negative review of One Battle...?

[Laura Kelber]

The IMDb writing credit has been altered yet again. It now reads:

Paul Thomas Anderson (written by)
Thomas Pynchon (inspired by the novel "vineland" by).

Keep in mind that PTA's page on IMDb is controlled by his people, though
it's possible Pynchon could alter his own listing on the page. The
lowercase "v" and the clumsy wording suggests the change was probably made
hastily by an intern or someone else deputized by PTA, presumably at
Pynchon's request.

The fact that there have been several changes of Pynchon's credit since the
official listing appeared suggests (to me, anyway) that Pynchon is a little
ambivalent about the film. It clearly has a connection to Vineland, but he
may be bridling at some reviewers calling it an adaptation.

LK



On Mon, Sep 29, 2025, 5:42 PM J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> Laura
> I find your critique very astute and section 6 is a particularly good
> summary of my overall disappointment. DiCaprio makes some kind of  sense as
> a revolutionary gone to pot, but who loves and fights for his daughter. But
> their story is cliched and seems to ignore the suffering all around them.
> He is also not Zoyd the musician in any way and hardly represents the
> nature of any social movement I am seeing. There is a green movement in
> Humboldt county  and across the country which could have provided much more
> to go on and could have  elaborated the labor rights family connections we
> see in the Traverses.  The   black revolutionaries felt like the worst
> possible caricatures of the Panthers  and we never get a sense of what
> their communities are actually suffering. Also 16 years ago there wasn’t
> much going of violent revolution. More like occupy wall street,  cops
> beating up black people  and the coup in Ukraine.
>   The cult like connections of the Christmas Club  don’t reach far enough
> into the role of government, FBI, empire, ICE, or media and don’t read like
> the tech moguls, Blackrock type investment banks or neocons driving the
> empire in recent decades.
>
> One thing he got right was to replace the centrality of TV with computer
> surveillance, showing how incredibly hard organizing revolutionary
> resistance of any kind has become.
>
> I feel Orson Welles and other filmmakers of that time showed that you can
> be very intense without doing propaganda. Also I don’t feel
> Frank Capra can be written off for his more hopeful picture of what
> america could be.
> OK , starting to ramble. Hope others will speak up..
>
>
> On Sep 29, 2025, at 3:33 PM, Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Note: Joseph, my posts haven't been showing u on the P-list, so let me
> know if you get two copies of this.
>
> I'm not a huge Paul Thomas Anderson fan, though I loved Boogie Nights and
> thought the Phantom Thread was interesting. I don't think he's whom I'd
> choose to adapt Pynchon's books, because humor isn't his strong point. Ah,
> if only Kubrick could have done it! Maybe the Coen brothers?
>
> A month or so back, Pynchon wasn't credited as a writer on the film's IMDb
> page. It's since been added, though a little equivocally. "Written by"
> credit is given to PTA, after which is added: Thomas Pynchon (novel
> "Vineland"). So there's no acknowledgement that this is an adaptation.
>
> But it's certainly more than just a nod to Pynchon. Should the screenplay
> be nominated for anything, it would have to go under the "adapted
> screenplay category." The big question for me is what did Pynchon consent
> to? Was he involved in the film at all, even in terms of reading the
> script? Did he withdraw his blessing, but then give it after seeing a cut
> of the film? I guess we'll never know.
>
> I think we're seeing, and will continue to see, the rise of an anti-Trump
> cinema, which I'm all for. But I don't think anyone's clinched it yet. The
> two films that most stand out are this one and Eddington, written and
> directed by Ari Aster. They have remarkable similarities, down to being
> over-long, over-funded projects by not exactly humble writer-directors.
>
> SPOILERS to follow if you haven't seen both:
>
> 1. Both are present-day (Eddington takes place mostly during Covid)
> sprawling works that introduce anti-Trumpian elements. In the case of
> Eddington, it's the fight about Covid regulations, along with unfettered
> AI; OBAA focusses mostly on immigration.
>
> 2. Both have caused genre confusion for reviewers. Eddington is currently
> listed as Comedy/Drama/Western; OBAA gets Action/Crime/Drama. I've read a
> number of rave reviews calling OBAA a comedy, and the audience seemed to be
> laughing through a lot of it.
>
> 3. Both have underdeveloped characters. I'd have to keep a cheat sheet
> nearby to even discuss them by name. It's not always clear who the
> protagonist is because the films cover a broad panorama. The presumed
> protagonist of Eddington acts in such a mystifying way mid-movie that
> there's just no going back to anything like rapport. In OBAA, Leo DiCaprio
> is supposed to play the protagonist, but he behaves more like a supporting
> character. In the beginning, he's the snitch's sidekick. In the
> present-day, PTA seems to have no idea about how to make him an active part
> of the story and so he turns him into Lebowski, bathrobe and all, and
> relegates him to stoner comic relief for whatever else is happening.
>
> 4. Neither tells a particularly coherent story. In the case of Eddington,
