We’re all driven by the invisible whip.
HE had a light dinner with a couple of super-smart movie guys on Saturday evening, and we wound up sending an awful lot of directors to the guillotine, I’m afraid. Michel Franco, John Boorman, William Friedkin and three or four others escaped the blade, but Guillermo del Toro, Park Chan-Wook, Ryan Coogler…many, many directors rode in the proverbial horse-drawn cart to the Place de Concorde and felt the kiss of steel.
A voice of perception: “One Battle After Another is Paul Thomas Anderson‘s love letter to his daughter…the current between Leonardo DiCaprio and Chase Infiniti is the most affecting thing about it.”
Overheard: “It’s largely about Christian nationalism today, and that force — not simply in the movie, but within the Trump regime — is on a primal level about race, and there’s really no point in denying that the hugely influential and representative Charlie Kirk was a straight-up KKK-level racist. He was quite open about it.”
Ditto: “Critics aren’t allowed to say that the political undercurrent of OBAA is primarily powered by the ardor of enflamed black females…it’s set in a 21st Century world of militant political rebellion that has no room for or interest in ’70s memories of the mostly white SLA cadres (Nancy Ling Perry, Emily Harris, Patricia Hearst, et al.) or radical outlaws like Bernadine Dohrn, Kathy Boudin, Diana Oughton or Cathy Wilkerson. Okay, Alana Haim is a junior member of the team but otherwise the French 75-ers and the Beaver nuns are all sisters of Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver.
“Without militant black women OBAA wouldn’t have much wood in the fire. Leo’s character is no Mark Rudd or Fred Hampton…he’s basically an insecure dork or a schlumpy sloucher, and certainly a tag-along. Sean Penn’s Lockjaw is primarily defined by his perverse animal-boner attraction to Teyana Taylor‘s Perfidia Beverly Hills.”