Sean Penn Playing the Embodiment of ‘The Phone Works Both Ways’

One Battle After Another and other September 2025 watches.

Some light spoilers for One Battle After Another and Twinless below.

Teyana Taylor and Sean Penn in One Battle After Another. Photo: Screenshot.

One Battle After Another
New release
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Paul Thomas Anderson is so damn good at making movies. I levitated out of my body at One Battle After Another’s POV: Road … I had not felt that way since Challengers’ POV: Tennis ball. Now I see why the trailers were … that way. How do you describe a movie that has so much swagger? It is ambitiously about desire, grief, white supremacists, phones not being charged, bureaucracy, the cruelty of the immigration system, RFK Jr., little buns, smoking too much pot, rebellion, freedom, angst, and Junglepussy saying “My name is Junglepussy!” (I need cameras up on Ari Aster: Eddington compares to One Battle After Another like a child’s race car bed compares to Lewis Hamilton behind the wheel. I’d be embarrassed.)

I watched Punch-Drunk Love for the first time not long before I saw OBAA, and I was moved by the emotional similarities between the two. Both are preoccupied with the awkwardness of need: Bob chainsmokes joints and wonders how he can connect to his daughter Willa while keeping her safe from threats she doesn’t know anything about. Instead, they both keep pushing each other away.

Teyana Taylor is so good as Perfidia Beverly Hills, a wanton revolutionary and thrill-seeker who sees any structure — family, government, even the unit of rebels she leads — as hampering her independence. Taylor has to be captivating, vexing, sexy, fearless; the movie doesn’t work if you know get her alchemic hold on everyone around her, feel disappointed by her, want more of and from her. Willa has to piece together a version of her mother she can live with: not the way Bob idealized her, or the way Lockjaw coveted her, or the way her friends felt betrayed by her. (Is this the most Sean Penn has worked for me in … years? Firstly, everyone reacts that way to Teyana Taylor. Secondly, his performance as an embodiment of a deadbeat dad saying “the phone works both ways…”).

This movie reminded me a lot of that scene in 20th Century Women where Annette Bening remarks sort of wistfully that Greta Gerwig gets to see Bening’s teenage son “out in the world,” in a way Bening herself never will. There’s no greater high than the movie’s third act, when Willa inherits her mother’s bravery and rage while remaining the girl her father raised her to be.

Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Season 5
First time watch
I only started this show to make it to the dinner where Kim Richards called Eileen Davidson a beast. Five seasons! To understand one dinner! And it was worth it…