One Battle After Another
It only took us a month and change, but we finally saw One Battle After Another in the theater. For anyone not in the know, it's the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie--based in part on Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland --that has received mainly rapturous reviews. It is deserving of the praise. It is a propulsive rollercoaster ride of a movie that doesn't feel as long as it is (162 minutes). I only looked at my watch one time, which is pretty good for me in a long film. I'm not sure if I should bother with a plot synopsis since that is easily available elsewhere, but basically, Leonardo diCaprio stars as a grizzled, burned out, pot-smoking, ex-radical revolutionary who is suddenly forced into his old life to find his kidnapped daughter. In the process, he and she are pursued by various nefarious forces, including Sean Penn as a heavily muscled, severely uptight white supremacist military weirdo named Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. It's a hilariously ridiculous ...