September 27, 2025 • 11 mins
ICYMI: ‘Later, with Mo’Kelly’ Presents: Mark Rahner’s review of the new Warner Bros. Pictures action/thriller “One Battle After Another” in ‘The Rahner Report’ - on KFI AM 640…Live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app & YouTube @MrMoKelly
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to Later with Mo Kelly on demand from
k f I, A M. Six forty talks about pontificates
about pop culture, Ron and Report with Mark Ronner.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
K FI Later with Kelly. It is now time for
the Runner Report with Mark Ronner.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Tonight, we're going to talk about one battle after another
from director and writer Paul Thomas Anderson. Here's some trailer
and it's similar to the one Mo played, but I
had to find one without any dirty, filthy job ending
words in it.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Oh what I'm doing here, I'm creating a closed circuit.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Very important to keep your cap shunted like this so
you don't accidentally nate you're charged stuff. Oh, I should
create a show, a revolution. The message is clear.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I'll be seeing you very soon.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
None of us see you first.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
For bringing justice to the vigilante group known as the
French seventy five. We are here to award Steven lot
of John with the Medal of Honor.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
You have to understand, and we'll let.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Me and Mom. We used to run around and do
some real batch. They got hurt. Now they're coming after us.
I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
I didn't ask for this.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
That's just how the cards were rolled out for me.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
It's not cards. You don't roll cards, it's dice, dach,
what is wrong with you? You're right, let's go. Okay,
that's plenty of that. When Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will
Be Blood came out back in two thousand and seven,
I was still kind of processing what i'd seen, but
it was deadline time and I had to file my review,
and I said it was some sort of instant American classic,
and I think it did turn out to be one. Also,
(02:08):
I walked around telling people I'd drink their milkshake for
quite some time after that. We're just gonna go with
PTA from here forward, and figure that you won't take
it for the Parent Teacher Association in this context, or
that kind of spongebath you take when you can't have
a real shower. You're not gonna go with PTA or
one second here technical there we go. I'm not quite
(02:29):
ready to say that PTA is the modern Stanley Kubrick,
but I think he and Christopher Nolan are the closest
we've got, and anything they do is worth seeing, even
if you don't immediately love it. I respected but didn't
love Inherent Vice or Punch Drunk love or Phantom Thread,
but I do love Boogie Knights and Licorice Pizza, and
I think one battle after another falls pretty squarely on
(02:49):
that side of the ledger. If I have to tell
you what it's about, and I really think it's best
for you just to strap in for the ride and
see where it takes you, here's what I'll say. It's
about a revolutionary played by Leonardo DiCaprio who belongs to
a group that rescues immigrants from detention centers, among other things.
His partner girlfriend, Old Lady Perfidia Beverly Hills, is played
(03:09):
by Tiona Taylor, and she's a fairly theatrical badass who's
pregnant and also attracts a military whack job played by
an absolutely jacked Sean Penn with the spectacular name of
Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw. That's our starting point. The story
spans years into where the kids now a teenager being
menaced by Colonel Lockjaw after the revolutionary group is more
(03:31):
or less scattered to the winds, and Leo's character with
the polar opposite dull name of Bob Ferguson, is a hapless,
drunken stoner with a man bun and a bathrobe and
he needs to save his daughter. I can barely even
tell you what kind of movie one battle after another
is drama, satire, comedy, some action and violences to all those,
and it's kind of nuts. I'm not the world's hugest
(03:54):
Leo fan, but I really admire his lack of vanity
in becoming this Putts, who's sort of like a cross
between his Rick Dalton character from Once Upon a Time
in Hollywood and the dude from The Big Lebowski. You
probably wouldn't like this guy if you met him. He's mediocre,
he's irritating, but he loves his daughter. And we got
to talk about Sean Penn as Colonel Lockjaw. Whatever you
(04:14):
might think of Sean Penn in the real world, well
I don't care. He's a fantastic heel in this movie,
and it's as much his movie as Leo's. PTA's channeled
his frightening intensity. It really is frightening into something I
think is sure to get an Oscar nomination, and not
a perfunctory one. Nothing about this movie is perfunctory. And
for a movie whose characters have such comic book names
(04:36):
like perfidy of Beverly Hills. In Colonel Lockjaw, it's an
actress whose actual name is Chase Infinity who stands out
is Leo's feisty daughter. So what if her name sounds
like a mid priced sedan. If you missed Moe's interview
with her, you can hear it on the later podcast.
I see that One Battle after Another's got something like
ninety eight percent on Rotten Tomatoes now, and you'd usually
take that with a huge grain of salt, especially after
(04:59):
last year's best lists the Oscars and Anora and Amelia Perez.
But this ninety eight percent isn't the result of a
bunch of pretentious, out of touch hacks. One Battle after
Another is a quirky, idiosyncratic movie that is the work
of a distinctive filmmaker, and an Ai could never crank
out something like it. It might be the kind of
movie critics think they should like, but it's also legit good.
