"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.

But I get it if people still think something is missing. It's a weird story, and I'm not sure what Pychon is trying to do really works, and it's felt a bit in OBAA too.

I think a person literally calls it 'vibes in the air', when he is trying to explain what is happening in Vineland.

I liked this movie but got annoyed with it immediately overshadowing Sinners which I thought was a much bolder film. The comparison also made me a little annoyed with PTAs depiction of the black characters (but not the acting). Like what was up with that short scene when the daughter is sent to her room by a younger woman at the mission? Why does the woman talk like that?

PTA did seem to drop some of the traits that have kept me from keeping up with him. Like there always has to be one completely unhinged character that has some outburst like PSH yelling pigfuck or whatever

The Christmas Adventurers Club: For an evil organization so hellbent on the most horrible things, I'm trying to parse why they were played so hard for laughs. The Maxwell Smart tunnels. The Patagonia vests. The outdoorsy backdrop (straight out of a Wes Thomas Anderson movie, tbh.) The way that one white guy blows through his lips and makes a motorboat sound as he takes in what a doozy this whole situation is. Even their abbreviation, CAC...

The scene was funny! "I'm gonna hand it over to Tim..." White people, amirite?

No, they didn't have to be scary like the 1776 guys. Maybe to illustrate how they hide in plain sight, like the Chick Fil A Chick 'N Lick CEO?

I assumed the ridiculousness was taken from or inspired by Pynchon

They’re sinister white supremacists but also cut absurd figures, kind of a weird pitch? Now to take a sip of coffee and look around at literally anything

Never read any Pynchon. Did this feel the same as Short Cuts :: Raymond Carver?

read both and they are very different, Pynchon far more humorous/jokey for real, not in that Carver deadpan way

you should read Vineland! it's honestly my fave of his and fairly easy to parse aside from a few typical diversions

Vineland is one of the few Pynchons I havent read, but I'm told Godzilla makes a brief cameo? Just that alone should say a lot about the difference in tone w/the movie

the Christmas Adventurers Club was one of the things that felt most like Pynchon in the movie, the evil yet utterly banal secret group one of his foundational concepts

"Godzilla" for legal and personal reasons does not appear in Vineland however a Japanese lab is destroyed and a the crater left behind does happen to resemble a giant lizard foot and there are trace amounts of radiation left so...

It's not really Pynchonian. It's way too explicit, whereas Pynchonian evil is a lot more shadowy and unknowable. He is the great writer of paranoia, and there isn't really anything to be paranoid about with the CAC, they're kinda just cartoonishly evil. It's banal, but so Is the kind of white supremacism that they champion. There's nothing like it in the book, where the motivation of the Lockjaw-character is unexplained. The one time someone asks 'why is he doing this?' the answer is 'Who the hell knows'. And PTA probably thought that wouldn't work on film.

That character in Vineland feels p straightforwardly libidinal in a way that isn’t a million miles from lockjaw tbh. I think the shadowy & unknowable bit and the real dirty business overlap, the homme fatal in bleeding edge is described (in the narration!) as a neoliberal scumbag

They’re sinister white supremacists but also cut absurd figures, kind of a weird pitch?

do you live in the United States in 2026 or

Now to read the next sentence and take a sip of coffee while understanding anything

Never read any Pynchon. Did this feel the same as Short Cuts :: Raymond Carver?

― pplains, Wednesday, March 4, 2026 3:46 PM

read both and they are very different, Pynchon far more humorous/jokey for real, not in that Carver deadpan way

― Serfin' USA (sleeve), Wednesday, March 4, 2026 3:57 PM

To word this better, is OBAA similar to Short Cuts the movie, in which the basic material is familiar, but the film itself is not a straight-up adaptation?

oh! yes, totally

And also that both films are very much expressions of the filmmakers’ voices more than the authors’.

I saw Shortcuts and loved it. Years later I got into Carver and realized that the movie I had seen years before was based on his stories. Rewatched the movie and disliked it greatly.

Yeah imo Altman was a much worse fit for Carver than PTA is for Pynchon.

I haven't read Vineland, so I may be wrong, but my impression is that Short Cuts is considerably more faithful to its source material despite not really capturing the overall shabby vibe of Carver. Like Altman sticks more closely to the plots of the stories, but the shiny LA aesthetic isn't the right fit.

Also, PTA's Inherent Vice seems to be much more faithful to the novel than OBAA.

Short Cuts's misanthropy does get more facile as it approaches its conclusion. Altman won't even allow the baker and the grieving couple their moment!

