Three Key 2025 films: "One Battle After Another", "Sorry, Baby", "Palestine 36"

I've become a bit wary of that Paul Thomas Anderson guy. Some of his films I like a lot (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Hard Eight, Punch-Drunk Love) but some of them I found both over-long and disappointing (Licorice Pizza, The Master). One Battle After Another I initially decided to skip as it is long and didn't look too appealing in the trailer. However my interest was piqued by stories about how it had done very well with critics while being largely shunned by audiences. Also, one or two of my buds who had seen it spoke very highly of it. So fuck it, I gave it a go.

And… it's OK. It does maybe go on a bit and the bit of the film that comes before the "16 years later" jump is a bit formless for its admirable kinetic qualities, but the whole storyline of the former urban guerrilla (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his daughter (Chase Infiniti) on the run from a crazy Fed is pretty engaging. People like to go on about DiCaprio's girlfriend age event horizon, but such talk obscures what a compelling actor he is, and he's not the only one giving strong performances here. And it uses music well and all flows along. But I can't but feel that there are better films to be made about urban guerrillas, for all this one improves as it goes along.

If you went into Eva Victor's Sorry, Baby knowing nothing about it bar what you had seen in the trailer then you might think it is a quirky comedy-drama about a neurodivergent hottie and her fun-packed oddball adventures with friends, a neighbour and a cat. It's only the bit in the trailer where she says "Something bad happened to me" that might give you pause. Of course this is actually a film about recovery from sexual assault, a difficult subject that initially had me deciding to avoid it until a late change of mind brought me to the cinema. And it's an odd fish, dealing sensitively with the sexual assault (offscreen but described afterwards) and having moments of emotional intensity while also being at times rather funny. That Eva Victor also plays Agnes, the main character, and has reported that the film is based on her own experiences adds further heft to it. I really liked it and a I encourage everyone to see it. I also hope that Victor makes and appears in more films, not necessarily at the same time.

Some random Sorry, Baby things:

• When Agnes goes round to a male neighbour's to borrow some propellant so that she can set fire to her assaulter's office, she waits outside while he goes to get it, and I could totally see how someone in her situation would be loth to go into the home of a man.
• The way Agnes is coded as neurodivergent but so is Natasha, a fellow PhD student and her enemy. Maybe only neurodivergent people take postgraduate courses in American liberal arts colleges.
• Agnes rescues a kitten and goes into a shop to buy food for it while hiding it unconvincingly under her jacket; this is funny and relatable.
• When Agnes has sex with the neighbour (who is nice), this is presented as the kind of intimate fumbly sex real people have and not the kind of amazing Hollywood sex people have in films (don't @ me if you have amazing Hollywood sex all the time).
• Agnes has a nice friend called Lydia who appears to be the token non-neurodivergent postgrad student in her college. She is played well by Naomi Ackie who I thought was some kind of up and coming person to watch out for but actually she has been in loads of stuff.

Annemarie Jacir's Palestine 36 is a film about the Palestinian revolt against British rule that erupted in 1936. Aside from wanting to be free and not have the Brits bossing them around, the Palestinian rebels are also trying to prevent their country being taken over by Zionist settlers. The film follows different Palestinian characters, mostly from the same village, and also some British officials, including the High Commissioner, a well-meaning but ineffectual civil servant, and the oddball counter-insurgency army officer Orde Wingate (more famous for leading the Chindits in the Second World War). It generally looks great (although I had reservations about some use of what appeared to be colourised newsreel footage) and was very evocative of the period. I don't think it resolved very well, however. That might be a consequence of the history it is based on (the revolt failed and its defeat paved the way for the disaster that befell the Palestinians in the late 1940s) but I still felt that some kind of more satisfying narrative conclusion should have been possible, even if the revolt is shown as a failure.

I also thought it was unfortunate that the film has no Jewish characters. The Zionist settlers are an offstage presence, having arms imported, shooting at the Palestinian villagers from their fortified settlement, paying newspaper editors to run favourable copy, etc. but we never see them as actual people and we never get a sense of why they are coming to Palestine and how they see things there. In a film where British antagonists share screen time with the Palestinians (in a manner reminiscent of The Battle of Algiers), the absence of the Zionists is a curious omission, particularly given that Wingate's real-life suppression of the Palestinian revolt partly revolved around recruiting, arming and training a Jewish militia.

Despite those reservations I enjoyed this film greatly and I recommend it to anyone curious about how the Middle East got into its current crazy state.

