Endless War – Piauí Magazine

MOptivated by a message from Walter Lima Jr. I received on WhatsApp, I did what I stopped doing frequently for some time – going to the cinema Sunday afternoon. This time, I watched the One battle after another. The 2h42min movie was produced with an estimated budget between $ 130 and 175 million, not to mention the substantial release expenses. The screenwriter and director, as well as producer with Adam Somner and Sara Murphy, is Paul Thomas Anderson, “undoubtedly the largest American filmmaker in activity,” according to Walter wrote in the message. For him, the movie is a America’s panel haunted by an endless war, where good faith and the shame of Puritanism gave way to the irrationality of permanent hatred. Behold, it presents itself as an endless abyss, Apocalypse Made in USA! This is how I see one battle after another, by Paul Thomas Anderson…

This time Anderson shows us an America where hope and anger confront the contradictory, where the statue of freedom is naked and still carries the flame that can set the world burning. Nothing is careless in this epic of self -destruction, where humor season a plate of various flavors and knowledge, as we have already seen in Dr. Strangelove (Dr. Fantástico, 1964) of Kubrick.

Superb, but if they don’t give Sean Penn an Oscar as best actor they can close Hollywood’s “science and arts” academy and reopen it as pizzeria because she will have lost her reason for being, the same I repeat to the “best movie” and its director.

The session in which I watched the One battle after another It began unusually – a complaint whose tone was not a certain connection with what would be seen next. The torrent of advertising prior to the film had barely started when the protest was heard shouted by a boy sitting a little in front of me: “Ideologization of the audience!” Another viewer reacted: “Are you drunk?”, What the first replied, “I’m not drunk, no! Ideologization of the audience!” – A brief skirmish, suitable to introduce the combat that would succeed on the screen.

I left the cinema stunned after watching the movie, in part for diverging from Walter’s brilliant text, but not only for that – the script of One battle after another It’s confused. It offers a caricatured view of political militancy in the 1960s transposed to our day, treats the current persecution of immigrants in the United States superficially and explores violence per se. Leonardo DiCaprio is not convincing in the role of “Ghetto” Pat Caladen, an explosive expert and a member of the revolutionary group French 75. After a half -year -old interval, being called Bob Ferguson and became a drug addict, his daughter Charlene is renamed Willa (Chase Infiniti). Of the novel VinelandBy Thomas Pynchon, which Anderson considered for a long time adapting, one of the preserved parts is the relationship of Bob and Willa, in which the film ends up concentrating.

However, according to the so-called “Consensus Declaration” written by the Rotten Tomatoes team, a website that adds criticism of film and television in the United States, it is “an epic adventure-filled epic adventure of action worthy of being admired. One battle after another It is Paul Thomas Anderson’s most fun movie so far, and one of the richest thematically. ”

The supposed formula for success would be to combine fun and wealth of thematic or entertainment and message, according to the quotation of the famous critic Andrew Sarris made by Mario Abbade in the supplement RioShowof The globe, Where the doll applauds Anderson’s foot: “’… the cinema comes to perfection when both strands walk side by side in the same movie, with one stimulating the other,” wrote Abbade citing Sarris, to finish: “And it is exactly this perfection that Paul Thomas Anderson reaches with One battle after another (…) Delivering a long, reflective and qualified featurees.”

I disagree with such praise. When you seek toRarar contemporary themes ingredients of a spectacle focused on great commercial success, usually The result, coIn Anderson’s film, it is a mere schematic dilution of conflicts in which several simplifying prejudices and distortions emerge.

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

There was rarely as such self-delayed manifestation by 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 opinion current with One battle after another also dragged the critic of the magazine The New Yorker In the text published in the number of October 6. Justin Chang concludes his comment, largely merely descriptive, so: “Times rarely were so hostile to CPOLITICAL MYTS RIAATIONOS AUDaxic how it isSTE, or INTELIGENCEa of blockbuster it isssa scale. Anderson’s actuality is undeniable, but mere current has never been argument in defense of greatness. One battle after anotherwhose merit equals any other great United States movie I saw this year, not only is up to the moment. With extraordinary tenderness, fury and imagination, forges a moment of its own and insists that even better may be coming. ”

Tburned, but after all, an ally came to my divergence in relation to the alleged virtues of One battle after another. For this friend who prefers to be anonymous, “the worst is so much talent (Anderson knows how to film) in the service of a plot whose cathartic solution requires a 16 -year -old girl to be shot the scoundrel of the time. For the second time, the audience of my session smiled comforted (the first was when the indigenous killer of good heart comes out of her gun to annihilate the Proud Boys class). from that.” In the same email came an excerpt from Daniel Cohn-Bendit, published in The Grand Bazaar, of 1975:

For Godard, Hollywood cinema is really the weapon of fascism. A certain type of cinema, whether a traditional western or Z (de Costa-Gavras, 1969)It is “fascist” in the sense that it is really a spectacle in which emotions are manipulated and try to deceive the viewer. And the more it gets to be carried out, 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 is fascinating in the reception of movies by my friends is that the more reactionaries they are, the more they like. The Faroestes have almost all a background of superhuman, represent these healthy sexual relations with the other – The women, the men. (…) This is why I think that if we like these farms, it is a fundamental political problem because it shows a radical rupture between our politics and our daily lives.

“Politically mistaken, the conflict resolves in the Anderson movie shot (in reality with several shots, but with one in particular) (…) and the most impressive is that people fall into the American trap. They think that the PTA film is political and progressive. Political he is, but not like Manohla Dargis or PTA imagine. the audience, making it cheer for 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 O 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 some extent. The real problem, however, is that the temporal clipping makes no sense. It is a film that cannot decide on the relationship between past, present and future… The counterculture of the 1960s is transposed to the counterculture of the 2000s. So the resistance in Reagan America becomes resistance in Trump America. What’s wrong with that? The movies all the time relocate their source material in time. But in this case, relocation is only partial. Anderson made a movie about pre-internet politics and pushed him into the digital age. Nothing really makes sense …

(…) The vibration and sensitivity of this film have nostalgia at a time when political resistance was a matter of secret hiding places, car persecution and false identities. It was scary, but it also looked fun. This is no longer the kind of fun. It was no longer a long time ago.

(…) Em One battle after anotherThe clear intention is to be in the 21st century, but 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 at that time that the revolution will not be televised. But unfortunately, it will be all over the internet, as much as Anderson wished it was different.

A critic called this movie “a view of authority and resistance in tune with the time and place where it goes. That is, here and now … a disorienting transmission made from the front lines of our present.” But this is the problem – it is news transmitted to an era of network technology. Even if you want to portray people who are out of time, you need to get the time first.

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

In Brazil, the film, released in 666 theaters, was seen by 120,343 viewers from 25 to 28 September, second in the list of twenty largest audiences, according to the data from the Film B portal. In the second week on October 2-5, aired in 644 theaters, it was seen by about 82,000 spectators, having suffered a 30% frequency drop and accumulated a total audience of 255,000 spectators (the data for the first four days of October are still estimated).