One Battle After Another

Well, I got through this, even though I came close to not coming back to it after pausing at the 1:11 mark.

Let me just be clear about a few things:

1. It is paradigmatically and practically improbable for movies produced by the Hollywood Machine to be political in anything but the most superficial sense, never mind radical. So stop calling this movie political. You're embarrassing yourself, or revealing yourself as the ideal mark for shallow Oscar bait. How is this movie political, anyway? Because it keeps reminding us of the Gil Scott-Heron song? (The quote is from the most crass and least political line of the song, BTW, but the funniest, I guess.)
2. Ditto for descriptions like experimental, or postmodern, except in a reductive, nihilistic form, which is all the kids these days have time for. Magnolia is more deserving of the adjective experimental, or even Licorice Pizza, but we're years beyond the former here. Where's the formal and/or stylistic experimentation in this movie? Anderson finds a kinda cool way to shoot cars following each other on a hilly roadway, and...that's all that I can remember. I had just rewatched North by Northwest before I watched this, so forgive me if nothing in this movie stuck in my mind. I didn't care for There Will Be Blood, but there absolutely are memorable images (and one classic performance). Where are they here?
3. Since this movie doesn't take the assumed radicalness of its characters seriously, never mind their ideals which are never articulated clearly, the Academy will undoubtably reward it with some Oscars, just like it did the execrable Parasite, which is also not political in the way you think it is. Can you name one specific political principle or demand articulated by the characters?
4. This is not a serious adaptation. Reading rubes like David Ehrlich try to make it serious just by calling it political, and name-dropping Pynchon would be embarrassing if I took seriously the name of the publication he writes for, which has been a lie for quite some time. Don't make me laugh.
5. The actors are quite good, but since they're directed to reduce the political to the personal, which is really what allows an ostensibly topical Hollywood movie to get made in the first place, I don't know how laudable that is.
6. What with its car chases, explosions, family reunions, shoot-outs, and monsters coming back from the dead, this movie is as red-blooded American as Rambo or Halloween, if not nearly as good as the latter. (You'd be better off historically and politically by watching Reds, La Chinoise, or even Zabriskie Point.)
7. Pynchon's book really is an obsequy, among other things, to the lost potential of the 60s; One Battle After Another is a dirge to the lost potential of its director, and the paucity of judgment in modern audiences and critics. Sorry, I don't speak Oscarese.
8. No one would be paying the kind of attention to this movie that they are now without the embarrassingly uncritical director worship which Letterboxd nerds prance around in and Letterboxd staff exploits. It's not even auteurism; it's something much shallower. So even from an auteurist standpoint, this is minor Anderson.

I don't know what else to say, other than the universal acclaim from the usual suspects should have warned me off in the first place. The last hour and a half is easier to take than the first hour because the farcical radicalness is dispensed with in favor of generic action-thriller. (I guess this movie must help somebody somewhere feel better about their political impotence.) And that's fine. Just stop pretending it means anything else.