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N.Y. Times, February 4, 1939, Page 1….

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ABC is deep-sixing Jimmy Kimmel Live! “indefinitely”, which sounds like “adios”, fare-thee-well and that’s all she wrote. The yanking was ostensibly about Kimmel saying something erroneous or insensitive about Charlie Kirk‘s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson. Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr wants Kimmel gone, having suggested that ABC’s broadcast license “is at risk from Kimmel’s statements about Robinson.” Nexstar Media Group, which is seeking FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna, was ebviously eager to dump Kimmel. The Trumpies, in short, are doing everything they can to eliminate late-night Trump antagonists.

For the last several months I’ve been skeptical about the notion of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another (Warner Bros., 9.26), which I caught yesterday morning inside the AMC 34th Street, being any kind of artistic comeback flick, much less an Oscar contender. In my mind PTA has been vaguely downswirling or certainly treading water since There Will Be Blood (’07), his last really good film.

Well, it’s now Wednesday afternoon and I am no longer skeptical about the potential award-season fortunes of this film. It’s a serious winner — thrilling, complex, darkly humorous, poignantly emotional from a father-daughter perspective, dramatically scored, beautifully shot…it really connects. Battle might run into some trouble commercially as it’s strictly a blue-cities flick from a political-ideological standpoint, but in all other respects I am now a believer.

Battle is certainly a Best Picture contender, and it could even potentially win (although I doubt this given that it’s too emphatically woked-up and white-male-hating or white-male-pitying for general comfort). But it’s going to be nominated in almost every category. Anderson has bounced back big-time, and is certainly no longer slumping…he’s riding the award-season whirlwind. Who remembers the paranoid imaginings of Alan Pakula‘s The Parallax View (’74), and particularly the vibe of the Parallax Corporation? I’m not saying that Battle is even vaguely analogous to Parallax, but they do line up in one respect.

Pakula’s Parallax Corporation was run by shadowy, cold-blooded, conservatively-attired serpents who were in the business of murdering high-profile liberal politicians. I’m just saying that in PTA’s newbie, which actually has a happy ending, the Parallax Corporation is, at the very least, symbolically back in action, only this time the group is called the Christmas Adventurers, an elite cabal of white nationalists who aren’t plotting political killings but are certainly “think white”-ish and pulling racist strings when strategy requires it. I went into yesterday morning’s 9:30 am screening with an attitude of guarded optimism.

I was mainly hoping that it would be as good as what the earlybird whores have been crowing about for the last few days. I knew it wouldn’t be as good as what IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich has been saying (“…might be the best movie released by a major American studio since I started working as a critic in 2010”) because Ehrlich is, in my humble view, a foam-at-the-mouth woke fanatic, but I really wanted at least a ground-rule-double or a triple. I didn’t trust the idea of a home run as PTA has been off his game since Blood and probably, I’ve been calculating, sinking into soft mud, but I really wanted to hear the loud crack of the bat and the subsequent roar of the crowd. Battle, to put it mildly, has exceeded my expectations.

Form-wise it’s a total homer — a knockout masterwork from a gifted director who knows exactly what he’s doing and how to deliver the right stuff — while the content is so absurdly woked-up in a POC-favoring, over-the-waterfall-in-a-barrel way that it’s sure to be hated or certainly hooted at outside the big cities, especially in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting. Average Joes and Janes will say “yeah, a really good movie but what’s with the leftist guerilla-revolution jazz?

In the wake of the Charley Kirk tragedy they’re releasing a hooray-for-the-left, defy-the-malevolent-whiteys film? A movie that says all white people and especially guys in starched military fatigues with close-cropped hair are bad…we get that, this is what Hollywood always does…whitey bad, POCs good…whitey baddie-waddie, POCs are spirit angels and God’s chosen..but the Kirk tragedy has changed the political landscape.”

I for one didn’t mind the woke current because OBAA is so damnably well directed. I think it’s PTA’s best film ever, and if you ask me and Warner Bros. marketing’s decision not to premiere it in Venice or Telluride was nonsensical. The present-tense section (the first 40 minutes are set in ’09 or thereabouts while the remaining two hours are set in the present) happens in a Trumpian police-state world that feels fairly current (ICE-like military invasions, rounded-up immigrants held inside chain-link-fence compounds, white shitheads in military fatigues and business suits bringing racist rain down upon the heads of change-seeking POC lefties) and is basically….well, not about an ongoing battle between the POC wokies and the big bad whiteys, although it’s the only seriously action-driven, car-chasey PTA film ever.

Battle is primarily about a father’s attempt to rescue his daughter from rightwing kidnappers (i.e., the present-tense material), but it’s based on an oddly sexual romantic triangle between Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson (grizzled ex-revolutionary), Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (broomstick up his ass, hot for black chicks) and Teyana Taylor‘s Perfidia Beverly Hills, which is dramatized during the first 40. A triangle, incidentally, that doesn’t even spark conflict or recriminations Battle is so well done, so gripping, so well acted, shot and cut, so dynamically captured….the 160 minutes fly by like they’re 95 or 100. But it’s so fucking woke and so virulently against heavily-fortified white authority figures, it’s not going to fly in red states…not in the wake of the Kirk murder.

