The Battle of Baktan Cross

That was the best movie I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Felt like it anyway. Back when I was still a teenager chronologically replacing Tarantino my favorite director became PTA mainly due to seeing Magnolia (1999, Paul Thomas Anderson) five times in the theater. Although his last three films all took time for me to warm up to. Especially Licorice Pizza. But I just saw Licorice Pizza again a few days ago in 70mm blowup at my neighborhood theater and I got a lot more out of it. Particularly the way these two young people are trying so hard to be older or more sophisticated or confident or accomplished in competition with each other. The way their flaws aggravate each other. His newest film took me back to that sense of instant recognition of greatness.

     Coincidentally both Tarantino and Anderson remain two of the few directors who have held out and continue to shoot on film. They're also two of the only directors in the world who have written all of their own screenplays and make big budget Hollywood studio pictures. Both have made roughly the same amount of films (9-10). Most of the movies they've both made have been set in L.A. And the same actor has starred in each of their last films: Leonardo DiCaprio.

As One Battle After Another (2025, Anderson) began (man I love getting to see a film play in a theater with no ads or trailers) I was enraptured shocked amazed that it was so unbelievably good. For the first ninety minutes I lost all sense of time. First the political content. Zeitgeist as fuck. Okay not really anything to do with politics. Except the stuff that incites people to passionate outrage—which let’s be honest that’s all most Americans really care about am I right? The immigration issue. Raids. Mexicans. White supremacist secret societies fighting for racial purity. Undisclosed locations. 

     It’s the kinetic energy PTA designs that figuratively and literally keep everyone on the run. And the threat of danger is palpable. It taps into that real life paranoia of the possibility of secret government agendas targeting you. Or cops. Or you know like they could be capable of. Also my entire life I feel like I’ve only ever encountered that former revolutionary trope countless of times like the Dude being boomer burnouts who claim to have been involved in all these radical groups in the 60s but you kind of take it as tall tales or even completely exaggerated ineffectual fraud. In One Battle After Another by updating the former revolutionary thing to a more contemporary setting and showing how serious about it they all really were is part of how the film deals with such real stakes. What happened to revolutionaries? My hunch is we stopped using that word ever since 9/11 because President George W. Bush replaced it with terrorist.
     Another trope so overused (I realize that’s redundant) is going after a man’s daughter being the center of the conflict in a huge action movie. But this time around PTA makes it work. Fresh enough spin. Heartfelt. Pathos. I was on the edge of my seat feeling like I’d never seen a movie this good and how does PTA know how to write an action movie this well since he’s never made one before until around the ninety minute mark it popped into my head that okay this is finally after all just a dad getting his daughter back plot. And you know there’s no way in this film anything will prevent that. But alas? I could hardly hold that against it or say it in anyway diminishes its grandeur.
     Seems like it’s also catering to a modern (youth) audience with its potsmoking black women loving not too bright hero played by an A lister icon like Leo. Good for us. The car chases are maybe the best part of the movie. After suffering from Marvel fight choreography rot I had recently been thinking how they may have ruined fights but I still love a good car chase. Heck I even rewatched Transformers Age of Extinction (2014, Michael Bay) just last week just for the car chase scenes. And I won’t bother to lookup the special ops government guy who interrogates characters trying to find Bob Ferguson and his daughter but his dialogue and casting also felt like a fresh take on something we’ve seen so many times before. Probably best movie of the year.
 
9/24/2025 Plaza Theatre
Atlanta, GA
70mm

The least worthwhile film from PTA yet?

Paul Thomas Anderson has maybe three distinct phases of his career so far. First there’s the style of his early period, when his films were bombastic, forcefully kinetic, grand, sweeping melodramas with lots of yelling. These were Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999) and Punch-Drunk Love (2002). These films also display an impulsive originality, with odd characters and an indulgence in the unexpected. And they’re serious dramas that remain fully immersed in comedy.

     But what happens in Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love is that Jon Brion composes original scores that take prominence in the mixing of the soundtrack, and additionally are featured heavily throughout the entirety of these works. It's a pivotal moment in Anderson's development as a filmmaker. (I saw Magnolia five times in the theater when it came out and cried every time.) Then after many years came There Will Be Blood (2007).

 

The next phase would be marked by a refined cohesion of tone; a slower, more calculated fluidity of camera moves; and original scores by another brilliant composer who drops the H, Jonny Greenwood. These are There Will Be Blood, The Master (2012), and Inherent Vice (2014). These are Anderson’s 3 masterpieces. Two dark epics about obsessive capitalism and a pure comedy Pynchon-faithful to the finest detail adaptation. These are the 3 I can rewatch for days. Each is perfect. 

