffs. That's the PTA ethos, I guess.

i would definitely not make a jump between rooftops and fall 40 feet and get immediately arrested

Yeah, I would probably get immediately dead. Maybe being perpetually drunk and high gives him loose rag doll physics.

i like how we don't see the fall--it's all in silhouette like the skaters, but like you can't see it too much because of the tree

also the car chase was so intense despite/BECAUSE of how it wasn't filmed in any sort of normal cinematic way. the undulating road

― ivy., Tuesday, October 7, 2025 10:39 AM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

those shots triggered memories as a high school driving winding Vermont roads.

agreed the chaos surrounding Bob trying to just charge the phone while the sensei is calmly getting everything setup was a highlight.

also that Bob runs ~toward~ the crowd after he falls … the timing of the taser was like a rimshot, it was p funny

either sic hasn't seen a PTA movie, or sic is secretly sixteen and then ILX has a bigger problem

???!¿

One other thing I found on reddit is that the two vehicles are a Ford Mustang and a Dodge Charger, just like in the chase in Bullitt.

lol and then bob buzzes in behind those two powerhouses in that tiny little nissan

Max Read on the cars:

https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-oscar-should-go-to-bob-fergusons

yeah i loved that piece

that IS a great article (just ignore the begging for money at the top)

max deserves it! 50 bucks a year is good value for gis newsletter

Max otm

https://www.indiewire.com/features/commentary/i-saw-one-battle-after-another-six-times-in-six-formats-1235154431/

the car chase is weird is it even a chase theyre not going that fast willa and the hitman have fast cars but bob is catching up to them in a not that fast car, great scene

There have been a lot of bad rants/half-assed takes about race politics in this movie, but that's too bad because I think that there's need for a good conversation to be had on this topic. Here are my unfiltered thougths:

Bob, who is kind of a bland cipher of an uncommitted white revolutionary, is attracted to Perfidia because ... it isn't really clear why. He is just presented as into her, and (maybe) specifically her Blackness. (His name 'Ghetto Pat' definitely begs a racialized interrogation).

Perfidia is attracted to Bob because of his technical competence, and seems particularly turned on by the violence in his bombings. But it's clear that he's half-in, half-out the revolution, a fact that her elder relatives explicitly state him makes him unsuitable for Perfidia. I read them as former revolutionaries themselves, maybe Black Panther types. Perfidia is also attracted to the idea of dominating Lockjaw (?) but no longer, uh, pops for him once she's completed the domination. Or ... never did in the first place. She's also a rat. She also commits an act of violence specifically, and unnecessarily targeting a Black man.

Lockjaw is explicitly attracted to a stereotype of Black sexuality. Lockjaw is also not a homoSEXual, if that's what you're implying. His gaze – through the binoculars – briefly and disgustingly informs the narrative voice.

Throughout the movie, while the two feckless white guys attracted to Perfidia's ghost ramble around, chasing their daughter, they are almost entirely oblivious/ambivalent to the *real* revolutionary acts all around them: Sensei Sergio's underground railroad, the expansion of gender roles and teenage self-actualization, the unity and opposition by the protester-skaters, Avanti's reversal against the right wing cowboy dudes, the CAC. I wonder if PTA is toying with the idea of white middle-class revolution as uncommitted and aesthetic against the backdrop of effective community mobilization by culturally minoritized people.

I think he is absolutely exploring that idea.

i think youre being lil hard on ol bob here really anything that could be said of him could be said of the whole french 75, the portrayal of them was a lil pat imho, everyone thinks radicals are self involved delusional thrill seekers, but thats ok because the movie is not about presenting a subtle depiction of a revolutionary cell, its about falling off a roof when all you want to do is charge your phone

I think that’s a great read, soda - it’s why Leo is perfectly cast, he’s the kind of guy who could skate by on goodwill and charm without really having what it takes. He fucks up all aspects of revolution, which is probably also PTA’s self-assessment if he’s anything like this 55 year old dad posting.

perfidia was clearly the biggest fuck up of all, her grandmothers all she comes from a long line of revolutionaries meanwhile shes all lets fuck during the explosion engages in an affair with the man himself and then snitches, everyone else snitches too tho, theyre all very fallible, there may be some aspect of middle age white man navel gazing at the many failures of bob but i dont think its the key to the text

the french 75 are on some level ridiculous people, but on the other hand they were out there trying i tip my cap to them, sensei st carlos the face of a more grounded and effective movement was a fan he even knew their slogan

that had reminded me that the opening moments with bob are him pulling a wagon with pyrotechnics to a job... maybe not the sharpest tool in the shed.

her grandmothers all she comes from a long line of revolutionaries meanwhile shes all lets fuck during the explosion engages in an affair with the man himself and then snitches

I thought the scene with her mom was good in establishing those roots for her, and an idea of what she was rebelling against — not just the system and the man, but also the burden placed on her as this revolutionary when maybe she mostly wants to blow things up and fuck and not think about saving the world.