Yeah I think it's not so much plot fidelity as tone that's the difference. PTA's California is not exactly Pynchon's California, but there are enough congruences that the overlay creates a kind of thrilling hybrid where they each inform each other. Whereas Altman World may be populated by similar characters to Carver World, but the vibe is very different. Altman people are more reactive than Carver people, more active and angry, less passive and sad. (Or that's how I remember Short Cuts, it's been a long time.) It's like the same narrative landscape but populated with a somewhat different species.

I'm trying to parse why they were played so hard for laughs

I think my posts about this were only after my first viewing but I stand by them

Also, PTA's Inherent Vice seems to be much more faithful to the novel than OBAA.

― whimsical skeedaddler (Moodles), Thursday, March 5, 2026 9:41 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hard agree

the movie that’s a credited adaptation of a novel, with the same title as a novel, is more faithful to a novel, than a movie which doesn’t have the same title as a novel and isn’t credited as an adaptation???

I should probably re-read Vineland. It was the very first Pynchon I read, eons ago, and I found it very hard to follow. I'm reading Shadow Ticket now, which maybe has toughened me up. Its also hard to follow at times, I think purposefully so, since in just about every chapter Pynchon introduces new characters with complicated backstories by dropping hints and implications that are left to the reader to connect.

I read it in last May and found it the sloggiest of slogs.

i liked shadow ticket but definitely ended up just riding the vibe after a certain point - by the end i dont think pynchon really cared about connecting too many of the dots

aw Alfred that makes me sad xp

there's this part in the history of the (FP24? something like that) film collective where he talks about the truth shown in images and it's so beautiful

PTA's California is not exactly Pynchon's California, but there are enough congruences that the overlay creates a kind of thrilling hybrid where they each inform each other. Whereas Altman World may be populated by similar characters to Carver World, but the vibe is very different.

Carver's world was very similar to OBAA and Vineland's Humboldt County (Carver went to Humboldt State and moved back to Arcata in '77), but Altman moved it to L.A..

Yeah, definitely I'm past the point of trying to connect the dots in terms of plot with Shadow Ticket. Whereas to me it seemed like something like The Recognitions was more of an influence on the older stuff like Gravity's Rainbow, this late Pynchon novel feels more influenced by European po-mo or things like The Third Policeman. Unfortunately for me, since I much prefer The Recognitions to The Third Policeman. But I can still vibe to Pynchon's punchy prose and way with dialog.

xp that's really interesting especially considering all of those in light of Denis Johnson's writing about the same area (Already Dead in particular).

Second viewing was a lot better for me. While I'm still not sure what to ultimately make of the thing, the acting, directing, all the stuff, it's just so good.

Saw this on an airplane (lol), but it was unedited and I quite enjoyed it. Maybe when PTA was making it he thought it was a bit far fetched but so much of it reflects the current moment perfectly— the heavily militarized and blurred distinction between military and police; the corny cabal of white nationalist billionaires who depend on immigrant labor, the fact that despite the fascist regime, the high school kids were still blurring gender identity, etc, maybe a better future is possible.

Maybe when PTA was making it he thought it was a bit far fetched

has he said this? his televised statement very to the contrary this week is the only comment I’ve encountered from him abt it

was a guess? I’m probably wrong.

i wonder if DiCaprio saw OBAA as a redo of Don't Look Up

As much as I appreciate his work, PTA’s greatest accomplishment is partnering up with Maya Rudolph.

absolutely agree. cannot imagine OBAA existing otherwise.

Picked my spouse up from the airport and starts telling me about this great movie on the flight that I should see if I haven’t already. Only problem was they’re super jet lagged and can’t exactly remember it but pretty sure it’s:

Little Battles All the Time

lol it me. this is one of those movies that i can never, ever remember the title of

Big Little Battles

You just have to remember the acronym: OBAMA

Big Little Battles

Little Battles Everywhere

This title format that drives me bonkers - Big Little Lies etc.

Rewatched this last night and it fucking rules. I couldn’t get into the rhythm of it the first time; it felt static and compressed. This time was a blast and it all worked for me. Read this thread this morning.

Thoughts: Perfidia’s love feels transactional in the way that people who have dealt with an unstable childhood. Her mother is frustrated with her impulsiveness. Perfidia does what is best for her, not the movement, except for when their goals align. Not sure if that tracks with the book or if I’m reading it right. The letter doesn’t feel like it comes from her character, but I agree that the movie would have tipped it off if it came from Leo.

Leo and Lockjaw are both soldiers of dubious quality and not leaders. The difference is in their essential nature: one wants to do good for others but needs someone to tell him what to do or he spins his wheels. Lockjaw hates himself and blinded by a need for acceptance. He needs someone to direct him or he will pursue selfish interests.

Want to watch it again.