Fwd: negative review of One Battle...?

[Mark Kohut]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Oct 6, 2025 at 12:49 PM
Subject: Re: negative review of One Battle...?
To: Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com>, pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>


I would agree...and I wonder how much might be Pynchon not quite liking
Anderson's ultimate vision here....dunno...but I think there is a lot of
Pynchon's vision....

and I haven't been getting your posts nor Tracy's, whom I must have blocked
and a quick glance at his 'they are clcihes: and "they ignore what is going
on around them" shows why I won't read his posts----he doesn't take the
vision on the screen straight but sees it with his baggage of
preconception but I do miss your comments,Laura....

But I have alos been too busy toeven send out this: there is in at least
two theaters in the greater DC area which are showing a truncated edited
version of the movie now----the first of them did not when I first saw it
there on opening weekend.....

The truncated version cuts all of the great 'black as night" ,BASNIGHT)
10-12 minute beginning...it begins on the bridge..

On Mon, Oct 6, 2025 at 12:13 PM Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> >>
> >
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>