One Battle After Another: More Than Timely and Powerful and Quirky

My son (Simon Vozick-Levinson, Deputy Music Editor at Rolling Stone) invited me to see One Battle After Another with him (he wanted to see it a second time), and I'm sure glad that I just did.  Paul Thomas Anderson's movie (based on Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, which I haven't read) opened in New York City and around the country last month, on September 25.  It tells the story of resistance to a fascist United States of America, a story which is becoming ever more like the reality of ICE and government agents pepper-spraying clergy, pulling innocent American citizens off the street for deportation without a hearing, that we see every day on television and social media.

The only difference is Federal police in One Battle After Another fire real bullets not pepper-spray.  But the dystopian movie -- this fictional film of a Hitlerian dystopia that is nearly here -- gives us a frightening portrayal of the racism and xenophobia of the rich white men and military who order ICE to go out and do their worst.  At the same time, the movie portrays those who are driven to violence to oppose what they rightly see as the destruction of America.

One Battle After Another indeed shows us two generations of opposition to fascist government in the USA.  This has two narrative dividends.  First, it enriches the narrative, exploring the family dynamics of the revolutionaries.  Also first,  it provides a truthful historical depth to the story: in our offscreen reality, fascism and its attendant racism didn't originate in the past ten or twenty years.  It has roots that go back centuries not decades to the birth of America, and its acceptance of slavery.

The movie is also brilliantly acted.  Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Benicio Del Toro never disappoint, and they all were outstanding in this movie.  Chase Infiniti, who was memorable in the TV series Presumed Innocent, was powerful in One Battle After Another, as was Teyana Taylor.  It was also great to see Wood Harris (The Wire) and Tony Goldwyn (Law & Order)  and Brooklyn Demme on the big screen. (Demme was interviewed on the Being Frank podcast this past April, in an episode that ended with Frank LoBuono playing my song "Alpha Centauri").

Speaking of songs, there was some excellent music, across a diversity of times. My favorite was "Soldier Boy" by the Shirelles, which was eerily satisfying to hear, given that it was on Top 40 radio in 1962, the happiest time in politics in my recollection, a time that sparkled with promise and progress, in such stark contrast to this wrought movie and our country today. And there was indeed some gallows humor that was pretty funny in One Battle After Another, which was also a tonic for what was happening on the screen. 

The action scenes were excellent, too. One of my favorite was Del Toro’s character Sensei Sergio St. Carlos escaping via a tunnel under his house, something I’ve always wanted to construct, and one thing I’ve admired about El Chapo. The car chases were exceptional, with one blockbuster chase involving three cars driving at lightning speed in hilly terrain, each driver having a separate agenda, something I've never seen before, even in a James Bond movie.

But the undeniable strength of this movie is its warning against what America is becoming before our very eyes -- a sober warning delivered with all manner of quirks and idiosyncratic characters that all too often border on gonzo -- which couldn't have been delivered at a better, more necessary time.

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Simon Vozick-Levinson's A Guide to the Revolutionary Music in ‘One Battle After Another’ in Rolling Stone, September 29, 2025

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Once Upon a Time ... In Hollywood: Masterful Alternate Reality

My wife and son and I just saw Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time ... In Hollywood at our son's invitation. He's an even bigger Tarantino fan than I am, and my wife liked a couple of his earlier movies too.

The latest is among the best three Tarantino ever made - right up with Reservoir Dogs (in a class by itself) and Jackie Brown, which was just an all-out brilliant movie.  I use the phrase "alternate reality" in the title of this review.  As many of you know, I'm a science fiction author, and a copious reviewer of science fiction television series and movies.  I don't mean to suggest that Once Upon a Time is science fiction alternate reality, in the way that, say, the recently departed Counterpart on television was.   But as the title surely suggests, Once Upon a Time is a fable, neither docu-drama (though it does touch upon many aspects of real history) nor sheer fiction.

And the aspects of reality woven into this marvelous movie that takes place in 1969 Hollywood range from Bruce Lee to Mannix on television to the Playboy mansion to Charles Manson and Sharon Tate.  The fictitious characters are headlined by Rick Dalton (a somewhat washed up 1950s TV Western actor) and his stunt man double, Cliff Booth.  Rick is played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Cliff by Brad Pitt.  I've been saying ever since the two began burning up the screen decades ago that their looks almost made them interchangeable.  It was good to see Tarantino finally build a movie around this.

