Tag: paul thomas anderson

Film by Ezekiel Yu
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A still from Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another," as reviewed by poet and critic Ezekiel Yu.

¡Viva la Exageración! – Reviewing Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” (2025)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s title seems to echo the famous quote about history, but it could also easily be applied to raising a child. It is fitting, then, that the main action of One Battle After Another involves the hunt for a missing child, since a large part of parenting has to do with the risk of your child’s endangerment, and the consequent hope that you have given them the tools necessary for their well-being in the event that endangerment does arise.

Broaden the scope of a single child to an entire generation, and you have one of the film’s primary concerns—anxieties, even—over which many of its characters incite conflict, and/or try to secure on their own often blinkered, and ridiculous, terms. Anderson’s camera (operated by Michael Bauman, on 35mm and using VistaVision cameras) even seems to operate like a helicopter parent, tracking its subjects constantly through the American proto-dystopia, as diligent on its targets whether they are walking down hallways or on car chases through heavy traffic. And the child in question, Willa Ferguson née Charlene Calhoun (Chase Infiniti in her big screen debut), is by turns idealized and diminished by her elders until she is finally given the opportunity to dictate her fate in the film’s climax. […]

Film by Marc Magill
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A shot of Tom Cruise from "Magnolia" by Paul Thomas Anderson

Art of Momentum: On “Magnolia” (1999) by Paul Thomas Anderson

The central conceit of any movie can be flawed and flimsy but justify itself within its execution. For instance, media based upon the themes of the Book of Job are innumerable, from Kafka’s The Trial, to the Coens’s A Serious Man to even Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. This doesn’t make the movies equal in their technical expertise. A movie’s quality just can’t be equated from its elevator pitch – premises are dangerous, as they can often cause the artist to become fixated on the unimportant qualities of their content. In fact, artists are often uncertain of why their output is good at all and are unable to replicate previous quality due to drawing only false conclusions. An artist’s self-opinion is very rarely trustable, as it can be influenced by third parties with different agendas, from sycophantic agents to frothing pundits and mega-fan bros.

In no movie is this as demonstrable as in Magnolia, probably the wackiest of Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography. The off-kilter concept arose from the film being his follow-up to Boogie Nights, a critical and commercial success that allowed Anderson to do something “he could never do again”. This carte-blanche historically has either made an artist swell under the weight of their own ego or rise to the challenge. Magnolia seems to be a conflux of the two – in some ways its framing device and the reason for it is misguided and simplistic, but Paul Thomas Anderson’s technical execution rises to the challenge regardless in elevating that conceit. And then, the movie flies from his hands like a slick bar of soap, and that’s because he refuses to let go of his metaphysical rambling. What it results in is a huge mess, a clean break from all the good-will he had managed to engender. […]