La revolucion is here! Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth feature One Battle After Another opens today on movie screens of various sizes and shapes. (We were lucky enough to see it in 70mm VistaVision—insert Scorsese CINEMA dot jpeg here— but we’re curious about the 4DX One Battle experience, which we imagine involves Smell-o-vision pot smoke and gunpowder, maybe? Anybody who actually test-drives this format, please report back.) Anyway: It’s great. It’s PTA. It gets you really high. We still don’t fully understand, beyond the Leo Factor, how PTA got Warner Bros. to bet $130 million on it, or the even-wilder-given-what-it-is $175 million that’s been bandied about (“As you may or may not know, this is an important film for me—if it’s not a hit, I’m going to get kicked out of my apartment”) but, honestly, who cares? It’s art! Respond to it like a person! Nothing more depressing than a bunch of Thanatoids on Twitter cosplaying box-office analysts! Anyway, go see it! Kudos to Chase Infiniti and Junglepussy (two names Thomas Pynchon himself would be proud to have come up with) and to Leonardo DiCaprio, an up-and-coming actor with a bright future ahead of him.
Corey Atad checked in this week with a list of films that either influenced One Battle or talk back to it in some interesting way, from the 1966 revolutionary classic Battle of Algiers to Terminator 2 (another crowd-pleasing masterpiece about a parent with a radical past strapping up to rescue their child after an old enemy researches, which like One Battle contains car chases and also happens to figure in PTA lore.) Ariel LeBeau argues that One Battle, despite being semi-adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, may actually be the most personal film PTA has ever made—the father of four’s most dad-coded film, but specifically his most Girl Dad Energy work to date, charged with the anxiety of raising children in the midst of [gesturing vaguely to every insane apocalyptic thing going on in the outside world]. And—this being GQ, you know how we do—Savannah Sobrevilla charts Anderson’s style evolution from his bucket-hatted enfant terrible era circa Boogie Nights to the thoughtfully bearded genius-professor look he’s rocked on many a red carpet of late. (This week we had a conversation about Anderson’s present-day look with a friend who opined, “He’s aging into what his fanboys think they look like,” which was so accurate we didn’t even recognize that we were being personally insulted. Also, this is exactly what we are wearing right now.)
And while we’re on the subject—back in June, Heven Haile profiled One Battle For Another’s Perfidia Beverly Hills, real name Teyana Taylor, who revealed among other things that her instantly-iconic trailer line Bitch, I feel like Tony Montana was an ad-lib that made the final cut because PTA loved it, and that she came up with the idea of calling DiCaprio’s character “Ghetto Pat.” Great piece, go read that—and, reaching back a little deeper into the archives, also go read Zach Baron’s swell 2017 (Phantom Thread era) profile of Anderson himself, in which Baron calls his subject “maybe our best and most clear-eyed chronicler of America's myriad demons and self-betrayals,” and Anderson talks about what he’s learned from resisting and subsequently embracing Pilates: “The lesson there is shut up and listen to people when they give you free advice about things to help you with your lower back.” With that in mind, we’re going to get up out of this chair. Thanks for reading, see you next week, and All Hail St. Nick. —AP
