sean penn

One Battle After Another

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Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) aims a rifle

If the characters from Dr Strangelove somehow escaped and eventually found themselves in a Tarantino movie, it might look like One Battle After Another. A 1970s-vibing, magpie-thieving, funny and relentlessly entertaining ride, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie is basically one gloriously extended chase with added spiritual input from Hitchcock, the Coens and Paul Greengrass (plus QT). It’s funnier than your average Anderson movie – There Will Be Blood wasn’t notably full of jokes – and happier than usual to paddle in genre waters. The story is based on Pynchon’s novel Vineland, with much diluting by Anderson, and follows a gang of direct action radicals, the French 75, whose campaign of bombing banks and migrant … Read more

Daddio

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Sean Penn as Clark, the driver, in his cab

The conceit of Daddio is that it’s just two people in a car driving from JFK Airport into New York City. It’s a yellow cab and the driver is played by Sean Penn, the passenger by Dakota Johnson. As the car rolls towards the city they talk. At first Clark makes cab driver smalltalk, kneejerk remarks about the modern world and how everything has gone to the bad. Then he shifts on to giving her the wealth of his wisdom, and eventually, after a cool appraisal, she obviously comes to the conclusion that he’s mostly mouth and starts to respond. This is what the film is about, their wide-ranging conversation, but returning regularly … Read more

Licorice Pizza

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Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman

Paul Thomas Anderson’s quest to make the perfect 1970s movie continues with Licorice Pizza, a living, breathing simulacrum of the sort of film that stalked the landscape before George Lucas came along with changed/ruined (according to taste) everything with Star Wars. Ironically, another Lucas film, American Graffiti, might have served as a moodboard for his attempt to outdo 2014’s Inherent Vice – itself an attempt to outdo 1999’s Magnolia – along with Robert Altman’s rambling, discursive Nashville, though the storyline deep down is actually A Star Is Born – guy on the way down meets gal on the way up – with a scrappy side order of What’s Up, Doc. The guy is … Read more

Flag Day

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Jennifer and John

Parenting tips with Sean Penn? Flag Day continues the actor/director’s interest in movies circling around the idea of family. In 2001’s The Pledge, childless, edge-of-retirement cop Jack Nicholson sought redemption by bringing in a child murderer, out of a personal sense of duty to the parents. In 2007’s Into the Wild, graduating student Emile Hirsch rejected the fast track to the top enabled by his wealthy parents and headed into the wilderness to… also seek redemption. Even if you didn’t like them, both were full of interesting moments and performances. More tightly focused than either of those on the actual parent/child bond, Flag Day tracks the on/off, up/down journey down the decades of charming … Read more

This Must Be the Place

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Sean Penn in This Must Be the Place

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 24 August The Mainz pogrom, 1349 In the 14th century, the bubonic plague – aka the Black Death – killed between 30 and 60 per cent of Europe’s population (20-30 million people) in the course of about six years. It arrived from Asia in 1346 and ran rampant. No one knew what the cause of it was, but one of the theories was that it was God’s way of showing his displeasure with humanity, either for waging war constantly (the 100 Years War was ten years in), failing to drive the Muslim out of the Holy Land, or, casting about for … Read more