Michael B. Jordan

I think its best mode and perhaps the best way to understand it is...

like something adjacent to a cartoon, like a political cartoon, right?

And the question that I, the thing that excited me so much watching it that first time, which I'll never ever forget, I just was so exhilarated and watched it in IMAX and it looked so good and felt like it weighed 4,000 pounds, right?

was the sheer fact of Tiana Taylor as an elemental energy and a physical presence, right?

I felt like he was giving a Black woman the treatment that he gives these white men in his movies.

He invented a character.

And, you know, Pynchon has a lot to do with this.

Thomas Pynchon wrote Violin, the book that this movie's based on.

He came up with a character who is, in the world of this movie, a Black woman who has as much weirdness and complication and, like, wrongness...

As the white guys do.

And that that in the world of Paul Thomas Anderson is a form of that is that is equality.

But then undergirding that is this are these are these questions of like just American politics.

Forget like leftist, you know, white supremacist military industrial complex.

But just like what the fundamental grimy roots of this country are all the soil they're growing in.

And without really having to hit that drum too hard after the first 33 minutes, you understand what the stakes are.

And...

They don't have to be too specific about what the politics are.

I never got hung up on the fact that these people believe in four things and one of them is freedom from fucking fear.

Like, yes, amen.

I didn't need more from that because I feel like this is a chase picture.