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Eva Victor and friend in Sorry, Baby (The Travers Take: "Sorry Baby")

film: "Licorice Pizza" (2021)

Everyone loves this; everyone except me, for I found it to be dull and fundamentally inconsequential. It follows an odd semi-relationship between a precocious teenage child actor mutating into a kid entrepreneur and a somewhat aimless woman in her 20s. And it's set in 1973 or 1974 with the post-October War oil crisis in the background (at one point a truck runs out of petrol and rolls down a hill, which I think might be a metaphor of some kind). It all looks great and has a great soundtrack and features great performances, not least from the principals (Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim), but I found it really hard to care about the story or the characters. I think maybe a lot of this is down to the characterisation of Gary Valentine, the kid entrepreneur. Basically I hate entrepreneurs and having to spend time in the company of some 15 year old and his stupid business ideas was like a sojourn in hell. Alana Haim's character (also called Alana, which suggests a lack of imagination on somebody's part) was a lot more appealing but that made her association with the kid entrepreneur all the more disturbing.

But as noted, nearly everyone else in the world loved this. The only other gripes I saw focussed on the age difference between the semi-couple at the story's heart. At the start he is 15 while her age is somewhere into the 20s. There's no suggestion that they are even approximating to getting it on but that still is a whomper of an age difference; if a film featured a romance between a man in his twenties and a 15 year old girl then there would be uproar. I have to say though that the age difference did not jar so much with me while I was watching the film. Partly I was preoccupied with how boring the film was but I think also Gary's precociousness masked how young he was, while Alana's slight frame and lack of focus in her life made it easy to subconsciously think of her as younger than she was. Also I am so used to films in which women in their 20s play teenagers that the age difference was easily forgettable when they weren't ramming it down our throats.

People also did not like that there is a racist minor character in the film.

Overall though I think this film is like The Master, a previous Paul Thomas Anderson: full of strong performances and scenes that linger in the memory, but something that was an ordeal to get through when I was actually watching it.

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Gary, Alana, and some other kid in a car (Hollywood Reporter: "Analysis: A Close Reading of 'Licorice Pizza's’ Japanese Wife Scenes")

film poster (Wikipedia)

Three Films by Paul Thomas Anderson

Boogie Nights (1997)
Punch Drunk Love (2002)
The Master (2012)

In the run up to the release of The Master, the Lighthouse cinema showed some older films by Paul Thomas Anderson. I went to see two that I had previously missed. Boogie Nights tells the story of Dirk Diggler, a man with an enormous penis, who becomes a star of the 1970s porn industry. It is an odd film, in that it is very affectionate towards its characters and shows good and bad things happening to them, but it never really gives any sense of whether it has a fixed opinion towards pornography and the porn industry. There is a lot of music in it, not so much the classic waka-waka-waka music that I am told makes for the standard soundtrack to porn films. Instead we get a lot of scenes of people dancing in nightclubs (actually in the same nightclub repeatedly). I was very struck by a scene where everyone starts doing this amazing formation dance - why does this never happen in real clubs?

There is also a funny scene in the all-gone-to-shit stage of Mr Diggler's life in which he and his even less bright friend try to become 1980s pop stars. And a recurring joke in which an African American character is mad into shit country music.

In the film there is a big chunk of it where it all goes wrong for all the characters and they all become sad, with some of this being triggered by the changing nature of the porn industry as video replaces film. But then by the end they all get it together again and the film ends on an upbeat note… except that if you have any sense of historical events you know that HIV/AIDS is coming at them like a honking juggernaut driven by a blind homicidal maniac. It is odd that the film does not engage with this, though it does remind me of, say, the ending of Tim Burton's Ed Wood, where the film goes out on a big note but you know it will really go bad for at least some of the characters afterwards.

Punch Drunk Love, meanwhile, is one of those films in which a guy who is a bit dysfunctional has his life turned around when a good woman falls for him. Such films are always viewed as heart-warming and uplifting but I have found them problematic ever since I read a piece by someone saying that if you look at these films from the woman's point of view they are a bit of a disaster - basically a successful and competent woman suddenly finds herself shackled to some loser man-child.

But I am only really mentioning this film because of the musical and sound content. It has possibly the most amazing sound design of any film I have ever seen, using strange and disorienting effects to communicate the confused nature of its main character. The music is great too, with Jon Brion apparently composing music on the set and then Anderson adapting dialogue and action to fit the timing of the sounds. The soundtrack frequently uses a harmonium, partly because a physical harmonium appears in the film as something of a plot device.

Anyway, if you have never seen this film I strongly recommend it, particularly if you can see it somewhere with decent sound. Notwithstanding my quibbles about the whole woman-saves-fuckwit genre, Adam Sandler in the lead role is genuinely affecting and the music and so on adeptly conveys his confusion and dysfunction.

The Master - did that have much in the way of music in it? I cannot really remember and did not particularly like it that much. The performance in the lead roles by Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman are very impressive but the film does seem to be one of those plotless ramblers. That said, it did make me weirdly sympathetic to Scientology, as the scenes where the L. Ron Hubbad analogue was auditing or processing or whatever it was the main character made it all look surprisingly impressive.

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A review of Knocked Up, by Joe Queenan.