One Battle After Another

Sometimes the best we can do is raise kids to be ready for the revolution.

Movie: One Battle After Another

Running Time: 2:42

Nominated for: Best Picture, Directing, Lead Actor, 2 Supporting Actors, One Supporting Actress, Casting, Cinematography, Editing, Original Score, Production Design, Sound, Adapted Screenplay

How I watched: AMC

When it had me: Pacing

When it lost me: On my second viewing, it lost me in he first ten minutes

What systems does it challenge: Authoritarianism

Reiew Number 1: I was dreading this film because it's so. Damn. Long. But it really kind of cooks! The pacing is strong and the plot has enough driving action that you don't have much time to accidentally fall asleep.

Leonardo DiCaprio is very enjoyable as a completely inept, divorced dad. And Chase Infiniti is great as an annoyed teenager who is not annoying to watch (a rarity). 

Watching America depicted as a police state with small enclaves of struggling revolutionaries was a rather sickening feeling. How far are we from this, Paul Thomas Anderson? And how long ago did you come up with this idea? (I researched the answer to that one. He'd been writing it for 20 years based on a book from the 60s about revolutionaries. What goes around, comes around.) And whether the message is coming from the 60s or today, white people really are the worst at joining the revolution.

Entangling many story lines, this movie keeps them all afloat deftly and satisfies with an action packed third act. One of my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson movies ever. It is probably going to get much more love than Sinners, which will bum me out.

Happy for Teyana Taylor's nomination but really feel like Chase Infiniti deserved the nod.

Review Number 2: I watched it a second time, mainly because we were late for the movie the first time. I wasn't sure how much we had missed so we caught it again on streaming. Interestingly, seeing the extra ten minutes at the beginning kind of changed my whole interpretation. In my above review I talk about how the movie cooks, which it does from the inciting incident; the "uh oh, we have to run" moment. But the full beginning felt really long and delayed getting to that starting block. 

I also felt uncomfortable with the characterization of Perfidia Beverly Hills with her very hypersexualized nature and confusing relationship with Sean Penn's character. Why is PTA writing this particular character this way? He either didn't have a point to make with it and just thought this was a believable character or he did have a point to make but failed to make that point clear. That extra ten minutes kind of changed my feelings about both the pacing and the overall message.