alt Hacker NewsThe author framed this as if "One Battle After Another" was some adult work and they couldn't watch "Predator" afterwards because it was so childish.
I had the opposite reaction and could barely make it through 15m of One Battle. The movie opens with women in skin tight dresses and mini skirts with automatic weapons robbing banks and breaking into migrant detention centers while yelling "this is what real power looks like". That feels like childish nonsense to me but then it is wrapped in this "radical chic" that is supposed to force me to take it seriously. Rather than movies like Predator which are intentionally dumb and fun the author should look at how vague political messages and sex are used to take extremely shallow work and make it "adult".
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Paul Thomas Anderson's films oft set within extreme and/or marginal cultures. The porn industry in Boogie Nights. The Master was a thinly veiled alter ego of Scientology founder L.Ron Hubbard. One Battle after another looks at radical leftists. PTA likes to take characters that are hard to empathize with and humanize them. Also OBATA is a comedy, everybody but the daughter is a caricature.
I bounced off it in about the same amount of time, just the other day. I’ll probably return to it at some point given how talked-about it is, but as soon as the woman was revealed to be pregnant the implicit “ho ho! Who’s the father?!” made my eyes roll so hard it knocked me right out of the movie.
> That feels like childish nonsense to me but then it is wrapped in this "radical chic" that is supposed to force me to take it seriously.
We aren't supposed to take it seriously; it's meant to be "childish nonsense". We can easily see that these women are getting off, sexually and by exercising power over others. A woman in a short dress struts around on a counter and introduces herself as "jungle pussy" to captives in a bank robbery, all while ranting about "black power". What happens next? A (black) security guard dies in agony and we get a close-up on that. We see "radical chic posturing" and then its consequences.
Meanwhile Predator: Badlands truly is a movie for children. I sat through the whole thing with friends (who loved it by the way). Lots of adults love children's movies and books. I'm unbothered by this, because these people's tastes don't seem to the affect the production of books/movies that are actually good. But I do feel that people who eat this stuff up have failed to grow up in some fundamental way.