After a two-month siesta thanks to the rigors of the teacher day job, I found myself back on the Kicking the Seat podcast and YouTube channel hosted by Ian Simmons. The cinephile world was set ablaze at the end of September with much-ballyhooed release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new multi-genre opus One Battle After Another. The film has been enjoying all the recency bias and proclamations that it’s the best film of the year and the titan to beat at the Oscars.
Read MoreIncontrovertibly, the loudest word reverberating out of Paul Thomas Anderson’s imposing crime saga and instant awards season juggernaut, One Battle After Another, is “revolution.” When an ambitious movie, no matter the subgenre, invokes that term as its core for conflict, it sets out to establish a setting and context of corruption while positioning a potentially dramatic and dangerous chessboard of characters prepared to take risks and fight against their marked opposition.
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