I loved the scene with the mom, because the lineage that the Perfidia character comes from is a major thing in Pynchon. There's a rich backstory there, which I think PTA successfully alluded to.

Yeah I mistakenly referred to frenesi & Sasha upthread when i meant frenesi & prairie, Sasha is the grandma character who also has a much expanded part in the book (which actually goes into 4 generations of women involved in activism)

the french 75 are on some level ridiculous people, but on the other hand they were out there trying i tip my cap to them, sensei st carlos the face of a more grounded and effective movement was a fan he even knew their slogan

people celebrating bob's work like he's some prestige ILX poster. he's some early internet/slight intellect who's moral compass went the right way. flash forward to his behavior towards Willa's friends and he's borderline every male with a BS in math/science, or elon musk.

i guarantee you would not want to meet that bob 20 years down the road.

his behavior toward willa’s friends was ok, and also very endearing

lol he was being a fucking asshole are you serious

idk if asshole is really the right word, he was a little intense for sure. just being protective of his daughter

bob is a mess hes been through a lot i dont think hes a bad guy i wouldnt mind meeting him

i was cringing so hard in that scene, calling the kid “ese”, slamming the door in his face, telling him to get in the car, the passive aggressive hug, total jerk behavior, absolutely nothing “ok” about it

at the same time it’s relatable for the dads out there, it’s like an extreme version of what most dads feel from time to time when they see their kid’s friends pull up. nothing to be proud of though, it’s a temptation to resist

def dubious behavior, the scene starts with him being freaked out by the car hes paranoid hes got ptsd and hes self medicating instead of seeking help, of course he is a fugitive from justice so its understandable why hes not trying to tell someone about it

yeah feel like ol bob gets a pass there. also a couple of things in fairness, the kid’s knock was uncool, and also her friends ended up snitching on her so maybe he was right to be paranoid

i think the movie does a good job of humanizing the leftists, the fascists on the other hand lol

― comrade jhøsh (k3vin k.)

btw, nice

the fascists on the other hand lol

yeah the only part that didn't work for me was as i said the DNA test scene, where the script appears written to enable a difficult conversation between the two that brings out some of lockjaw's pent-up fathering instincts, and complicate his villainousness - eg did he actually love perfidia? is he actually a bit like bob in the way that he (incorrectly) feels he knows what's best for willa? (that she should wear makeup, etc) - it feels like a scene in which he is meant to have a few somewhat relatable qualities. but penn's choice to play him as a cardboard cutout, which i think actually works otherwise, just steamrolls all this stuff, flattens it, he just plays it all as quivering thin-skinned violence, which yknow, fine, but it doesn't bring anything new and the whole scene feels a little long because of it imo

otm

https://www.indiewire.com/features/commentary/i-saw-one-battle-after-another-six-times-in-six-formats-1235154431/

― Dan Worsley, Tuesday, 7 October 2025 22:48 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

The 4DX effects in “One Battle After Another” range from the obvious (the seat rocking around during car chases, a cool breeze blowing past during nighttime exteriors) and the understated (slight weaves with the camera moves that enhance the film’s more hypnotic moments) to the perverse and absurd but undeniably effective (the seat jiggling slowly when Sean Penn’s Lockjaw masturbates), like a nudge on the viewer’s behind when that same character is being violated off screen by his nemesis/obsession, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor).

kinda want to try this now lol

ughhh

ew

we saw this today, it was great, no notes

the movie is not about presenting a subtle depiction of a revolutionary cell, its about falling off a roof when all you want to do is charge your phone

otm

hard pass on 4D tho

It's just amusing to me that a movie by America's foremost arthouse director has been released in that format

I’m guessing the budget comes with a requirement to play ball

Also I’d bet he finds it hilarious

you’re like i can’t believe he just said that, is that something these guys say, is that a thing with them?? like a supposedly real phenomenon they have developed slang for

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, October 2, 2025 7:42 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Their name for the long-standing threat of the succubus, who by being willfully sexual undermines their moral uprightness. (As they see it. In fact, like all too many men since the advent of the patriarchy they let the lower head do the thinking on behalf of the upper one. And after Lockjaw tried to claim he was the victim, the CAC actually did the sensible thing of gassing him and burning the corpse in that sterile office park.)

why are you guys going to see this trash

Daily Mail: Leonardo DiCaprio's woke 'pro-Antifa' blockbuster is struggling at the box office amid conservative backlash

b/c the only vote left that matters is my dollars

(I realize your post was in jest, but just wanted to clarify)

saw the vistavision today, best movie experience in ages. the baktan cross exfiltration/riot extended sequence is unforgettable.

there are so many wonderful small performances and so many expert shifts in tone that hold it together. i need to see it again but man that vistavision screening is special.

