One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, September 26, 2025) Movie • Page 45

there are so many better tom petty songs

 

Bob on the couch asking his daughter for another beer, smoking a joint, trying to take a selfie on his iPhone, while she goes out to fight the battle he helped create.

 

not uncomfortable at all lol, whole scene with them figuring out the phones and then telling her to be careful as she leaves felt very wholesome to me

 

Born a Rebel would have worked better except when you take a second to think about what Petty means by rebel.

 

honestly not sure if this is a serious response.

 

Yes it’s a serious response. It made me uncomfortable and felt false-wholesome to me. I had to sit on it to really wrap my head around it when I first watched it. It’s an indictment on Bob’s failure and incompetence while his Black daughter goes out to fix what he couldn’t.

 

Isn’t that what Anderson alluded to in his speech last night though? “We fucked up, but hopefully our kids can fix it”

 

the basic premise of how discourse on this movie works for me is:

someone like me makes a negative criticism

then someone explains the film

and then i think, wow this film really isn't as deep i already thought it was.

 

Yeah, and how is that comforting? It sucks and I don’t see that as a happy ending. But it’s a true ending- which makes it better IMO

 

He’s also laying on a sofa in the same way one is layed down in a casket implying that he and his gen are getting comfortable being closer to death or that their passion for revolution is dead already.

 

I watched the scene of Bob on the phone trying to answer the question and while Leo is great, the dialogue about triggering and safe spaces is so bad lol. There's a couple moments like that in here that I felt were dumb.

 

RE Oscar’s: I really enjoyed the scene selection they used for Benicio’s nomination being the one that includes the “a few small beers” quote. They knew what they were doing there and I ate it up as I was meant to.

 

Seems like Nate lost an Oscar pool so now everyone’s gonna do the OBAA discourse all over again

 

The whole film goes out of its way to criticize Bob over and over again. The “who’s the real father” plot—Bob not being a foil to Lockjaw but moreso a mirror to Lockjaw—is purposeful in painting that failure. His only success is his daughter.

 

see, i thought that was actually pretty funny and and a rare example of it being well done.

 

If you buy into the interpretation that Bob is a stand in for PTA, which seems even more plausible now given PTA’s acceptance speech for best screenplay, this is absolutely one of the main points of the film.

 

It's such a weak critique. DiCaprio's frustration makes it funnier, but the actual dialogue from the person on the phone is like Daily Wire level satire.

 

Only thing I’d argue on this point is that from reading Vineland, the over the top-ness is very Pynchon-like

 

I really enjoyed this movie, I wanted it to win, and I'm glad it won.

 

watching movies can be fun sometimes

 

i could enjoy watching an old left wing militant revolutionary have a blindspot with updated gender politics.

 

Bob isn’t the hero of the movie. He is an idiot. He was always just along for the ride and that’s before he spent decades, in his own words, numbing himself to everything. Virtually everything in the movie that happens is in spite of him, not because of him. Of course he doesn’t have good identity politics while talking to his teenage daughter and of course he’s just a buffoon on the couch while his daughter is out doing things at the end. He just wants to listen to steely Dan and watch Turner classic movies. What are we doing here

 

To be clear I do see it as a happy ending. He continues to be the buffoon he was prior to the events of the movie but his daughter is out in the world being active now and the people hunting her have been vanquished. Seems weird to be cynical about that.