BEFORE: I was going to feature the body-swap film "Little" here, with Regina Hall carrying over and getting me to this year's Best Picture winner, but that film was available on Netflix when I made this chain - just a couple weeks ago - and is not available anywhere now. It happens, that's become a fairly typical part of my process, and I'll tend to do a double-check on IMDB right before starting a new segment of the chain, just to make sure everything is still where I left it, and there will be no bumps in the road. But just like I have un-linkables and one-linkables, I also have droppables, and that film was a droppable, the middle film in a chain of three, if it suddenly becomes unavailable or I have too many movies and not enough slots, I can drop it and just move on, the chain should close up around the hole.
Honestly, I was on the fence about watching that film anyway, because it links to another body-swap comedy, plus IMDB lists "Little" as a romance, or at least that's one of its tags, so I was starting to wonder if it was in the right place to begin with. Also I need to drop SOMETHING in order to make it to Mothers Day on time, that film being suddenly unavailable then makes the decision to drop it that much easier. If it hadn't been a middle film of three then I might have taken steps to actually PAY to watch the film, on YouTube or something, but now I don't have to, I can save a few bucks and just skip it.
So now that's designated as "burned toast" and we're not going to worry about it, because it can only good happen, down the road a bit. "Little" could be needed come Christmas time or next year or something to make the linking happen and keep the chain alive, there's no way to know that now, of course, but that could be the case, so this was the chain's way of telling me that it's time to watch the film that won Best Picture. Regina Hall carries over from "Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul." and I can still keep films lined up with two more birthdays this week.
THE PLOT: When their enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunite to rescue the daughter of one of their own.
AFTER: I "met" Paul Thomas Anderson on his last tour of the country, when he was promoting "Licorice Pizza" and there were screenings on 35mm. Well, I work for one of the last theaters in NYC that can still screen on film, so a number of screenings were booked, and for one I got to speak with him (briefly) to tell him when, and how, to walk on stage to the panelist chairs. Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman were there, too, and of course I had no idea I was addressing someone who would go on to win the Best Director Oscar with his next film, and it was still a few months after that when I watched "Licorice Pizza", but you know, everything at the right time, not all at once.
Obviously, with Mr. Anderson winning Best Director and this film winning Best Picture, I made the goal of getting to it as soon as possible, and I did - while still respecting the necessary nods to Easter, and Mother's Day coming up. Not that this film is related to either of those, but if this could be worked in between and scheduled for late April rather than, say, May or June, then all the better. Come to think of it, there's a bit here that's mother-related, it's just way too early, the holiday is still about 18 days away. But also, today is Earth Day, and though this movie was initially planned for tomorrow, maybe it fits better here, a day that's all about activism, and activism is at the start of this film. Well, revolutionaries, activism, whatever, it's all the same, right? The initial issue is immigration, and we see part of the infamous Trump border wall from his first Presidential term, along with a detention camp somewhere on the Mexican border where immigrants are being held, and the "French 75" group is there to break them out.
Two of the group's members become lovers, Pat Calhoun and Perfidia Beverly Hills, however during the course of the break-out, Perfidia sexually humiliates the commanding officer, Steven Lockjaw, but he kind of digs it, and later becomes obsessed with her. This becomes important later during another operation when he catches her planting a bomb at another installation, and he agrees to not turn her in, provided she agrees to have sex with him. Later she becomes pregnant, and we the audience know that either man could be the baby's father. Perfidia gives birth to a baby girl but does not settle down and play the nurturing mother, she goes right back to her revolutionary cause, and is arrested after shooting a guard during a bank robbery. Lockjaw is still obsessed with her, and arranges for her to turn evidence on the other revolutionaries and avoid prison. She enters witness protection, and after using her information to arrest and/or execute members of French 75, he goes to visit her at her safe house, trying to make a booty call, only she's fled for Mexico. Pat Calhoun moves upstate to a sanctuary city and raises his (?) daughter under a new name, Bob Ferguson.
Fast-forward sixteen years and the country has become more conservative, the anti-immigration movement is out of control, and the national guard and armored troopers are marching in the liberal cities, and DAMN, if this film didn't predict TO A TEE the I.C.E. actions of last year, right? Lockjaw has risen to the rank of colonel and has become a prominent anti-immigrant figure in the government agencies, and also has been invited to become a member in a high-profile secret society of white supremacists. He'll be fine, as long as they never find out he had sex with a black woman... Meanwhile "Bob Ferguson" has been living off the grid, raising his daughter and is now a paranoid stoner. He won't let his teen daughter have a cell phone, because he knows they can be hacked and tracked, and he's suspicious of all of her friends.
Lockjaw hires a bounty hunter to capture Somerville, aka "Billy Goat", another one of the French 75 members, one who knows where the others are all hiding. So it's only a matter of time before the troops are sent to the sanctuary city, while another ex-French 75 member, Deandra, rescues WIlla from her school before the troops arrive, and Bob is also warned about the upcoming raid, so he escapes via a tunnel under his house, and heads for Willa's karate studio, where her sensei, Sergio, runs the operation that saves undocumented immigrants. Together they get the information that Willa has been taken to a convent of revolutionary nuns (they take care of retired bears in the off-season, I think). Unfortunately Bob gets arrested during the raid after falling off a rooftop (parkour is for the young, it turns out) and so that's going to take some time to break him out.
