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Alrighty, folks, today we're going to be reviewing the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, One battle after another that many in the critical community is saying is the best movie of the year. Nay, the best movie in five years, 10 years, maybe in all of human history. This video is sponsored by our friends at ExpressVPN. Alrighty, so let's go through this movie. First of all, not good, do not like, bad. The direction is top tier because it's Paul Thomas Anderson, meaning it's a beautiful looking film, moves quickly. The music is actually quite good. The score is by Johnny Greenwood, who I'm not sure what else he has done actually, but I thought that the score was effective. I believe he did There Will Be Blood. So it's kind of a spare but effective score by Johnny Greenwood. The cinematography is beautiful. There is a car chase scene near the end that. That is well choreographed. And the movie sucks because the writing's bad. Okay, so the entire premise of the movie, it's based on a Thomas Pynchon novel which is called Vineland. And when I say based on, I mean loosely related to the basic idea of one battle after another. The basic plot is that you have a person named Ghetto Pat Calhoun, who is played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Perfidia Beverly Hills. Again, all of the names here are supposed to be on the nose, sort of slightly surrealistic, but they're not good, right? Perfidia Beverly Hills. Because it turns out that she is perfidious. Get it? Like Perfidia Beverly Hills. Because she's like. Because she's too cool for school. And because they actually sing the Beverly Hillbilly song at one point. Anyway, they are leaders of a revolutionary terrorist group called the French 75. And they seem like they're out of time because they really should be from like the late 1960s. But actually this part of the movie is supposed to be set some 16 years ago. So like 2008, 2009. The. The first scene in the movie is them raiding an ice facility to free illegal immigrants, which turns out to be sort of the running theme here is that revolutionaries, what they really do is they fight the system in order to allow unchecked migration into the United States. Why? Because they need to defeat white nationalism. White Christian nationalism. That's the basic politics of the film. So Perfidia Beverly Hills, she breaks into this ice facility along with her with her explosive expert boyfriend, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. She is obsessed with. With revolutionary violence. And also she is wildly sexually promiscuous. And so the opening Scene involves her, how shall we put asking Sean Penn character, He's the villain. Who is Colonel Stephen Lockjaw, I kid you not. Again, these names are bad. And who is a white supremacist. He's commanding the ice facility. The opening scene is her asking him to get up, but not like to his feet. And so you get a very long shot of his crotch as he is turned on by this radical Black Panther like terrorist. And. And so it turns out that he becomes obsessed with her and so he ends up tracking her down. He lets her go after she. She agrees to go to a motel and have sex with him. For some reason she keeps that commitment, which is strange. Anyway, she has like a BDSM relationship with, with Lockjaw. So she's bombing things with Leonardo DiCaprio and she's getting pregnant by Sean Penn, who's playing this uptight white Christian nationalist who is turned on by black female revolutionaries. Get it? Because white Christian nationalists, really, really, they have a sadomasochistic relationship with black female revolutionaries. In any case, she gets pregnant. There's a shot from the film that you've seen of her, very heavily pregnant, firing off what looks like an M4. And the idea is she's a true revolutionary, right? The freedom is in her belly. And at one point she says that the gun is for fun, but her genitalia, that is for fighting. She ends up being caught in the middle of a, of a bank robbery and she gives up the group in order to go free. And then she is supposed to go into witness protection and instead she escapes to Mexico. You never see her again for the rest of the movie. So that's just kind of left open. Anyway, fast forward 16 years. Her husband, Ghetto Pat Calhouna, calls himself Bob and he's a loser who smokes weed all day. And he is raising the person he thinks is their daughter, but who is actually the daughter of this white nationalist colonel. They are living in a sanctuary city called Bacton Cross. And Willa, his daughter, this is the daughter. She is a spirited teenager who as it turns out, is into revolutionary violence along with some of her gender non binary blue haired friends. And there are a couple of jokes here at the expense of the gender non binary blue haired friends, but mostly at the expense of out of touch old Bob who doesn't understand why somebody would be gender non binary. And there are a couple of humorous moments where Bob, again Leonardo DiCaprio, he is trying to call into the revolutionary group because what happens is that Stephen Lockjaw is trying to to join a white nationalist group, a white Christian nationalist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club. I know. This is so stupid. The whole thing's so. It's such a stupid movie. It's so dumb. Okay. And they decide they're not going to let him in because he might have a black daughter. And so he decides he's going to track down the black daughter and kill her so he can get into the white Christian nationalist club, as one would. He decides to lead a raid on Backton Cross, the sanctuary city, to track down, in reality, his daughter. Meanwhile, Bob is looking for his daughter, and in order to find his daughter, he ends up teaming up with Benicio Del Toro, who plays a karate teacher and community leader named Sergio San Carlos, who's a sensei and who, again, is. Is funny in a sort of oddball, kind of Wes Anderson kind of way. Everything Benicio Del Toro plays now is, like, too cute by half. So, anyway, he is a. He's the leader of an underground railroad for illegal immigrants who. Who are all staying in this facility nearby and who are also engaged with skateboarding terrorists straight out of the Kyle Rittenhouse situation. And he's the big hero is this is Benicio Del Toro, who's gonna help out Bob, but also help out the illegal immigrants while this raid is going on. Okay, we'll get to more of this in just a moment. First, it's often said freedom isn't free. And that's true. Freedom has to be defended. But what isn't said enough is that online freedom isn't free either. 