The only sensible way to discuss One Battle After Another is in a form-vs.-content fashion.

Form-wise it’s obviously quite good — driven, vigorous, excellent at times. The longish length doesn’t feel all that burdensome…really. But the insurrectionist, death-to-the-racist-whitey-bad-guys, eat-hot-lead, anti-ICE, lefty-Antifa-women-of-color content (is there even one female speaking role played by a European-descended paleface?) will prove to be a box-office problem over the next week or two. A problem for Average Joes and Janes, I mean.

The radical political stuff is presumably playing well in the costal blue cities. That plus the “okay, Paul Thomas Anderson, a brand, has earned my ticket-buying allegiance” crowd.

From Owen Gleiberman’s 9.27 Variety essay, “One Battle After Another, With Its Thriller Vision of Authoritarianism, Is the Rare Movie That Could Rule the Cultural Conversation”:

The heart of this rant begins at the 1:00 mark…”looney woke shit“, etc.

One of the main reasons Kamala Harris lost is that she never even began to acknowledge that Average Joes and Janes despise the left for this. She never even alluded to the possibility of this feeling being out there.

Harris: “Looney woke shit what? You’re talking about us? Since when? Whudda-whudda whah?

Stuart Rosenberg and W.D. Richter‘s Brubaker (’80) was a ’70s hangover film. Not a trace of the influence of Star Wars or Jaws. It could have been released in ’74 or ’75 and no one would have blinked an eye.

Robert Redford was 43 during filming in ’79, and he didn’t look a day older than he did in The Candidate, The Sting or Three Days of the Condor.

Morgan Freeman‘s brief performance as a crazed psycho inmate put him on the map, and this was seven years before Street Smart (’87), mind.

Richter’s adaptation of “Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal” was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the ’81 Academy Awards.

Brubaker opened on 6.20.80, three months before the 9.19.80 release of Redford’s Oscar-winning Ordinary People.

Remember the old days when typical ComicCon devotees tended to be schlubby, dorky-looking straight guys with a generally horrific dress sense (shorts, low-thread-count T-shirts, black socks, sneaker slip-ons) and a tendency towards corpulence?

Last night around 10-something I was chilling at the arrivals area at JFK’s Terminal 1, idling in a black, snappy-looking Lincoln SUV.

A 40ish blonde woman had just popped the trunk of a newish black coupe that was maybe 15 feet away, and a middle-aged bearded guy in a cream-colored sweater and a dark baseball cap was loading his suitcase.

I was saying to myself “wow, that guy with the cap and beard sure looks like Luca Guadagnino….oh, but it can’t be! Too much of a coincidence.”

But my curiosity had been aroused. I’ve had Luca’s Italian cell since that introductory lunch we shared near Spezia in early June of ‘17. So what the hell…I texted a message: “Are you wearing a cream–colored sweater and a baseball cap?”

Immediate reply: “Yes! Where are you?” HE: “Right behind you.” Hug, smiles, joyful greetings.

Sometimes the world is actually as small as we imagine it to be.

You can believe or not believe in coincidences, but they happen anyway from time to time.

I’m on my way into town and the NYFF to catch my second viewing of After The Hunt. Repeating once again: Don’t trust the fiendish wokey critics.

HE to commentariat: Who’s the present-day cancelled actor Glenn Powell was afraid to be photographed with? What actor has a totally toxic reputation? Either way, how did Powell, 37, manage to grow this kind of cast-iron backbone?

How would Powell have responded if he’d met Dalton Trumbo at a Hollywood party in 1957?

Trumbo: “Hey, Glenn…nice to meet ya.” Powell: “Dalton! Love your work, man! Kitty Foyle, Gun Crazy, The Brave One, Roman Holiday.” (A photographer comes up, attempts to snap the two of them.) Powell: “Holy shit!”…ducks out of the frame, runs away in a crouch position.

