One for the Money, Two for the Show - My Favorite Xmas Film, and the Absolute Worst
I’d like to share, all wrapped in a bow, the Christmas movie that touched me like few others: Tangerine.
Then, in the second half of my story, reluctantly, I’ll tell you why I think Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Picture campaign for One Battle After Another is a disgrace.
Okay, onto the good part!
In 2015, Sean Baker made a movie called Tangerine (with nothing more than 3 iPhone cameras) in the Fairfax neighborhood around Hollywood High school; a neighborhood I know well!
It’s a story about a fraught Christmas Eve: Two sex workers who are best friends, a broken engagement, and their lives on a trannie stroll. It’s also about an Armenian cab driver, a secret lover and his family. Plus, a Cambodian all-night donut shop, and, not the least, getting high in the bathroom with your nemesis.
You don’t have to know or care about any of those things— Tangerine is full of soul, and knowing laughter, and cathartic when you least expect it.
It also stars James Ransone, 46, who sadly died this Christmas week. He was so great in Tangerine, as he was in all things. Or, as his Tangerine character, Chester, says, “THIS, motherfucking GIRL THING.”
I don’t have to say another word; the trailer below says it all.
After I first saw Tangerine, I called my colleagues at the Criterion Collection to tell them that Sean Baker is a genius and they needed to collect all his films, pronto. Spoiler: They did.
I wrote to Mr. Baker, too. He was so unknown at the time, happy to get a note. He asked if he could send me an autographed poster of the film, which is now framed in my living room. I wrote him today, to send my condolences about PJ (James). It is just not fair.
“One Battle After Another” is a Disgrace
The Big Picture Reason
Hollywood is in sunset-stage enshittification right now. A handful of clueless “content operators,” as director Jennifer Esposito will explain to you, flooded the zone with dreck all year. Per plan, they conceived of two “prestige” movies for the end of the year, their Oscar Run ponies, so you get to choose between Door Number 1 and Door Number 2. Like our political parties!1
Quite aside from OBAA, our so-called choices were always going to be sus. They will be next year as well. The zeitgeist, the cutting edge of moviemaking, is not going to be championed at the American “Oscars” — it has never been more hollow.
Would you like to see what was nominated for Best Picture in 1973, which was likely the year OBAA takes place?
Sure, go ahead: The Godfather, Cabaret, Sounder, The Emigrants, Deliverance. It’s unreal how far we’ve fallen— except, yeah, you could say that about so many things.
The Personal Reason
I was an ardent member of a revolutionary group in the 1970s. We made a lot of things happen, some heroic, some reckless. Our understanding of the evil empire was right on the money.
There is not one line in OBAA that rings true, which comes from the scripted mouths of its radical fugitives. Worse, it’s . . . blasphemy.
Yes, we, the mid-century revolutionaries, took risk, and were armed in self defense against the Feds. Organizing was, and is, our daily bread. Yes, we had sex and passionate loves. Some of us stayed together and had children. Some died way too young. The survivors? We’re old now, and relish our hindsight.
If you are naïve and imagine, after watching OBAA, that we ran around screaming, “I’m blowing this up and sport-fucking you at the same time while I sodomize J Edgar Hoover and forget my secret password!” — Uh, no.
OBAA sports the “dialog” of someone who has never boycotted so much as a leaf of lettuce. Paul Thomas Anderson, come on down.
—Has he ever been on a picket line in the rain and cold, or helped a comrade framed in prison by the KKK, or seen their family torn apart by a Blacklist? What is he on?
I am embarrassed for George DeCaprio, Leo DeCaprio’s father, who knew Rosemary Leary in person and knows the life she lived as an underground fugitive. George was part of the SF underground. You’ll note he has not said one public word on the film.
I am mortified for Sean Penn’s father, the late Leo Penn, whose career was destroyed in his prime by the Hollywood Blacklist in the 1950s.
Oh Yeah — The Racist Movie of the Year
OBAA’s egregious slap in the face is how black women revolutionaries are “pictured,” the supposed cause celebre of the whole film. Only in an industry this segregated, this clueless and corrupt, could you pull something like this with a straight face.