I’m in the middle of rewatching Inherent Vice for the second time and it’s immensely more enjoyable than I remember.

its so great imo

pynchon PTA shaggy dog universe

It has a lot of fun scenes, though only barely hangs together as it goes along. The big mumbly sex scene reaches similar excruciating levels as the Jason Robards scene in Magnolia.

oh god that sex scene is so hot wtf

sometimes i wonder what y'all are really watching

I'm not a fan because it goes on a long time and I struggle to understand what the fuck they are saying

feel like a lot of IV opinions right now are of people that haven't seen it in a good while. it's basically a PTA big lebowski? and then it made no money and now we have another one.

Inherent Vice is GREAT it’s a whole mood, i love it so much . I feel bad for all u numptys who dont get it

i like inherent vice a lot tho i think i did fall asleep the first couple times i tried to watch it, but i do agree with some of the criticism of it, i think pynchons loopy realities are a tough fit for ptas more buttoned down style which does at times in the film lead to some weird dissonance and choppiness, pta was maybe too reverent of the source material, but there is for sure a ton of really good movie in there joaquin phoenix as philip marlowe except stoned is exactly the thing i want to watch, josh brolin yelling molto panocako will stay with me for a long time, overall pretty great but def a feeling of could be a little better, which is fine its fine

with one battle after another seems like pta worried less about sticking to pynchons tone and just did his own thing which is always the right choice, he just made an action movie

I wanna see PTA adapt Edith Wharton next

Phantom Thread to thread!

one thing i noticed about inherant vice after watching the first 2/3rds of it twice before seeing the whole thing is much of it feels hazy and inconsequential before getting extremely serious at the end, which i think is interesting maybe reflects reality finally pushing through joaquin phoenixs well constructed defenses, but also is weird from a plot pov

What’s the actual story with the master apparently starting out as an adaptation of v? There is one throwaway mention of torpedo juice in the book but otherwise they have literally nothing in common as far as I can tell

had not heard that thats crazy

What’s the actual story with the master apparently starting out as an adaptation of v? There is one throwaway mention of torpedo juice in the book but otherwise they have literally nothing in common as far as I can tell

― GY!BP (wins), Saturday, 11 October 2025 12:48 (fifty-eight minutes ago)

Apparently it started that way but didn't get very far, I believe Phoenix's character started as some vers of Pig Bodine (and also Jason Robards) & some of the flashback stuff to him in the Navy is maybe an echo of that as well.

Lancaster Dodd is the most Pynchon name ever.

i like inherent vice a lot tho i think i did fall asleep the first couple times i tried to watch it, but i do agree with some of the criticism of it, i think pynchons loopy realities are a tough fit for ptas more buttoned down style which does at times in the film lead to some weird dissonance and choppiness, pta was maybe too reverent of the source material, but there is for sure a ton of really good movie in there joaquin phoenix as philip marlowe except stoned is exactly the thing i want to watch, josh brolin yelling molto panocako will stay with me for a long time, overall pretty great but def a feeling of could be a little better, which is fine its fine

with one battle after another seems like pta worried less about sticking to pynchons tone and just did his own thing which is always the right choice, he just made an action movie

― lag∞n, Saturday, October 11, 2025 7:36 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Agree with this 100% My issue with IV film isn't that it is bad per se but that it tries, and imo fails, to be straight adaptation of a book that is wildly all over all the place. If PTA has just "riffed" in IV I probably would have thought it was great.

His directorial choices to me suggest riffing.

feel like a lot of IV opinions right now are of people that haven't seen it in a good while. it's basically a PTA big lebowski? and then it made no money and now we have another one.

