Endless War – Piauí Magazine

MActivated by a message from Walter Lima Jr. that I received on WhatsApp, I did what I stopped doing frequently for some time – go to the cinema on Sunday afternoon. This time I watched One battle after another. The 2hr 42min film was produced with an estimated budget of between 130 and 175 million dollars, not counting the substantial launch expenses. The screenwriter and director, as well as producer with Adam Somner and Sara Murphy, is Paul Thomas Anderson, “undoubtedly the greatest American filmmaker working”, according to Walter wrote in the message. For him, the film is a panel of America haunted by an endless war, where the good faith and modesty of puritanism gave way to the irrationality of permanent hatred. Behold, it presents itself as an endless abyss, Apocalypse made in USA! This is exactly how I see ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, by Paul Thomas Anderson…

This time, Anderson shows us an America where hope and anger clash in contradiction, where the Statue of Liberty is naked and still carries the flame that can set the world on fire. Nothing is careless in this epic of self-destruction, where humor seasons a dish of various flavors and knowledge, just as we saw in the previous episode. Dr. Strangelove (Dr. Fantastic, 1964) by Kubrick.

Superb cast, but if they don’t give Sean Penn an Oscar for best actor they can close the Hollywood Academy of “Sciences and Arts” and reopen it as a pizzeria because it will have lost its raison d’être, the same I repeat for the “best film” and its director.

The session I attended One battle after another It began in an unusual way – a denunciation, the tone of which did not fail to have a certain connection with what would follow. The torrent of publicity prior to the film had barely begun when the protest was heard shouted by a young man sitting a little in front of me: “Ideologization of the audience!” Another spectator reacted: “Are you drunk?”, to which the first replied: “I’m not drunk, no! Ideologization of the audience!” – a brief skirmish, suitable to introduce the fights that would follow on screen.

I left the cinema feeling overwhelmed after watching the film, partly because it diverged from Walter’s brilliant text, but not only because of that – the script by One battle after another It’s confusing. It offers a caricatured view of political militancy in the 1960s transposed to our days, treats the current persecution of immigrants in the United States in a superficial way and explores violence per se. Leonardo DiCaprio is unconvincing in the role of “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, explosives expert and member of the revolutionary group French 75. After a gap of sixteen years, having changed his name to Bob Ferguson and becoming addicted to drugs, his daughter Charlene changes her name to Willa (Chase Infiniti). From the novel Vinelandby Thomas Pynchon, which Anderson considered adapting for a long time, one of the parts preserved is the relationship between Bob and Willa, on which the film ends up focusing.

However, according to the so-called “consensus statement” written by the team at the website Rotten Tomatoes, a website that aggregates film and television reviews in the United States, it is “a crazy epic adventure full of action scenes worthy of being admired. One battle after another It’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s funniest film yet, as well as one of his richest thematically.”

The supposed formula for success would be to combine fun and thematic richness or entertainment and message, according to the quote from the famous critic Andrew Sarris made by Mario Abbade in the supplement RioShowof The Globe, where the doll applauds Anderson’s film standing up: “’…cinema reaches perfection when both aspects walk side by side in the same film, with one stimulating the other’”, wrote Abbade quoting Sarris, to conclude: “And it is exactly this perfection that Paul Thomas Anderson achieves with One battle after another (…) delivering a fun, reflective and quality filmes.”

I disagree with such and such praise. When searching formake contemporary themes the ingredients of a show aimed at achieving great commercial success, normally the result, withIn Anderson’s film, it is a mere schematic dilution of conflicts in which various prejudices and simplifying distortions emerge.

The services continue, however. For columnist Michelle Goldberg, in The New York Times September 29th, One battle after another It’s “magnificent.” “It’s the best new film I’ve seen in years,” she writes, saying she “wondered whether such an openly anti-fascist film could be produced in Hollywood today.” Goldberg concludes, stating that there is “something subversive, in the best possible sense, in the film’s vision of good and evil (…) Watch One battle after another It’s liberating, in part because it ignores all the new taboos that Trump and his henchmen are trying to impose on us. The film could hardly be more relevant to Trump’s America, but it carries with it the premises of a better country.”

Rarely has there been such a manifestation of self-deception, when indicating the alleged relevance and “premise of a better country” of a group of characters whose adventures are guided by the commonplace violence of American cinema.

