“Help yourself to a sniper rifle.”
“THE NEW PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON IS THE GREATEST FILM OF OUR TIMES AND CAPTURES THE ZEITGEIST LIKE EGON SPENGLER WITH A GHOST TRAP!” screams the internet consensus for One Battle After Another, as pro critics tend to every time they’ve seen a new Anderson film at least three times at festivals. I’ve only seen six of his films (counting this one) and responded to There Will Be Blood with that sort of awe. The rest varied for me — Phantom Thread was an intriguing battle of repressed wills, but I couldn’t connect with his California ode Licorice Pizza. His tenth feature, Battle is an effectively pulse-pounding thriller that’s exactly the sort of antihero conflict I do enjoy — call it “bad guys vs. worse guys” — but somehow I thought it’d be much more complicated than it actually is. Maybe that’s on me for declining to remain Extremely Online these days.
I hadn’t originally planned to see Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Unlike many of my longtime Internet peers, his films aren’t an automatic draw for me. Though Reservoir Dogs has been a qualified favorite of mine since college, the rest have been a mixed bag. His previous work, Inglorious Badwerds, was a mature, complex, riveting film about WWII and about the role of film in WWII, but was hampered by Brad Pitt’s Kentucky-fried B-movie brigade who snuck in from the direct-to-video good-ol’-boys revenge flick next door. From the trailers, Django looked to me like a 2-cool-4-school blaxploitation Western. Call it Shaft in Texas or Black Grit. Despite the talented cast involved and the joyous responses from the critical majority, it didn’t really sound like my kind of movie.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 