2025 - ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, on the big screen

One Battle After Another is an excellent film, it is also a very quirky and at times odd film as is to be expected from it's writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson.  This film was kind of a crap shoot for Warner Brother's Studios.  Give a talented filmmaker a large budget and let him follow his own muse.  The end result is film that says a lot about the current social and political situation in the United States but also adds some oddball humor to it's story.

This film has an amazing cast, Leonardo DiCaprio is a burned out revolutionary.  Sean Penn is a very right wing military officer.  Benicio Del Toro is a karate instructor who is also moving illegal migrant workers around to keep them from being detained by the government.  Penn in particular hasn't had a good part like this in a long time.

 

Anderson has also taken a different approach to the action scenes instead of the usual over the top hyper and frankly unrealistic approach most of these action movies have. The chase scenes have been carefully staged and edited.

 

 One Battle After Another will unfortunately not be a financial success.   The film just did not catch on with the public. This admittedly unconventional but very entertaining film will apparently lose a lot of money.  The studio spent a lot marketing this film but something clearly didn't click with getting the word out to the movie going audience.  Frankly what the public now wants in film entertainment is apparently a mystery to Hollywood especially when a film like this fails

Still a great film anyway you cut it.  One Battle After Another deserves to be seen in a movie theater to appreciate it's widescreen compositions.  In fact all of the technical credits in this film are at an extremely high level along with the performances of the cast.

The running time is 162 minutes. 

1996 - HARD EIGHT, a good study of some low life characters

This a decent little drama about gamblers getting by in Reno.  The director/writer Paul Thomas Anderson has made a film that is essentially about four characters and their interactions with each other.

Philip Baker Hall is the old guy who's been around a while and knows all the tricks.  John C. Reilly is his pretty dense protegee.  Samuel L. Jackson is some sleeze ball who knows Reilly.  Finally, Gwyneth Paltrow is the cocktail waitress/hooker who Reilly falls for.  All of the cast is very good and it was kind of nice to see Paltrow play a character who wears too much makeup and isn't very smart. 

I have to give the director/writer Paul Thomas Anderson credit, he could have fallen for the colored light eye candy of the casino setting but he manages to control himself and focus on the actors.

It's nice to watch a film where the story moves along because of the characters instead of being held hostage by elaborate action pieces for a change.

102 minutes.