The current of opinion enthusiastic about One battle after another also dragged the magazine’s critic The New Yorker in the text published in the October 6 issue. Justin Chang concludes his largely descriptive commentary thus: “Times are rarely were so hostile to ccreation of political mythsOS AUDidle how it isste, or to intelligenceto of blockbuster it isthis scale. Anderson’s timeliness is undeniable, but mere timeliness has never been an argument in defense of greatness. One battle after anotherwhose merit equals every other major US film I’ve seen this year, not only lives up to the moment. With extraordinary tenderness, fury and imagination, he forges a moment of his own and insists that even better ones may be yet to come.”

Tburned, but finally an ally emerged to my disagreement regarding the supposed virtues of One battle after another. For this friend who prefers to remain anonymous, “the worst thing is so much talent (Anderson knows how to film) at the service of a plot whose cathartic solution requires a 16-year-old girl to shoot and kill the scoundrel. For the second time, the audience at my session smiled in comfort (the first was when the good-hearted indigenous killer comes out with gun in hand to annihilate the Proud Boys gang). Fascism is not very different from that.” In the same email came an excerpt from Daniel Cohn-Bendit, published in The Grand Bazaar, from 1975:

For Godard, Hollywood cinema is truly the weapon of fascism. A certain type of cinema, be it a traditional Western or Z (from Costa-Gavras, 1969)is “fascist” in the sense that it is really a show in which emotions are manipulated and attempts are made to deceive the spectator. And the more he lets himself go, the better. In this cinema there is absolutely no attempt to do anything else. And he (Godard) I sought to use cinema in a political struggle… What’s fascinating about the reception of films by my friends is that the more reactionary they are, the more they like them. Westerns almost all have a superhuman background, they represent these sadistic sexual relations with the other – women, men. (…) That’s why I think if we like these Westerns, it’s a fundamental political problem because it shows a radical break between our politics and our everyday lives.

“Politically mistaken, the conflict is resolved in Anderson’s film with one shot (in reality with several shots, but with one in particular) (…) And the most impressive thing is that people fall into the American trap. They think the PTA film is political and progressive. Political it is, but not in the way Manohla Dargis or the PTA itself imagines. Liberal on the surface, deeply reactionary in what counts – in the way it represents the world and manipulates the audience, making them root for the violent resolution”, added my ally, before sending me One decade after anothercomment on One battle after another that David Runciman publishedon October 3, on the newsletter to the podcast Past Present Future:

Well, it’s not bad, but it’s not a masterpiece. The best pieces are a kind of cross between About Grande Lebowski (Ethan a Joel Cos, 1998) e Thelma & Louise (de Ridley Scott, 1991) with a little Karate Kid (John G. Avildsen, 1984 e 1986)which is fun to a point. The real problem, however, is that the time frame doesn’t make sense. It’s a film that can’t decide on the relationship between past, present and future… The counterculture of the 1960s is transposed to the counterculture of the 2000s. So, resistance in Reagan’s America becomes resistance in Trump’s America. What’s wrong with that? Films always relocate their source material in time. But in this case, the relocation is only partial. Anderson made a film about pre-internet politics and pushed it into the digital age. Nothing really makes sense…

(…) The vibrancy and sensitivity of this film is nostalgic for a time when political resistance was a matter of secret hideouts, car chases, and fake identities. It was scary, but it also looked fun. That’s not the kind of fun anymore. It stopped being so a long time ago.

(…) Em One battle after anotherthe clear intention is that we are in the 21st century, but the counterculture is still organized around the idea that revolutionary politics is a matter of personal human interactions. Perhaps it is as true now as it was then that the revolution will not be televised. But unfortunately, it will be all over the internet, no matter how much Anderson wishes it were different.

One critic called this film “a vision of authority and resistance precisely in tune with the time and place in which it is set. That is, here and now… a disorienting broadcast from the front lines of our present.” But that’s the problem – it’s news delivered for an age of networked technology. Even if you want to portray people who are out of time, you need to get the timing right first.

After debuting at the end of September and gross 22 million dollars in the first weekend in the United States, One battle after another already collected 42 million dollars in the American market and just over 59 million dollars in other countries, according to the Box Office Mojo website.

In Brazil, the film, released in 666 cinemas, was seen by 120,343 spectators from September 25th to 28th, ranking second in the list of twenty largest audiences, according to data from Portal Filme B. In the second week of exhibition, from October 2nd to 5th, shown in 644 cinemas, it was seen by around 82 thousand spectators, having suffered a 30% drop in attendance and accumulating a total audience of 255 thousand spectators (the data for the first four days of October are still estimated).