If Paul Thomas Anderson’s good at two things, they’re “Making Damn Good Movies” and “Setting Studio Money Ablaze.” Those things can be incongruous at times, much like they were for Licorice Pizza and Inherent Vice, but they’re always fucking experiences that we just don’t have a ton of at the movies anymore. Enter One Battle After Another, a $130 million riff on a Pynchon novel featuring Leo Dicaprio doing madcap shit over three hours.
Seriously, reading about this thing’s test screenings has us absolutely fucking stoked, and we’re sure David Zaslav is adding like thirty Alka-Seltzer tablets to his Perrier this morning. Speaking of this morning, Warner Bros’ dropped the long-awaited trailer for the project right before noon, so settle in and get hyped, folks. We only get one of these kinds of pictures every so often.
Peep it:
You ain’t getting shit from Warner Bros about what this particular movie’s about, so here’s the jacket summary for Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which is apparently what One Battle After Another is based on:
“Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube.
Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie’s long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs (“Floozy with an Uzi”), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.).“
One Battle After Another will hit theaters on September 26. We think it will bow in Venice at the latest, and hopefully, we’ll see it in Toronto this year. Also, it’ll be showing in VistaVision, so get ready to shell out for those extra “premium format” fees.