This could be a very apt comparison. I really wasn't a fan of Big Lebowski which for a very long time felt bloated and uneven to me. Obviously a big favorite among many including those I know, so it was unavoidable that I'd see it again and again over the years, but as much as I could appreciate some parts, I really couldn't see how it was a great movie, and to be blunt, no one I knew really made a serious argument for it, it was basically a stoner movie for them. But Richard Brody of the New Yorker made an intriguing argument that expanded what others had suggested, believing the implications were much more profound and what really made the movie - that you had to think of Lebowski as a disillusioned '60s idealist at the height of George H.W. Bush's popularity (and arguably when Reaganism was at its most popular, least controversial and most accepted point in American politics, becoming a deceptively benign status quo for most of the public). That really opened the film up in a lot of ways for me, where I really embraced it through the eyes of someone who was a true child of the '60s. I have no problem calling it the Coen brothers' greatest film, and I now find it much more affecting than long-time favorites like Fargo and No Country for Old Men.

Anderson half-joking called Inherent Vice a Cheech and Chong movie and the ultimate stoner movie, and taken at face value, it can play that way (which tbh would be the kind of film I don't really care for), but it still retains a political subtext - I haven't revisited it yet, but I imagine it could become clearer and more potent the next time I watch it.

ptas more buttoned down style

i understand you're comparing him to pynchon but idk that i'd describe pta's style as anywhere near "buttoned down" especially in his recent work

it tries, and imo fails, to be straight adaptation of a book that is wildly all over all the place

it doesn't try to be this at all!

yeah I wouldn't even describe Phantom Thread as buttoned-down. Even when he works at his most miniature his movies are like sonnets: strictly rhythmed and and metered but with the liberty to be as uninhibited as possible.

i meant to say buttoned up

IV very much a "comfort movie" in that it approaches that platonic ideal of a noir, for me: I can never quite figure out 100% of wtf is going on. The "serious" tone slipping in, or past, the hippie good times is precisely the point, I think. Martin Donovan's comical/menacing scene actually works a bit better for me than any of the CAC stuff in One Battle.

Very much a movie I reach for when I just want to chill out in front of the TV, though I rarely make it all the way through.

Thought this was p good, but a bit weird tonally, which I guess comes from it being an adaptation. Some of it felt like Tarantino based on the kind of awkwardly written black characters, but I've not read the book so idk how much of it comes from that. I felt like the tone gave it a strange energy, and then behind that there was a fairly simple action movie motoring along, nicely made and with some great scenes, and some funny parts. A lot of archetypal characters and scripting, which felt funny and familiar but maybe was on the edge of stereotype or cliche, some of Lockjaw's scenes, Bob with Willa's friends. Like it was funny but not particularly surprising in its humour. It didn't really say much as a film either, which seems a difficult feat to achieve given what it's about and the state of the world. I guess cartoonish is the word I would use. IDK if I actually want a more earnest film but this also feels the trait that kinda held it back a bit or a sort of limiting if interesting frame.

On a separate topic from upthread, absolutely agree that 10am or 11am cinema trips are brilliant. I saw this about 1530 and that was fine and good, but you couldn't pay me to spend, say, 7pm to 10pm in a cinema.

years and years since I read it but I'm not sure there are any prominent black characters in the book

it's an extremely loose adaptation in any case

saw it again tonight, and it still breezed by. incredible movie

I think on second viewing I’m sympathetic to the theory that avanti Q had a change of heart because he thought they were going to rape willa. he does linger even before the others arrive, but I think seeing a total of 5 guys or whatever it is is what put him over the edge

was also more convinced on second viewing that the christmas adventurers guy knew it was willa ahead of him, or at the very least thought it was avanti Q. watching his face closely makes it clear to me that he was in pursuit, not just going home

what’s also clear is that bob wrote that letter. perfidia would have no means of knowing their address. and bob more or less implies to sergio that he had not heard from her

also having specifically watched for clues re: bob and willa’s ultimate reunion closely, I think the view that willa was in shock is the right one. she reads off the code words and shouts “who are you??” — but bob never actually recites his part. also logically it would be no reassurance if he had, considering he was the one who had taught her the code words in the first place. also wouldn’t make sense that he would have raised her for 16 years without harming her if he were a baddie

where is this crackpot "bob wrote the perfidia letter" theory? guy has been in a drunken/drugged state for what seems to be all of willa's childhood. that he faked that kind of letter sounds like a massive reach.

xp... i mean she just found out her crazy dad turns out isn't her dad but actualy a cucked white surpremacist. anyone in her eyes deserves a gun pointed at them at that point after those 24 hours.

I think if you think for about half a second about how the logistics of how perfidia would have known the address to send the letter to, it becomes clearer. really, how would that work?