Clark: “Are you a coffee fan, Dr, Ryan?” Ryan: “Yeah, I like coffee.” Clark: “Try the Lindo brand. I think you’ll like it.”

If you’ve seen a film more than 10 or 12 times over the last 30 years, it can be safely stated that you really, REALLY like it.

I attended the Clear and Present Danger press junket in San Francisco in the mid-summer of ’94. (31 years ago and change.) I forget why it happened at the top of Nob Hill instead of at one of the usual venues (the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, etc.) but for whatever reason that was the drill.

I had my 12-minute interview with Harrison Ford, and of course we discussed the Reagan administration’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.

I love how Clear and Present Danger doesn’t try to trick or fake you out. It just guides you along, lets you watch, listen and observe, and basically treats the viewer like a smart, well-educated person…it doesn’t play games.

— from Harmin’ Armond’s 9.26 National Review piece on Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.

…except in two respects.

One, the political tone of her review — the theological undercurrent — sounds like it was penned by the critic for Ramparts or even The Berkeley Barb in the late ‘60s. So she’s clearly in the tank for Paul Thomas Anderson’s empathy for (or excitement over) lefty, insurrectionist, down-with-whitey politics as well as the propulsive cinematic chops.

And two, Dargis doesn’t even allude to the charged political climate out there — to the fact that (a) within the last two weeks lefty nihilists have fired bullets at government-allied, conservative-minded figures (Charlie Kirk being the most tragically prominent) and (b) — hello? — the fact that OBAA is a film about lefty revolt, insurrection and bullets.

Richard Brooks‘ The Professionals (’66) deepens and souls-up during the final half-hour, agreed, and the only elements that don’t quite work, due respect, are the flagrantly inauthentic, un-Mexican Jack Palance and Claudia Cardinale. Good performances but there’s no believing them deep down.

Brooks, who adapted the script from “A Mule for the Marquesa”, gave Lee Marvin a difficult first-act line. Regarding an old photo of Marvin’s Henry “Rico” Fardan, Ralph Bellamy‘s J.W. Grant says “your hair was darker then.” On the page Marvin’s reply — “My heart was lighter then” — sounds too pat, too written. But Marvin makes it work by muttering the line in a semi-embarassed, self-amused way. This is where good acting and good directing come into play.

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..a bright, likable, interesting, indie-minded director (diligent, spontaneous) who tapped into something fetching and zeitgeisty in the ’70s and ’80s — basically a 16-year, six-film streak.

Let no one dispute that Jaglom was a world-class gabber and bullshitter (I interviewed him at length in the front seat of a car when he was filming Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? in Manhattan, and we could’ve easily yakked for another two or three hours). Plus he fancied himself as a soulful ladies man (his hottest girlfriend was Andrea Marcovicci), and he was a longtime friend and ally of Orson Welles.

He was always cushioned to some extent by family money, although I don’t know the particulars. “Risk is my middle name” was one of his better lines, but family wealth mitigates this.

A freckly, fair-skinned, auburn-haired guy who was shaped by ’60s experimentation and was always the agile, whipsmart social hustler, Jaglom’s run began with 1971’s A Safe Place, and continued five years later with Tracks (Dennis Hopper as a traumatized vet). Neither of these, to my fullest recollection, was all that great.

Jaglom found his groove and arguably peaked with four films released between the early to mid ’80s — Sitting Ducks (his only real financial hit) and Can She Bake A Cherry Pie? (’83), Always and Someone to Love (’87 — his only Marcovicci film).

That said, I’ve always had a thing for Jaglom’s Venice/Venice (’92):

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Instant analysis of yesterday’s ICE shooting in Dallas** led to verbal sniping between JD Vance, Gavin Newsom and Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau. The following is from Jesse McKinley‘s 9.24 N.Y. Times story about same.

** The 29 year-old shooter, Joshua Jahn, was an overweight videogame enthusiast (what else?) who shot himself when the fuzz closed in. One of Jahn’s shell casings had been engraved with the phrase “ANTI-ICE.”