Owen Gleiberman: “The film spooks us with the question: Is this where America is now heading? Anderson completed the movie before Donald Trump took office in January 2025, but it’s presented as a knowing projection of what autocracy under the current administration could lead to. The film isn’t just some abstract metaphoric cinematic speculation; it’s designed to look and feel just ahead of the curve of where we’re at now. And since Once Battle After Another is trying to be ruthlessly authentic about how an authoritarian state works, the revolutionaries, it turns out, don’t have much of a chance. “The film suggests that the current white-nationalist movement is, in heart, an attempt to separate white and Black people as a primal way of pretending that black-white sexual relationships of the past never happened. And that this denial is nothing less than the key fantasy driving the new alt-right America.

Bob leaves revolution in the dust to rescue his mixed-race daughter, but the movie says that what he’s doing is the real revolution: finding a family that you fight to hold together; keeping Black and white together, as they long have been; keeping hope alive, in the face of a regime that employs the stifling of hope as a ruling tactic. The movie says that out of this revolt of the everyday a greater revolution will rise.” All hail the performances by DiCaprio, Taylor, Penn plus Chase Infiniti (excellent actress!), Regina Hall, Shayna McHayle, Alana Haim, Starlette DuPois, D.W. Moffett, Paul Grimstead, James Raterman, Tony Goldwyn, Jim Downey.

My WordPress theme design (Armory) has stopped updating and hasn’t for years. My fault entirely. The Revolution slider has also stopped functioning. It’s now obsolete, and almost the whole thematic structure and operation of Hollywood Elsewhere has collapsed into a heap of soggy dysfunctional pretzels. We’ve lost the style sheet.

My designer and I are now searching for a new theme (possibly Flexblog) and a new provider of a slider mechanism. The process will take a few hours but it’ll be a good thing to finally update the PHP and streamline the whole shebang according to 2025 standards.

Meanwhile I’m expanding upon my initial comment-thread post about PTA’s One Battle After Another (WB, 9.26). which I saw and quite liked (the absurd woke mindset aside) yesterday morning. The embargo lifts at noon eastern, 9 am Pacific.

I saw four films yesterday — One Battle After Another, plus (2) Darren Aronofsky‘s Caught Stealing (which I hated with a passion — I couldn’t stop muttering “go fuck yourself, go fuck yourself, go fuck yourself” to Austin Butler‘s lead character…I wanted him to take a bullet to the head so I wouldn’t have to hang with his sorry, beer-slurping ass), (3) Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin‘s Splitsville, a marital infidelity freestyle-farce sitcom which I didn’t exactly “like” but found unusual and occasionally funny and semi-diverting and therefore tolerable (although Covino and Marvin, who play the two male leads, aren’t nearly attractive enough to enlist audience empathy and identification — if I was gay or a woman I definitely wouldn’t want to fuck these guys…no way), and (4) Dag Johan Haugerud‘s Dreams (Sex Love), a quietly first-rate Norwegian drama that played in competition in Berlin last February and is now screening at the Film Forum.

Where can I get this T-shirt? Seriously.

I saw Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value last night at 10:30 pm, exiting around 12:40 am. I was afraid it might not live up to expectations, but no worries — I began to feel not only stirred and satisfied but deeply moved and delighted by the half-hour mark, and then it just got better and better.

For my money this is surely the Palme d’Or winner. I wanted to see it again this morning at 8:30 am. Yes, it’s that good, that affecting, that headstrong and explorational. A 15-minute-long standing ovation at the Grand Lumiere, and all the snippy, snooty Cannes critics are jumping onboard.

But what matters, finally, is what HE thinks and feel deep down, and that, basically, is “yes, yes…this is what excellent, emotionally riveting family dramas do…especially with brilliant actors like Renata Reinsve (truly amazing…she really kills) and Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas and Elle Fanning topping the ensemble cast”

But I was really too whipped to tap anything out when I returned to the pad at 1:15 am. I managed a grand total of 4.5 hours of sleep, and am now at a Salles Bunuel screening of Eugene Jarecki‘s The Six Billion Dollar Man…beginning in a few.

Sentimental Value (why do I keep calling it Sentimental Gesture in my head?) is a complex, expertly jiggered, beautifully acted Ingmar Bergman-esque family drama that feels at times like Woody Allen‘s Hannah and Her Sisters but with less comic snap…it’s more of a fundamentally anxious, sad, sometimes very dark but humanist dramedy (a flicking comic edge, a Netflix putdown or two). A film that’s completely receptive and open to all the unsettled cross-current stuff that defines any shattered, high-achieving family, and this one in particular.

Emotional uncertainty and relationship upheavals are in plentiful supply.

Set in Oslo, it’s basically about an estranged relationship between Skarsgard’s Gustav Berg, a blunt-spoken, film-director father who hates watching plays, and his two adult daughters — Reinsve’s Nora Berg, a prominent stage and TV actress who’s a bundle of nerves, anxiety and looming depression, and Lilleaas’s Agnes, Nora’s younger sister who’s not in “the business.”

Gustav’s career has been slumping but now he’s returning to filmmaking with a purportedly excellent script that’s partly based on his mother’s life (although he denies this), and he wants Nora to star in it. She refuses over communication and trust issues, and so Gustav hires Fanning’s Rachel Kemp, a big-time American actress, to play Nora’s role.

I could sense right away that Kemp would eventually drop out and that Nora would overcome her anger and step into the role at the last minute. And I knew the film would explore every angle and crevasse before this happens.
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And it really digs down and goes to town within a super-attuned family dynamic…steadfast love, familial warmth, sudden tears, extra-marital intrigue, stage fright, film industry satire, thoughts of suicide…nothing in the way of soothing or settled-down comfort until the very end, and even then…but it’s wonderful.

I have to attend the Sentimental Value press conference at 12:45 pm…breathing down my neck.