The movie is chocked full of memorable scenes, including Sharon Tate enjoying her own movie, Cliff getting the better of Bruce Lee in either a fantasy or a flashback, and Al Pacino playing a agent whose name is Schwarz and insists that people don't call him Schwartz (I've known a few people named Schwarz over the years, and have always been aggravated that I couldn't call them Schwartz).  And a plethora of great lines, including Dalton exulting in fried "sour kraut" when he takes a flame thrower to Nazis in an audition for a movie.  (I wouldn't be surprised if Tarantino came up with that line when he was 15, and was just waiting for a chance to write a scene in which he put it into a movie.)  And a full-house of great stars, most of them no youngsters, playing all kinds of bit and bigger parts, as per just about all Tarantino movies.

But the best part - and I won't say more, lest I give too much away - is the ending of the movie, which is why I say this movie is alternate reality (or alternate history, depending on how you look at it).  With so much of our reality animating this fable, Tarantino lulls us into thinking that just about everything will be the same.  It isn't, and that what's wraps up this wonderful package of what will go down as a quintessential Tarantino masterpiece.

real alternate reality, if that makes any sense

"flat-out fantastic" - Scifi and Scary

Inception: Brilliant

Given that this blog is Infinite Regress, I thought it was long since time that I reviewed Inception.  It had one scene literally of mirrors on mirrors, which is infinite regress par excellence.  And the rest of movie was just great as well - Christopher Nolan's best movie since Memento, which is high praise indeed.

The people part of the story is good.  Cobb (played Leonardo DiCaprio) is mostly in the business of stealing information from marks of clients by tapping into their dreams.   Introducing an idea into someone's mind - which if it takes root can change a person's life (and sometimes therein the world) - is called "inception," and is a much more difficult undertaking.   (Here the story picks up on Richard Dawkins' notion of the "meme" as an ideational virus.)    Cobb, we learn near the end of the movie, has done this only once before - to his wife, to get her to leave the deep dream state both were in.  It had disastrous ultimate consequences for her.

Cobb and team are hired to plant an idea into the new head of a company.  The team is a fine assemblage of memorable actors and performances, including especially Tom Hardy (good to see him back from Meadowlands),  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Ellen Page (meshing well with her Cisco commercials).  The action is superb, with car chases and scalings of snowy mountains almost James Bondian in their sweep and power.

But the deepest thrill of Inception resides in the sheer intellectual audacity of its puzzles and their pursuit.   The mission requires the team to take their target not just through a dream state, but a dream within a dream within a dream.  Time moves more slowly - drastically so - the deeper the dream state, or the further away it is from our normal time in our waking reality.   And though death in the first level of dreams just awakens you in our reality, death in the deepest, or third state, can sentence you to limbo forever.    When you add these high stakes to the speed and impact of the action, with stunning visuals including the folding of streets and the crumbling of cities, you get one breathless rollercoaster ride of a movie.

As is always the case in which dreams mix with reality, a central underlying question haunts the proceedings: is what we are seeing reality, or some dream of which we're not aware.

Cobb explains that there are ways in which we can tell.   One of them, a token that we can rely on as an indication of reality, provides a somewhat ambiguous ending.    But there's another way - whether we know how we got to where we are in our current experience.    And, on that score, I think the ending is clear.

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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

Leonardo DiCaprio's 11th Hour

Leonardo DiCaprio's The 11th Hour opens this Friday in New York and Los Angeles, and around the country next week.

It's a movie in the tradition of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

You can see a trailer for it here:



I have to say that I'm not really convinced that the Earth or our species are in the 11th hour, and certainly not at 11:59pm - a minute away from utter destruction or extinction - as one of those experts says in the trailer.

We just don't know enough about the Earth, its history, what's going on right now, to make such apocalyptic pronouncements.

Nonetheless, anything that gets us to think like a global community, to look at reducing the environmental problems that do beset us, to understand whether Katrinas are inevitable or avoidable, to come with ways we can all help - any movie that encourages this is very welcome.

So, while I don't agree that we're there, I look forward to seeing The 11th Hour.