Getty Images
I will be compiling the critics who employ the movie OBAA as a
PLEA TO RETURN TO SANITY
What sanity? Obama got in the WH because GWB got us in a evil war in Iraq – employing lies. I made a list of Republicans who got elected after Eisenhower, and a list of Democrats who ran. They got the hippie vote – and lost! Who remembers
HERBERT HUMPHREY?
How more sane the world would be if Herbert and Kamala had won. I would like to see Pea Soup make a short about Herbert and Kamala having a lustful affair. The ex VP will be an adult. The other short I want to see is
ARMOND WHITE INTERVIEWS THOMAS PYNcHON ON WINFREY SHOW
Thanks to AI, this can be done. As it is, I will prove Mr. White has nominated ME
FOR THE MOST RADICAL AMERICAN MALE IN THE LAST ONE HUNDRED YEARS….
and he doesn’t know it!
How many billions of dollars did the Hippe Movement get to…
MAKE PEACE IN THE MIDDLEASY, AND END THE WAR IN VIETNAM?
None!
The Sane Republicans are still keeping quiet about their Messiah asking for
TWO HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS TO END THE IRAN WAR HE STARTED
How many billions of dollars have Black Radicals and Politicians gotten, to..
MAKE PEACE IN AMERICA, AND, MAKE ISRAEL – FEEL SAFE?
John Presco
Anderson intentionally provokes the bloodlust of his woke confreres (and Gen Z viewers who know nothing about the Sixties) by celebrating the insipid, heretical, and violent activities of the liberal past and present. Anderson’s title lacks Pynchon’s pith but daydreams a culture of never-ending political obstruction and pandemonium. It is the year’s most irresponsible movie.
With the commencement of the 75th-anniversary year of the New York Film Critics Circle, Armond White, the newly elected chairman, passed the first morning of what he called “my reign” recounting how he’d barely made it through the 74th season, which had ended the previous night with the traditional awards dinner. For starters, White, whose writings can be found in the downtown freebie New York Press, was appalled by the behavior of the stars, particularly Sean Penn and Josh Brolin, who acted like “bores, or boors, or boars, however you want to spell it.”
There Will Be Bloodlust in One Battle After Another
By Armond White
September 26, 2025 6:30 AM75 Comments
Listen to the article now1.0x
Anderson’s reckless ode to radical terrorism
Paul Thomas Anderson’s decision to avoid depicting the political turmoil of the past ten years but to romanticize Sixties political violence in his new film One Battle After Another is a cowardly artistic choice. Adapting Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland is merely an excuse for Anderson to revive his own hipster fetishes — pop music, outré sex-and-violence, plus half-comic secular moralizing.
javascript:window.parent%5B%22e178b9cb-2476-e503-957c-06c01656ed83%22%5D.run(%7Bwnd%3Awindow%2Csjs%3A%22javascript%3Afalse%22%7D)
javascript:window.parent%5B%22e178b9cb-2476-e503-957c-06c01656ed83%22%5D.run(%7Bwnd%3Awindow%2Csjs%3A%22javascript%3Afalse%22%7D)The video player is currently playing an ad.
Top Stories
How the U.S. Navy Can Clear the Strait of Hormuz
Steven Wills
Kathy Hochul’s Seller’s Remorse
The Editors
The ‘Armageddon Scenario’ for Middle East Energy Exports Arrives
Jim Geraghty
It starts with Anderson’s recall of the social chaos in which druggy white California revolutionary Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his black radical consort Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) attack an immigrant detention center, combating the government, represented by military operative Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Their mismatch parodies Vietnam and civil rights era clashes, as if the actual bombings, gunfire, killings, and riots from the Weather Underground to the Black Panthers were laughable counterculture-versus-establishment skirmishes. Anderson’s tomfoolery makes stealthy comment on the battle between liberals and conservatives that has now become lethal. What’s meant to be entertaining is actually callous, dishonest, and reprehensible.
This fantasy may coincide with contemporary turmoil, but its mixture of political absurdity, comic bloodshed, and racial farce merely exploits Millennial confusion. Despite its source in Pynchon’s postmodern paranoia (the subject of Anderson’s earlier adaptation Inherent Vice), the film’s dystopic vision feels modern mostly because it follows the chic progressivism that Hollywood has embraced since the advent of Barack Obama.
Anderson’s Bob-Perfidia-Lockjaw triangle (each name an overly literary pun) is a Pynchon-ization of the conflicts that resulted from Obama’s personal link with Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers and the racial ambiguity that underscored his effect on the American polity.
More onFilm
Sofia’s Design for Living
Reading Between the Oscar-Worthy Lines
Spies, Damned Spies, and Netflix
One Battle After Another is not the first post-Obama movie (Harvey Weinstein once bragged about “the Obama Effect” on Hollywood), but its emphasis on political, racial, and sexual division operates on a new level. Anderson’s large-scale convoluted storyline of multiple characters, quarrels, vendettas, and hostilities actually reflect the Biden era, which provided liberal Hollywood an opportunity to indulge its screwiest fantasies about our national polarization.
Some of Anderson’s madhouse satire is spot-on. Since his nostalgic Licorice Pizza, he has learned to particularize the indie eccentricities that made his earlier movies seem gnomic. The most politically astute scene shows a pothead radical getting stoned while watching The Battle of Algiers. Bob, Perfidia, and Lockjaw go through variations on “new consciousness” apparent in their individual subcults: French 75 (for the left), Christmas Adventure Club (for the right,) and Sisters of the Brave Beaver (for disenchanted black feminists).