> the anti-mask Sheriff of a small town(who seems to be the protagonist whom
> we're sometimes supposed to root for and at other times root against)
> decides to run against the pro-mask Mayor. He has a deep-seated grudge
> against the Mayor over a woman, which causes him to explode in to a
> murderous rampage, which gets superseded by an apparently well-funded
> antifa false flag operation, which obliterates even more people.
>
> OBAA collects assorted political movements of the 60s/70s (The Weather
> Underground, The Panthers and maybe the Symbionese Liberation Army) into a
> weird amalgam personified by a gun-happy Black woman who's also a
> Frenesi-like snitch. Loosely based on Assata Shakur who just passed away
> this week? Then instead of leaving the story back in the 70s, he
> superimposes it into a struggle for immigrant rights, back in the early
> Obama period. The struggle enters the present day when the snitch's fascist
> sex partner decides to join a white supremacist group and decides he has to
> hunt down the daughter he may have fathered with the Black snitch. Mayhem
> ensues, and plenty of plot-holes, but not much story. After the initial 40
> minutes or so, there are few scenes that have to be there to make the story
> coherent. But there's a lot of dragged out walking down hallways,
> repetition, etc. Absolutely no way the movie had to be 2 hours and 41
> minutes long.
>
> 5. Both films shy away from being heavy-handedly propagandistic, and both
> employ the same methodology: making the "good guys" unlikeable. In
> Eddington, it's not enough to have the originally sympathetic Sheriff be an
> anti-masker. The film spends a lot of time mocking the BLM movement and
> progressives in general, while showing that the "progressive" Mayor is
> actually colluding with the Big AI tech company. It may be an accurate
> portrayal of the present political situation which is overrun with villains
> and scant on heroes. But it doesn't make for a very compelling film.
>
> In OBAA, we're basically told that the struggle against Obama's
> immigration policies is the same as the current struggle. That certainly
> doesn't ring true on a gut level, and it softens the present-day struggle
> to just another battle rather than something exponentially different.
> Unlike Eddington, the violence and hate are personified in the Brock
> Vond-ish Sean Penn character (and I have to decry the casting here:  Sean
> Penn is so old and ugly, neither Frenesi or the Snitch would be able to
> look at him, let alone fuck him). SO PTA doesn't have to work very hard to
> make the good guys look good. At worst (aside from the Snitch) they're
> bumbling and ineffective.
>
> 6. In Eddington, the bad guys have a complete victory. In OBAA, there's a
> partial victory, but la lucha continua. Both films leave the audience
> feeling ... what? Entertained? Exhausted? Assuming that AA and PTA had the
> same motivation for making these films: not wanting to stand idly by while
> this vulgar, stupid, narcissistic fascist dismantles the concept of human
> rights. And knowing that they had the backing to make a BIG STATEMENT film.
> But all they've done is chronicled what's going on, as if we don't know.
> Neither seems to have any idea of what they're calling for. At the end of
> OBAA, the daughter joins the resistance - going to a demonstration or
> action to support or denounce something. But stuff like that is already
> happening in the real world, and it's clearly not enough. If OBAA inspires
> people to - what? - take up arms? protest? vote? - that's all for the good.
>
> But I think both these films just add to the confusion. Think of
> Casablanca, that hokey, studio schlockfest that Bogie and Bergman were
> snickering over while they ad libbed through it. It's lasted not because of
> the romantic triangle or exotic location or explicit wartime propaganda. It
> lasted because people saw Claude Rains decide to go over to the good-guy
> side, and it didn't feel gratuitous. If he could do it, maybe your racist
> uncle could too. That's powerful at the gut level. It makes you feel that
> maybe things can change. Neither of these movies made me feel that way.
>
> These are two examples, but there are two more: Weapons (2025), Superman
> (2025). Go down the list and see if these two don't tick the same boxes,
> down to being written and directed by a white male director with a solid
> track record. Civil War (2024), which I consider the best of all these
> movies, was more of a warning than a testament, but has a fair amount of
> overlap.
>
> LK
>
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 10:18 AM J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>
>> I got a reference in either my inbox or my Pynchon list mailbox to a
>> negative review of One Battle After Another and now that email is gone and
>> I can’t remember the publication.  Did anyone else see it, read it? I
>> thought the review touched on everything that was unsettling to me about
>> the movie but also left out certain aspects.  I still have very mixed
>> feelings about the movie, and am hoping other list members will post
>> something. The acting was strong. The reference to the current fascists at
>> the top is bold and properly creepy, and the questions about the
>> possibility of revolution in such a time need to be talked about. Overall
>> though, I think the film misses the mark.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>
>