39.2 One Conversation After Another

Dave Anderson and I had three or four conversations about Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another which took the cinemas by storm last fall and the awards season this spring. One Battle After Another was a juggernaut. It garnered 506 nominations this year, it won 287 awards including Oscars for Andy Jurgesen for Film editing, Cassandra Kulukundis for Best Casting which was the first time they handed out that award, Sean Penn for Best Supporting Actor, and Paul Thomas Anderson picked up three for Best Adapted Screenplay from Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Best Director and he was with Adam Somner and Sara Murphy one of the Producers for Best Picture. It raked in over two hundred million dollars at the box office on a budget of seventy two million, it was shot on Vista Vision lenses using celluloid safety film and was almost three hours long. Dave and I meant for this to drop the weekend of the Oscars, but to be honest it was a nightmare to edit. Dave and I did this over zoom when we were not at our best. We needed more coffee at times, less alcohol at other times, and condensing the almost seven hours of audio down to a podcast that is ten minutes longer than the film literally took me six months to do in my spare time. Again, I thank you for being patient. Dave and I focus on the production value of the film, the shockingly good attention to detail in casting, directing, cinematography, and performances. We then grope around the flaws of the movie, what must have been the difficulty in adapting Pynchon’s novel about 60’s radicals resurfacing in the 80’s like in Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty (1988). In somewhat of a break from previous episodes, we touch around the edges of the politics of the film and how some of them are extremely relevant to our times and others... well... not so much. One Battle After Another is an astounding film, and whether you think it succeeds or not, everyone in America should see it. Thank you so much for listening to the Super 70 Podcast and for unsubscribing while I was gone. The Super 70 Podcast is available wherever you find podcasts. You can find me, my books, and my blog at www.thatdylandavis.com. I am @thatdylandavis on Threads, Letterbxed, and BluSky. All music on the Super 70 is written and performed by Rozalind MacPhail and you can find her on Soundcloud, iTunes, and YouTube. For those of you who think One Battle After Another has no basis in reality, please take a look at this Reuters article about a member of the Baader_Meinhof Gang who was recently arrested in Germany after being on the run for forty years. https://www.reuters.com/world/long-sought-red-army-faction-suspect-charged-germany-1990s-attacks-2026-03-27/