One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

[Mr Sausage]

It's more famously an alcoholic drink, which is what I'm certain the group was named after

Maybe so! But it ends up working well, this mix of the explosive and historical with the frivolous and indulgent.

[domino harvey]

Fun fact: the head bartender at our wedding reception put French 75s on our bespoke cocktail list because I had told him I liked French films Sadly, no french toast or pix of Sebastian Cabot on the menu

[untitled]

A few months ago I decided to read Vineland prior to seeing the film for a few reasons: I always prefer to read the book prior to a movie. Don't always do it but almost always wish I had.

I pretty much never do this, unless I happen to have read the book already—seriously, isn't that more likely to hobble appreciation of a film as an individual work of art in its own right than anything else?

If I have time when writing something professionally, I sometimes watch the film, read the book, and then watch the film again, but I don't think I've ever felt compelled to read the book just because a film adaptation is coming out.

Just getting back to this but I'd put it this way. You could be right, it may hobble appreciation, but I'm pretty good at compartmentalizing that stuff -- like the art from the artist, but I've long felt that if a written work was good enough to inspire someone to make a film based on it, I'd like to have read it first, so I try to IF I know and when I can. If I watch a good movie and only then find out it's based on a novel I'm disappointed I haven't read it. Almost always when I watch first and then go back to read something after I read using the visuals from the film instead of my imagination (LOL--so maybe I'm not so good at it after all.)
Any rate, just my personal preference.

[Red Screamer]

I shelled out money to see it a second time on VistaVision and the narrower framing is clearly the right one. There are certain specific compositional effects of symmetry or surprise that are all but ruined in the wider version (I saw the 1.85:1 last time) and in general, the visual style looks a little lax and empty with wider framing whereas in the 1.50:1 the dead-center compositions and close-ups are nicely emphatic....my armchair opinion is that the widescreen is an exhibition byproduct and if Anderson cares about video, we’ll have the narrower one on disc.

As I'm sure many of you know, 1.85:1 is what ended up on Warner Bros' disc. Comments from cinematographer Michael Bauman indicate that 1.50:1 is the correct framing (with the crops to the wider one still closely supervised by Anderson), but may be left exclusive to VistaVision screenings, which I hope doesn't prove to be true.

The Film Stage: I was looking at the 4K the other day, which is in a 1.85 aspect ratio, as most would see it. It was interesting to consider that the movie was shot in its perfect, intended 1.50:1 aspect ratio—VistaVision, which was in four theaters around the world—but how most people see it is another. And I kind of wonder what you feel about that disparity in how people view the film contra, maybe, ways that it was intended, which is an interesting tension.

Michael Bauman: Yeah. Yeah, because I think a lot of people, when the film finally settles in, they’re going to probably see it in 1.85, depending on when all the deliverables are coming. But I think the thing is: that’s what makes it special about going to see it projected—because you can kind of get, really, the original intention behind it, and seeing the full experience. I mean, you’re lucky to see it in Vista. Seeing it in Vista and seeing it in IMAX are really the two preferred formats to see it in if possible. I think the fact that people are experiencing different aspect ratios is always something we discussed, but I think it also kind of really helped out getting people to come out and see it because they could experience it in “the full glory,” so to speak.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

The New Beverly Cinema is debuting an optical reduction print (Vistavision to four-perf standard 35mm) next month. Their website makes no mention of this, but it’s new and was done under the supervision of Paul Thomas Anderson.