"A rare naysayer is screenwriter and film-maker Paul Schrader, who commented tersely online: Film-making at level A+, but try as I might I couldn't muster up an ounce of empathy for Leo DiCaprio or Sean Penn. I kept waiting for them to die. But that's why the film is gripping: there is indeed no empathy for its two unlovely leading males, and their mortality and vulnerability has a kind of unwinding, entropic energy. They are heading for disaster."
"And yes, the film-making is A+ or A++; it is supercharged with pleasure at its own audacity and expertise. It is moviemaking with a late-Kubrick elegance and a knowing theatricality, culminating in an exhilarating but also eerily strange car chase on an undulating freeway. This isn't the same as style without substance, but it's certainly a movie that can't help put promote its self-aware style to equal status with its subject matter:"
One Battle After Another, inspired by Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, is a formally enigmatic countercultural drama-thriller that combines audacious filmmaking with theatrical self-awareness. The film foregrounds two unlovely protagonists whose lack of empathy generates an unwinding, entropic energy as they head toward disaster. Cinematic craftsmanship is striking, with late-Kubrick elegance and a surreal car chase on an undulating freeway. The narrative time and place remain ambiguous, moved forward from Pynchon's Reagan-era setting into an indeterminate zone between the Obama and Trump years or a bizarro present. The title evokes endless crises and a perpetual culture war in a petty-tyrannical America resisted from within.
#paul-thomas-anderson #thomas-pynchon-adaptation #film-style-and-aesthetics #ambiguous-american-setting
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]