Not one mainstream reviewer has trashed OBAA, have they? But plenty of independent black critics have:
Brooke Obie: “Anderson is not interested in revolution. He’s not interested in vulnerable immigrants. Despite the many jokes about lusting for them, he’s not interested in Black women. He’s only interested in the interiority of white men.”
Kaycee Hailey: “The erasure of Black female solidarity, is all too common in narratives shaped around social movements.”
What Whitney’s Watching: “I left the theater feeling this sense of loss that that we’d never get to see ‘Perfidia’ outside of the gaze of a white man who fetishizes her.”
Caro: “I took note of the twee, bespectacled White woman next to me tensing at the slurs, the boldly racist rhetoric, the overall crassness of the film.”
(Ha! Was that me?)
Critic Jason England wrote, for The Defector: “The sharpest tension in the movie comes less from its characters and plot than from the director’s ideas about race and activism, which range from inscrutable to facile to puerile . . .
“The movie’s radicals are self-involved and aimless, seeking metaphorical and literal orgasms via violence and mutual fetish. They are characters plucked from the ‘70s, washed/dried/dyed in 2022, then moved to 2025 to provide contrast and commentary neither they nor the film has earned.
“Early in One Battle After Another, Teyana Taylor turns to Leonardo DiCaprio and suggests, “Let’s fuck while the bombs go off.” But no amount of fetish or spectacle will save us. Neither will the banners or the empty mantras of yesteryear. The lawn signs and T-shirts were always oblique confessions of impotence and an unwillingness to make tangible sacrifices in service of the future.”
Thank you, Jason!
A picture is thousand words, right? So are the names of the living, and the losses. I would like to mention some of the most influential revolutionaries, real ones, I came to know in the 70s. They are also artists and poets:
Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, Elaine Brown, Delores Henderson, Gloria Abernethy, Assata Shakur, Bobbie Henderson, Fredrika Newton, Afeni Shakur, Judy Juanita, Tarika Lewis, Pat Parker.
Do you see anyone who looked any of these people in OBAA? No, you did not. Maybe Regina Hall, the supporting “older auntie,” for a minute. She sure knows better.
What did PTA’s wife, Maya Randolph, think of this film? I am bewildered. I know it’s not personal, but this was so bizarre.
Are black women supposed to be shown in cinema as saints or virgins? Of course not! How about something, anything, resembling the richness of life we know?
These directors have figured it out, that’s for sure.
And, even a white man made Jackie Brown. I wish “Jackie” or even Coffy Brown would come down and read PTA’s beads!
Let’s do something REALLY different in 2026, shall we?
A Little Christmas Song for Your Little Bear
Toyland, toyland
Little girl and boy land
While you dwell within it
You are ever happy there
Childhood's joy land
Mystic merry toyland
Once you pass its borders
You can ne'er return again
When you've grown up, my dears
And are as old as I
You'll laugh and ponder on the years
That roll so swiftly by, my dears
That roll so swiftly by
Childhood's joy land
Mystic merry toyland
Once you pass its borders
You can ne'er return again2
In Case You Missed It
A Taste of Power: Oakland Women’s Politics Have Been a Long Time Coming
A classic GOP talking point to smear black women in politics as Jezebels. They slept their way to the top, right?
What’s the other one? Hamnet, Spielberg’s production company, Chloe Zhao director. It’s a worthy one.
Written by: Victor Herbert, Glen Macdonough, David D Rose, 1946
Caveat: I am not someone who uses film reviews as litmus tests… YMMV!
One thing I like about being in a critics group is we have spirited arguments about what we vote for, and then after we all eat rum cake and drink punch. As comrades. We love movies, period.
OBAA needs some criticism; it’s gotten out of control with the “accolades.” it’s received grade inflation that is too much, no matter what you think of it.
I’ve enjoyed some of PTA’s movies very much. I thought “Licorice Pizza” was hilarious and a zinger about growing up in The Valley in the waterbed era. Accurate! I saved OBAA for a relaxing night, thinking I would love it. I was very much surprised.
OMG thank you. I was squirming from minute one. As is often the case, everybody around me seemed enraptured. Oversexualized black women. Guns guns guns. Ridiculous dialogue. I've never been a PTA fan, and this one flinches it. Give me Sean Baker, every time.