Cold

 

Cold

The hordes of Indianians have returned to their state of Hoosierism, taking with them the college football national title and leaving behind one of the coldest Miami winters in memory.

The contest itself… #1 Indiana vs #10 Miami, was played at the Hurricane’s home stadium. It was a great game that left the locals bereft and the visitors (a majority by thousands in Miami’s home stadium) ecstatic. It is, I am sure, fair to posit that most of these Hoosiers had never breathed a moment when they had even fantasized about a national championship that did not involve a round ball.

On January 19, the HOO became the what… and watched, along with thousands of their neighbors, the Indiana FOOTBALL team… and their Heisman Trophy winning Quarterback… win it all. No longer would Gene Hackman be the only star of record in Indiana. The Hoosiers now had Fernando Mendoza!

16 straight games without a defeat, leaving in their path not only the Hurricanes, but cutting a wide swath through a lifetime of grievance, pain, and humiliation imposed for generations by the Ohio State Buckeyes and the reviled Nittany Lions of Penn State. Did I mention Fernando Mendoza seemed to fly into the end zone, defying gravity, to score the winning touchdown that January night at Florida’s Hard Rock Stadium?

The atmosphere was electric, if not warm. There is, they say, something about revenge being best served cold. Exciting as it was, I would have given it all up for another 10-15 degrees on the upside. If you have been anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States this January you know what I am talking about.

Of course, much worse things were going on just west of the home of the Hoosiers … for while the ghosts of failed football teams of the past were being put to rest on that Indiana campus… 600 miles from Bloomington… in Minneapolis… Liberty’s poem, highlighted by the phrase, “Give me your tired, your poor…” rang as hollow as ice in an empty glass.

It was all it took to get me to look for escape in the form of filmed entertainment. Landman with Billy Bob Thorton and a fabulous ensemble cast… now enhanced by the always good Sam Elliott... has ended its second season on Paramount Plus. When comes such another? Not soon enough.

I lurched toward some Oscar nominated motion pictures and was disappointed in Marty Supreme. Good as Timothee Chalamet is as table tennis champion Marty Mauser, and as well directed as one could ask of Josh Safdie… 150 frenetic minutes in the company of a sociopathic anti-hero was more than I had bargained for. There is some real good stuff in the movie, but I suspect little of it (if any) will make the memorable list when that great documentary in the sky, composed of Hollywood’s best film clips, is finalized.

The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) was next. It is a Brazilian film set in the time of that country’s military dictatorship (mid 1970s). It is winning a lot of international awards but I am betting American audiences will find it too long and its narrative too unstructured. It is well made and probably appropriate that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences find a way to honor it with a nomination… if not an endorsement that the viewing public should actually go out and pay money to see this film. Something I do not have to go out very far on a limb to predict they will not do.

My biggest disappointment of this film trio was Bugonia, but only because ever since Poor Things I so looked forward to this next film by director Yorgos Lanthimos. Emma Stone is back with the director for this one and she is excellent (and nominated). So is her co-star, Jesse Plemons. Poor Things, which pretty much won everything a couple of seasons ago, simply had me expecting too much of filmmaker Lanthimos. The Bugonia film is a very good one, it just isn’t the great one I had anticipated. Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons just could win it all, but I doubt it… not in the year of One Battle After Another.

But then…. I am the guy who went out on a limb for Russell Crowe in Nuremberg. Go know.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

 

 

BATTLE AFTER BATTLE

What may be the best film of 2025 is, undoubtedly, the most important film of a very long time.

It is… all at the same time… concise, obscure, funny, terrifying, accurate, necessary, and fanciful. I could go on. The movie certainly does… for just under three hours.

I refer you to Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and I hardly know where to start. Let me begin in the summer of 1955, immediately after my graduation from High School.

It was June and there was a review in TIME magazine of the film The Night of the Hunter where the reviewer wrote something to the effect that the movie was “a bit like using a .45 to kill a ladybug. One admires the marksmanship but deplores the waste of power.”

I have remembered that quote since reading it over 70 years ago, have referred to it more than once regarding any number of movies, and thought of it again when watching One Battle After Another. I thought of it… but quickly realized it really does not apply to this powerful and, potentially, important film.

“Potentially,” in that we have yet to see what the film audience will do with what they see at the nation’s movie theatres and streaming on Netflix. Will it awaken the imagination of the viewing audience? Cynically, I suspect that the potential of this film and its message will be wasted. The movie’s dismal failure at the box office is a strong indicator that I am right about that.

For purposes of this review, I shall put aside the politics of this motion picture. I believe it was Samuel Goldwyn who, nearly a hundred years ago, said something to the effect that “…messages are for Western Union.”  Ironic in that his grandson (Anthony Howard “Tony” Goldwyn) plays a powerful white supremacist in the movie whose significant role is all about “message.”

Onward. The movie is long… very long at 162 minutes. It does not matter. The time flies by. The performances are all … even the tiniest parts… visually and virtually terrific.

In no particular order, Chase Infiniti makes an amazing debut as the daughter of Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor, both of whom shine as Ms. Infiniti’s parents. I have never before seen a Latin American sensei… nor can I imagine anyone better at playing such a part than Benicio del Toro does in this film. Regina Hall is powerful in her role, and Sean Penn, as US Army Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, is assured an Oscar nomination for his performance in this motion picture. There are so many others… and director Anderson has herein proven the point that there are no small roles… as each of the actors in this movie play their parts beautifully and believably.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson wrote the screenplay for One Battle After Another, partially based on the 1990 novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon and with a nod to the French film classic Battle of Algiers.

Anderson is a genius filmmaker and unlike the movie, Jay Kelly, which I had to watch twice because I could not believe it could possibly be as boring as it was on the first viewing, I will watch One Battle After Another at least one more time to understand it better and in appreciation for my favorite art form being realized so well.

There is no minimizing the restraint this observer exerted in this review by minimizing the content of this motion picture. It is a very political movie and its truths might sting, yet they are valid. As someone who often categorizes himself as a political animal, I felt it better to exercise restraint and to deal with other aspects of the movie with only a reference or two as to what the whole thing is really about.

One Battle After Another is about revolution. The film begins in Reagan’s 1984 America and ends in the present day. It refers constantly to racism in today’s America… those who experience it by being born something other than white, and those who will do whatever necessary to … at the very least… freeze the country in place with the hope of a regression into a whiter, more Christian country than the one we now have.

One Battle After Another is scary, in that it could provide a handbook… or, at least, a reminder of what oppressed people ought to do. It is equally frightening to see what little was accomplished in those battles of the past and what has/ or more properly, has not happened for those advocates of change.

Director Anderson went out of his way not to mention any current politicians, political parties, or movements on either the left or the right. Still, it is an all-too-real depiction of what, at the very least, we are flirting with in modern day America.

“Be careful,” the aging revolutionary Leonardo DiCaprio says at the end of the movie to his 16-year-old daughter as she is about to go out into the world.

Meant to bring a smile of recognition to the filmgoer and a reminder of the understanding that the battle goes on, is her reassuring response:

“I won’t.”

Barney Rosenzweig