     Inherent Vice gets funnier every time I watch it. Eventually I realized my favorite parts involve the chemistry between the performances of Phoenix and Owen Wilson on screen together. The fog scene is amazing. DOC: “I don’t know what I just saw.” COY: “Me neither. In fact, I don’t even wanna know.” 

For now, it seems like he may be in the final phase. I didn’t like Phantom Thread (2017) at first. I still don’t really, but it’s fun to watch because of Day-Lewis’ and Manville’s performances. And the Greenwood score—especially the high point of the film, the entire sequence where the socialite gets wasted in Woodcock’s dress, with the expressionist music accompanying and underscoring it.

     If Phantom Thread is an anti-romance, fittingly it’s followed by the nostalgic youth romance Licorice Pizza (2021). If I tell you I didn’t like a movie does the reason why even matter? Mostly it’s because it’s a romance about two characters whom I really don’t care whether or not they even get together. Or maybe it’s because there’s not a single aspect of either of their young lives I find remotely appealing, nor does L.A. or Encino or whatever in 1970 whatever look cool, fun, or exciting. 

     Like Anderson’s early period, Licorice Pizza revisits his long since passed mode of rough camera work, with documentary-like whip pans, and in-camera editing, suggesting something like a return to his youthfulness technically to match the subject matter? Licorice Pizza also feels like it’s trying to be spontaneously odd, but I don’t know if it works this time. And does anyone else think it’s funny? I don’t. The biggest offence I took at unfunny is the John Michael Higgins character who speaks to his Japanese wives in a thick mocking American trying to sound Japanese accent. Not like racist offensive, like this is so painfully not funny offensive.

     This movie was just such a disappointment to me. The motorcycle jump scene was excruciating. The buildup was not exciting. The jump was weak. The aftermath was a letdown. Symptomatic of the whole experience. Also what’s up with the characters running everywhere?

 

Trivia: Alana Haim is the star of Licorice Pizza. When I first heard of Haim I thought it was pronounced Haim like Corey Haim. I just watched Magnolia again on streaming (yes I cried 5 times again) and saw this scene I totally forgot about where as soon as the Michael Bowen character, STANLEY SPECTER’S dad, asks that Felicity Huffman character if she’s heard anything about the new Corey Haim pilot, he mispronounces it like the group HAIM.

 

12/25/2021 AMC Phipps Plaza 14

Atlanta, GA

DCP

An Air of Quiet Death

When I was 20 and living at the Dustbin in Portland Magnolia (1999, Paul Thomas Anderson) was my favorite movie. But now that I'm so much older my PTA tastes have changed a lot. There Will Be Blood (2007, Anderson) is so much different from Anderson's early work, and so is The Master (2012, Anderson). These two richly characterized period pieces historically entrenched in twentieth century American industrialism remain profoundly dark and perfectly executed, to say nothing of the effects Jonny Greenwood's scores have had enhancing their viewings.

Phantom Thread (2017, Anderson) is a nuanced atypical love story brilliantly adorned in high fashion costumes and emotionally underscored ceaselessly by Jonny Greenwood's classically elegant music.

Daniel Day Lewis as REYNOLDS WOODCOCK is the movie. Phantom Thread feels like the final entry in a trilogy that could encompass There Will Be Blood and The Master, about dark obsession centered around a male central protagonist. And what could be as abysmally dark as oil, Scientology, and love, respectively?

Phantom Thread is a flawed film though, unlike There Will Be Blood and The Master. While Phantom Thread is magnificent in its rapturous May-December propulsion into the development of a romantic fantasy made reality by two relatable archetypal yet highly neurotic adults, there is little more that the film offers.

And while the film's beautifully and effectively realized core is provocative and truthful, the film's third act is uneven and falls miserably short. But hey, doesn't all romantic love? Another big problem with Phantom Thread is its cinematography. While there is no director of photography credited, Paul Thomas Anderson himself serves in this capacity. And the results are ravishing in some shots, but more often amateurish. So many scenes look like a bad student film because of spill. It's like he has something against flags. Or, in other words, it appears that many shots were filmed without using traditional photographic tools to block light by unwanted sources from contaminating the exposure. Maybe Anderson likes this effect? It's bewildering.

I must give praise to the craftsmanship and elegance of this intimate world along with the trio of characters who inhabit it. Phantom Thread possesses an exceptional command of portraying and pathologizing the intricacies of the elusive apparition that is true love.

Evidently Phantom Thread lacks the staggering tragedy that befalls the antiheroes of There Will Be Blood and The Master, yet suffering from poor cinematography and a stupid plot device supporting its third act, maybe said tragedy is exemplified through subtext? PTA being the victim? Now this is what makes for interesting art.

