# one battle after another my arts deliberately toothless neoliberal bs a joke at everyone's expense that is a deliberate satire of a 'radicals vs teh man' movie and basically does that 'both sides' pumpkin-pdf shit 'perfedia' and 'lockjaw' wts how exactly does anyone take this nonsensical ham-fisted shit remotely seriously - ten minutes in and i thought it was some kind of lousy snl comedy sketch at no point is the enemy ever _really_ identified we're just supposed to read there as being one at no point are the protagonists introduced or remotely contextualized either; they just do 'radical stuff' that is stuff any mainstream fence setting conservative - like the director - would automatically and unthinkingly consider 'radical'(tm) - i mean there's a black woman up and front from the first scene right that _has_ to be radical media rez movies preporting to be saying something - you're just supposed to correctly guess who the good and bad guys are but then the movie _does_ tell you who the good and bad guys are - by never once telling you who they are - you're supposed to (correctly) 'read' who everyone is but the writer and director never lays ir cards on the table and say what they mean - but that's because the only thing they have to say is that they've deliberately nothing to say about power or politics whatsoever what they're saying fact is that there isn't anything worth saying they haven't got the balls or the style needed to say anything real so they systematically and deliberately say 'nothing'; superficiality is ir entire point in fact it appears to hate the very topics it allegedly engages with - much like alex garland's civil war (wow was that ever awful) both decaprio and penn's two dimensional cartoon characters are drawn like that for a good reason - to deliberately obfuscate the two as someone being 'two sides of the same coin' - yeah in this case a $3 dollar coin made of cheap tin as for that secret group of ultra wealthy white supremacists called the christmas adventurers club how ir vile ideas weren't the defacto modus operandi of the military-police-industrial-complex but merely a rotten basket of fascist apples in an otherwise perfectly ordinary mentally balanced and well functioning state apparatus of organized stupidity death and murder tells one everything they should know the entire flick stinks of willful sneering cynicism and it's deliberate act of unseriousness be taken very seriously; paul thomas anderson couldn't direct himself out of a wet bag of rotting celluloid and should go flock himself // republic of bob