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So he puts her in the back of the car, he drives her there, he gives her up. But don't worry. Don't worry. For all of those who were worried that there might be a person of color in this film who's on the wrong side, no. He ends up turning on the White nationalists when he realizes that the White Nationalists are bad people about to kill the black girl. Now, he could have realized that in the car and not dropped her off, but instead he ends up dying heroically in order to save her by killing the entire White nationalist biker group. Okay, And. And so he dies. She grabs the car. There's a car chase involving another member of the original Christmas Adventurers Club who's trying to track her down and kill her in order to cover up, I guess, for the. For the fact that Stephen Lockjaw has a biracial daughter. And so the Christmas Adventurous Club guy kills Stephen Lockjaw, sort of, but not quite. He shoots him in the face, but he lives. And then Leonardo DiCaprio kills that guy and saves his daughter. And that's the whole film. At the very end, Stephen Lockjaw lives, but he goes to the Christmas Adventurers Club and they effectively euthanize him. They say, we're gonna let you in. And they put him in an office and they gas him to death. And that's the end of the movie, except that you get a tag. And the tag at the end of the movie is Willa gets a letter. She's had a letter from her mom that her dad's been hiding and she reads the letter, and the letter doesn't actually tell her to maybe lead a better life than she led or to abandon these revolutionary idiots who are accomplishing nothing. Instead, the letter says that she wishes she had been a better mom, but also she wishes that she had fought the revolution better. And the daughter decides that she too will be a revolutionary. And the end of the movie is Bob, who's now permissive with his daughter, giving her a thumbs up as she goes to perform revolutionary activity. If this sounds like a total mess to you, it's because it is. It is an ideological mess, but it's more than a mess. It's actually quite ideologically bad. The basic suggestion is a conspiracy theory in which the United States is run by white supremacist Christian nationalists and all people of color and a few nice incompetent fellow travelers like Bob are going to take on that entire system. And that system must be taken on at the cost of family, at the cost of friendship, at the cost of decency, at the cost of basic human capacity for success. It is better, in other words, to be a complete loser who wastes your life bombing things randomly in order to free illegal immigrants, to run willy nilly across the border, than to be, like a productive citizen of that. At no point is that actually considered by anyone, by the way, like just to be a productive citizen of society because the society, as we know, is run by white Christian nationalists. So in other words, when I've talked about permission structures, and I've talked about the permission structures for violence that led to, for example, the murder of Charlie Kirk, and what I've said about those permission structures is that they basically create ideologies. These ideologies are bad because they include three components. One, a conspiratorial view of the universe in which a shadowy cabal of powerful people are responsible for your problems in life and the problems of the world. Two, Two, a belief that your specific group is being targeted, and three, a belief that violence is justified in self defense. That's this entire film. This entire film is that there's a conspiratorial group of white Christian nationalists who are targeting people of color. Those people of color have to band together along with a few more on fellow travelers like Bob, in order to take on that conspiracy. And they should bomb things and they should kill people and they should do terrible things and say radical things while doing it. I'm in search of subtlety here. I do not understand, Honest to God, I. I do not understand the attempts by some to Say that this is a subtle movie in any way. It has the subtlety of a brick. There have been some people at the Washington Post, for example, in the Washington Post entertainment section who tried to draw a different moral from this. One writer, for example, says, quote, one battle after another shifts the paranoid nightmare of Nixon era political extremism to our current powder keg moment in a way that helps us process it. Yes, it could get that bad again. And this is what it would look like. In its most outrageous plot point, a kinky affair between opposite camp radicals in Anderson brings the horseshoe theory of politics to life. Of course, the rat, the wackiest right winger and the looniest leftist fall into bed with each other. Who else could match their violent intensity? Anderson also offers us hope, though, in the calm at the center, the sweet relationship between the chilled out dad who has lost his political fervor and the teenage daughter who is finding her own capable way. Yeah, except that at the very end you might think that's where it's going. That's not where it goes at the very end. It takes a hard left and goes directly into she should be a radical just like mommy was. Right? So again, the. All these writers are trying to find something there that isn't there. Or they are softly justifying all of this. One writer named Haben Kaladi says in the Washington Post, it's about hope. One of the last characters we hear from is Perfidia. Reading from a letter she wrote in exile to her daughter Willa, she asks, will you try to change the world like I did before adding, we failed, but maybe you will not. Right, that's the line. Maybe you should be a revolutionary. And in the very last scene, a revolutionary daughter is following in her mother's sacrificial footsteps, despite everything we've been seeing in, in the past three hours. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Like again, you can make excuses for it, but basically the thing's an apologia for radical left wing terrorism. That's. That's what it is. And any attempts to paint it as more complex than that, I think are, are overdoing it. Alrighty, so there is your review of One Battle After Another by Paul Thomas Anderson. Again, Leonardo DiCaprio is good in it. He's a good actor. Benitia Del Toro, fine. Tiana Taylor is Perfidia. She talented actress. It's all, it's all fine except for Sean Penn as Lockjaw, who kind of stinks, but just a bad movie. A bad movie all around. Like Shape of water style bad movie. It's a little surprising for Paul Thomas Anderson, who's sort of stayed away from the overtly political for a while. And again, I really like some of Paul Thomas Anderson's movies. I think that There Will Be Blood is a terrific film, even though, again, I think the politics tends toward the left. It's very anti religion and also anti capitalism. And I think the Master is really maybe his best movie, which is about the power of sort of cults and the draw of cults. But this is. This is a. It's just bad. It's not good. Will this win Academy Awards? It'll win all the Academy Awards because this is what Hollywood wants. Left wing agit prop from high powered directors.