And I will say the vignette with BARBARA ROSE as an emotionally overwhelmed socialite stands out as a high point keeping me on the edge of my seat while generating such a surprisingly unexpected type of empathy, mixed with laughter, shame, identification and sorrow.

A Battle That's Been a Trillion Years in the Making

Paul Thomas Anderson is to contemporary Hollywood something only maybe Terrence Malick can also be claimed as--an heir to the prestige rank of what the New Hollywood of the 1970s had established and set out to do. In his last two films he's found an actor willing to take on a gutsy unsympathetic lead and forged some unforgettable character studies. I bring this up because among the primary narrative elements used in a screenplay--character, setting, plot, dialogue, and genre--Anderson of late has mastered character and setting most. And since the only other top rank big budget director aside from Anderson and Malick that I can think of is Fincher, I find it telling of current Hollywood fiscal trends that Fincher specializes in plot and genre, for that's where the big money is at for artists of their caliber.

While almost every other Hollywood director has gone HD and begun pushing that envelope, Anderson remains committed to the potential of what film can do. A final Fincher comparison to ponder is he and Anderson's key collaborators for both of their last two films, the composer especially. Anderson's DP, Robert Elswit, ASC, was absent from his latest production--for the first time in their careers. That still leaves him with composer Jonny Greenwood and production designer Jack Fisk though. And this suits him just fine.

And some other trivia: Mihai Malaimare Jr., who shot Anderson's new film, shot Youth Without Youth (2007), Tetro (2009), and Twixt (2011) for Francis Ford Coppola, the last remaining figure from the 70s New Hollywood contiunuing in that vein of filmmaking, which Coppola calls "personal" fims.

Elswit first gave Anderson sprawling Ophülsian large canvass ensemble mosaics, then dark, naturally lit-appearing, artifact speckled tableaux. In The Master (2012, Anderson), the cinematography does not call attention to itself; and, no offence to Elswit, but, in a good way.

And Greenwood's score is less prominent.

Okay, here we go.

From the simple windsor font against a black background single title card, Anderson is relentlessly restrained. We're plunged into the world of Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and observe him on the beach, post WWII, catching some R&R with some fellow sailors: with little dialogue or context, we begin to study his character through action--his behavior, his rowdy primal lusts and pursuits.

And then, aside from the introduction of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the narrative keeps adding tiny crucially revealing pieces to the layers and layers of Freddie's existence, identity, and ultimate place in the universe.

And after most of our curiosities about Scientology are allowed to explore this similar narrative, imagining the parallels to Freddie's Master in the same way Last Days (2005, Gus Van Sant) did with a Cobain analog, it becomes possible to view The Master as an alternate take on There Will Be Blood (2007, Anderson). Plainview courted our empathy, but here Dodd does not; and, that leaves us with an even more cynical worldview to process. We empathize with Freddie. If Plainview glorified our dark side, Freddie reminds us how lost we can get.

And that's the scary part of the master. Because by the end, I actually did sympathize with Dodd. Maybe I should leave it at that. These are big questions. What does it take for Freddie to allow himself to be subjected to Dodd's demands? Is he worse off? Maybe not. All's I'll say is I reconfigured my connotation of what a cult is after watching The Master.

Anderson's breakdown has become signature. Plainview bitch-slapping Eli started something. And Anderson's most intriguing when he bridges man's spiritual identity to his animal nature. The Master shows Freddie going rabid on more than one occurence.

Dodd is a return to the nucleus that formerly held the surrogate band of miscreants in Anderson's early films together. And his stalwart wife and daughter remind one of Plainview's reliance on HW to sell his family image to his buyers. Philip Seymour Hoffman is magnificent in the way he truly embodies the charisma that needs to be that believable for this thing to really work, which it does.

I'll just close by saying that a few years ago I did some searches about Scientology, as I had just heard about it, and I read about it for hours. I still can't think of any movies other than A Woman of Paris (1923, Charles Chaplin), Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles), All the King's Men (1949, Robert Rossen), The Last Hurrah (1958, John Ford), The Last Tycoon (1976, Elia Kazan), Velvet Goldmine (1998, Todd Haynes) or Last Days ("last" is common in these titles) where the biopic's subject has been thinly disguised while obviously resembling the real he or she quite a bit, but The Master's focus on Freddie safeguards itself against it being a Hubbard bio. The Master remains as a character piece, and one that boldy portrays our weaknesses and most lasting needs we shuffle through along the way to our own searches for a master, on whatever paths they lead us, which often resemble just these kinds of ethical and moral wrestling matches that take place beteween Freddie and his master.

--Dregs