Anderson’s pop music hipsterism swaps past romantic associations for new cynicism: “Soldier Boy,” by the Shirelles, turns the S/M sex play between Perfidia and Lockjaw into civil rights irony; “Ready or Not,” by the Delfonics, makes that same irony bewildering; “Dirty Work” uses Steely Dan snark to portray Bob’s cuckoldry; “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” tweaks our shared disillusionment — particularly revolting in the Benecio Del Toro subplot that exalts the harboring of illegal aliens. Worst of all, Anderson uses Tom Petty’s “American Girl” to ridicule the results of what Obama called “America’s original sin.”
javascript:window.parent%5B%22e178b9cb-2476-e503-957c-06c01656ed83%22%5D.run(%7Bwnd%3Awindow%2Csjs%3A%22javascript%3Afalse%22%7D)
javascript:window.parent%5B%22e178b9cb-2476-e503-957c-06c01656ed83%22%5D.run(%7Bwnd%3Awindow%2Csjs%3A%22javascript%3Afalse%22%7D)
javascript:window.parent%5B%22e178b9cb-2476-e503-957c-06c01656ed83%22%5D.run(%7Bwnd%3Awindow%2Csjs%3A%22javascript%3Afalse%22%7D)
javascript:window.parent%5B%22e178b9cb-2476-e503-957c-06c01656ed83%22%5D.run(%7Bwnd%3Awindow%2Csjs%3A%22javascript%3Afalse%22%7D)
javascript:window.parent%5B%22e178b9cb-2476-e503-957c-06c01656ed83%22%5D.run(%7Bwnd%3Awindow%2Csjs%3A%22javascript%3Afalse%22%7D)
javascript:window.parent%5B%22e178b9cb-2476-e503-957c-06c01656ed83%22%5D.run(%7Bwnd%3Awindow%2Csjs%3A%22javascript%3Afalse%22%7D)
javascript:window.parent%5B%22e178b9cb-2476-e503-957c-06c01656ed83%22%5D.run(%7Bwnd%3Awindow%2Csjs%3A%22javascript%3Afalse%22%7D)
javascript:window.parent%5B%22e178b9cb-2476-e503-957c-06c01656ed83%22%5D.run(%7Bwnd%3Awindow%2Csjs%3A%22javascript%3Afalse%22%7D)The video player is currently playing an ad.
That passion play is faultlessly enacted by DiCaprio (a whiz at divided consciousness, as in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Penn (who stresses right-wing racist ambivalence just as he stressed gay self-righteousness in Milk), and Taylor (who makes black female pathology a secondary sexual trait as when firing a machine gun while pregnant — a lewd signifier that outdoes everything in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners). The consequence of this comic book trio’s ideological orgy is a biracial daughter named Willa (Chase Infiniti) who inherits her elders’ murderous impulses. (“Maybe you will save the world” is her mother’s bequest.) Thus, she’s the film’s American Girl heroine — an obscenity. A product of ideological miscegenation, Willa embodies a problem that not even social satirist Pynchon imagined. But Anderson merely insinuates its obvious Obama-based subtext — the generational identity crisis apparent in Willa’s oddball biracial, nonbinary friends who are briefly caricatured. Willa’s confusion goes unexplored.
Anderson’s perversion extends to his imitation of bad ’70s aesthetics. The lighting makes the film look almost colorless, intensifying only for a hilly car chase that is edited incoherently; it’s the one sequence where the IMAX imagery is notable yet boxy, like early television.
***
It’s a macabre coincidence that One Battle After Another opens so soon after the assassination of peaceable conservative debater Charlie Kirk. The film undeniably romanticizes political assassination. When Perfidia seduces Lockjaw, she taunts him with “Revolutionary violence is the only way!” Anderson intentionally provokes the bloodlust of his woke confreres (and Gen Z viewers who know nothing about the Sixties) by celebrating the insipid, heretical, and violent activities of the liberal past and present. Anderson’s title lacks Pynchon’s pith but daydreams a culture of never-ending political obstruction and pandemonium. It is the year’s most irresponsible movie.
White was the arts editor for The City Sun, where he wrote film, music and theater criticism, for the span of its publication from 1984 to 1996. He was hired by New York Press in 1997 and wrote for the paper until it ceased publication in August 2011. He then assumed the editorship of its sister publication CityArts starting in September.
White is a member of the National Society of Film Critics[14] and New York Film Critics Online.[15] He is a three-time chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle (1994, 2009 and 2010),[16][17] has served as a member of the juries at the Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and Mill Valley Film Festival, and was a member of several National Endowment for the Arts panels.[13] He has taught classes on film at Columbia University and Long Island University.[9]
In 1992, White was one of nine newspaper and magazine writers to win the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music criticism.[18]
In January 2014, White was expelled from the New York Film Critics Circle for allegedly heckling director Steve McQueen at an event for the film 12 Years a Slave.[19][20] White maintained his innocence,[21] and called his expulsion a “smear campaign.”[22] The previous year, White had shouted protests at Michael Moore while Moore was delivering a speech, as White felt Moore had been unfairly maligning the Catholic Church.[23] After White’s expulsion, film critics Harlan Jacobson and Thelma Adams defended White, with the latter calling the move “Stalinist”.[23] White received an Anti-Censorship Award at the 35th annual American Book Awards for being “unfairly removed” from the critics’ organization.[24]
Rosamond Press 
Leave a comment