(there will be spoilers)
I was pretty sure I’d like Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, but I was surprised to walk out feeling it was the movie of the year. That’s not only because it speaks so deeply to our exact moment of political insanity, but because it’s such an exhilarating viewing experience – confident, masterful filmmaking, very effective as a thriller, but also extremely funny, absurd and original. It’s possibly Anderson’s most traditionally entertaining movie but it doesn’t feel in any way watered down or compromised.
I saw it in bona fide IMAX, where its Vista Vision format fills the entire screen, so the anxiety-inducing score by Johnny Greenwood rumbles in your jaw as you stare at a scraggly, sweaty, 37-foot-tall Leonardo DiCaprio face fretting and scowling. Then sometimes it switches to a taller version of a Sergio-Leone-type-shot where two tiny characters stand apart on opposite sides of the screen. That’s the full range of cinema right there.
The credits say this was inspired by (not adapted from) the book Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. I was surprised when I learned that character names like Perfidia Beverly Hills, Virgil Throckmorton and Junglepussy didn’t come from the book. These little heightened details spike a mostly naturalistic feeling world with exaggeration and draw attention to the authentic ridiculousness of our world. Sometimes that feels more real than if it was realistic. (read the rest of this shit…)