Lockjaw has a head start at getting to the convent out in the California desert, he's got a DNA kit and wants to confirm that Willa is his daughter, and if she is he needs to kill her, or he'll never get in to the secret white supremacist society, which is call the Christmas Adventurers. The supremacists have also received evidence that Lockjaw might have a bi-racial child, so they send their own assassin out to kill both Lockjaw and Willa. In third place in this weird race is Bob himself, who gets sprung from prison by being sent to the hospital, then friendly agents at the hospital arrange his escape, and he hooks up again with sensei Sergio and they also head out to the desert. Bob's got a rifle and he catches up with Lockjaw, but he misses the kill shot. Lockjaw's already been to the convent and kidnapped Willa, but he's handed her off to the bounty hunter, who won't kill her because she's just a teen girl - but he will bring her to the compound of a far-right militia group, then he changes his mind and helps break her free, so like everyone else in this film, she steals a car and tries to get out of there.
The last quarter of the film is just a giant chase scene, unfortunately - I wish it didn't just devolve into that, but sometimes there's just nothing you can do about it. I've seen it happen many times with animated features, it's not exactly high drama when you just put every character in a car and make them all drive through the desert really fast. I think a screenwriter just writes down "chase scene", and then that can be five minutes long or half an hour, it just depends how complicated you want to make it, and how long you want it to be, and I guess maybe how much film you have. Here we have Lockjaw in one vehicle, Willa in another, the supremacist assassin in a third car and Bob in the fourth. Who lives and who dies all kind of depends on who's following who and whose car is faster. And really, you can work this sequence to produce any outcome you want - I just maintain there were loftier, less pedantic ways to get the story where it needed to go. But sure, it's an action film and who doesn't love an action-packed chase scene?
I still think "Sinners" was a better movie, in a few different ways. But "One Battle After Another" seemed to tap into more of the current cultural zeitgeist, whether that was by accident or by design remains to be seen. It's based on a Thomas Pynchon story, but clearly it was heavily tinkered with to represent current events regarding immigration, racial issues, the overreaching power of government to maintain order at the civic level. So the political climate created those problems or let them get out of control, and then this movie came along and beefed them up a bit, sort of taking advantage of them to make this story more relevant. I suppose that's one way to win an Oscar, I'm not going to say outright that's a bad thing, like you can't get mad at "Schindler's List" for riding a wave of interest in the Holocaust, ultimately that's a good thing. But we've called other Holocaust movies "Oscar bait", so I think maybe there's a fine balance that needs to be maintained.
Still, a lot of work went into this, and it found a way to be relevant, which not all movies manage to do. Pynchon wrote "Vineland" during the Reagan years, and so you can probably draw a lot of connections between Reagan and Trump, really the more things change, the more they stay the same, and history doesn't always repeat but it sometimes does rhyme. But that's only part of how you win a Best Picture Oscar, this film had a $70 million marketing campaign and another $14 million just for the awards campaign. It's not really fair if there are independent movies out there that don't have that kind of publicity budget, is it? And even if you consider it a masterpiece, does it make sense that a masterpiece would gross $213 million worldwide and still not be profitable? I know Hollywood accounting is a little fast and loose, but how can a movie make that much and still be considered a financial failure - like, what's the point?
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (director of "Hard Eight" and "Licorice Pizza")
Also starring Leonardo DiCaprio (last seen in "Killers of the Flower Moon"), Sean Penn (last seen in "Brats"), Benicio Del Toro (last seen in "The Phoenician Scheme"), Teyana Taylor (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Chase Infiniti, Wood Harris (last seen in "Creed III"), Alana Haim (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Paul Grimstad, Shayna McHayle, Tony Goldwyn (last seen in "Ezra"), John Hoogenakker (last seen in "A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas"), Starletta DuPois (last seen in "Waiting to Exhale"), Eric Schweig (last seen in "The Scarlet Letter"), D.W. Moffett (last seen in "The Year of Spectacular Men"), Kevin Tighe (last seen in "School Ties"), James Downey (last seen in "Happy Gilmore 2"), James Raterman, Dijon Duenas, Dan Chariton (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Jon Beavers (ditto), Ted McCarthy (ditto), Pearl Minnie Anderson (ditto), April Grace (last seen in "Don't Let Go"), Tisha Sloan,
Brooklyn Demme (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Sachi Diserafino, Melissa Duenas, Vanessa Ganter, Otillia Gupta, Nia Leon, Joe Silva, Jeffrey Massagli, Nicole J. Sunseri, Jeremy Ekalo, Alberto Garcia, Antonio Tadeo Garcia, Patricia Ridgely Storm, Jeremy Boone (last seen in "Joker: Folie a Deux"), Bryan Pickens, Carlos McFarland, Colton Gantt, Elisabeth Pease, Autumn Crosswhite, Mickey Giacomazzi, Omar Khattab, Sandra Iturbe, Marisela Borjas Ramirez, Derrick J. Saenz, Esperanza Rodarte De Santoyo, Hadasa Genesaret Palomares, Gilbert Martinez Jr., Luis Trejo, Julian Corral, Elijah Joseph Sambrano, Sherron Gassoway, Robert Sherock, Lynette M. Telles, Ann Limbaugh-Brouhard, Antonio Garcia, Emilio Carranza, Juan V. Ramirez, Ron Bermudez Perea, Edith Ascencion, David Reynoso, Timothy Kravitz,
and the voices of Jena Malone (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Anthony Weise,
RATING: 7 out of 10 tear gas canisters
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