(05:21):
It's also nearly three hours long, but I will watch
it again. When I compare Pta to Kubrick, one part
of that is that movies by both of them are
worth revisiting as time passes when you're at different ages yourself.
This one obviously reflects and comments on stuff going on
now with the iced attention Gulag, as well as a
(05:41):
preposterous secret white supremacist group, But there's lots more going
on than just riffing on current events. In fact, there's
enough going on for different people to find different things
in the movie. But one facet that appealed to me
was if you have to do something about things you
find unjust and intolerable, there's always a cost. There's this
scene with Leo getting load in his bathrobe watching the
(06:01):
nineteen sixty six classic The Battle of Algiers. It's about
Algerians fighting for independence from France, and you realize instantly
he's not that serious of a person. He wouldn't fit
in in that movie. Maybe he doesn't fit in in
this one. But this is where he is and where
his daughter is, and we all have to live and
act where we find ourselves. Character is revealed in how
we respond to terrible things or don't respond, or cheer
(06:24):
the terrible things on and get off on him. Am
I being too opaque here? There's some Doctor Strange love
level humor in this movie speaking of Kubrick, not just
from the loons and the racist you'd expect, but also
the revolutionaries and their insistence on proper procedure, which Leo's
stoner character has serious problems with. It's a little more
dry than shouting. There's no fighting in the war room,
(06:46):
but it's still pretty funny. He's got a huge cast.
Benicio del Toro plays a beer Guzlin karate instructor. Kevin
Tig from the old Emergency TV show pops up in
a small role. The movie's based on a Thomas Pinchon
novel which I haven't read, called Vineland and Inherent Vice
was also from Pinchon as well another one I didn't read.
(07:06):
I don't think one Battle after another is your typical
movie crowd pleaser, but I also don't see how anyone
who loves movies could miss it. I'm still processing it,
but I think we might have another classic on our hands.
This one's going on my best of list, along with
Sinners and some others. There's your on a report, Moe,
are you going to go see this? I'm going to
see it this weekend without a doubt at a boy
probably Sunday. Yeah, be prepared as long as it is.
(07:30):
It did not drag it all for me. I mean
the movie that we talked about last week him. I
was looking at my phone clock about every two or
three minutes. I just wanted the hell out of there.
I was not doing this in this It's just really
a masterful piece of filmmaking with a bunch of stuff
going on. The sound, the music by Johnny Greenwood is
(07:51):
overpowering and really adds to the thing. It's quite an experience. Now,
do we have a couple of minutes left over? No,
you got tom go ahead? Do you in our remaining time?
I think we got to talk about Alien Earth, which
wrapped up this week, Oh God, with its eighth and
I fear not final episode. I have rarely seen a
show that started off so strong as such a worthy
addition to the Alien movies, only to end up making
(08:14):
me feel like I needed a well a pta bath
and yelling at the screen after seven episodes of build
up and letting the Zeno Morph's loose on the Earth.
As the title promises, what we get is a shift
in focus to the handful of young android hybrid people
who may never know if they're real or just copies
of the kids whose consciousnesses were put in the artificial
(08:37):
enhanced bodies. They decided they're going to run the show now,
and it just stops there. To quote John McEnroe.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
You can't be serious, man, You cannot be serious.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
That is exactly how I felt. You saw this, didn't you, mo.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
I saw it, and I feel similarly, if only because,
and this is partly my fault, I went into this
thinking that it was going to be like a limited series,
one season beginning middle, and tell a very specific story,
which is two years before the Nostromo and Alien the
original movie. Instead, we got the beginning of a story
(09:13):
that they're going to drag out probably two or three
seasons if they have their way to tell, a story
which is not going to have anything to do with
the first Alien movie, and it seems like a cash
grap It started off wonderfully, beautifully, accurately, and then it
descended into something that was meandering with no real direction
(09:34):
and definitely no conclusion.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yeah it's dull when we agree, but you're exactly right
about that. And I think it almost would have been
better if the show sucked from the start, because it
started off so promising that the letdown was much much stronger.
How can they not.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
See that that ending was going to be trashed in panned.
I mean, how could someone look at those seven episodes
and then say, Okay, we got a code for episode
eight here. We need to do something. We need to
reshoot something, we need to rewrite something.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Oh, it is a galactic code Brown, And I just
I want to know what happened behind the scenes, because
I've rarely been as infuriated without a show ended, except
for maybe the Lost finale.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
It was similar in that regard because it left you think, like,
what's it's over, and the way they set it up,
it will setting itself up for this big moment and clash,
and I don't want to give it away. If you
haven't seen it and you don't get it, you don't
get to see it. And it's almost like they want
to make it like a some cliffhanger for next season
that we don't know that we're going to get and
(10:38):
we may not even care if we do get it.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
I'm okay if the show is euthanized, I don't need
another season. They have lost all my good will and
now I've vented. I'm not going to spoil anything else.
We agree, Damn it damn it, the hell
Speaker 1 (10:51):
You're listening to Later with Moe Kelly on demand from
KFI AM six forty
You're listening to Later with Mo Kelly on demand from
k f I, A M. Six forty talks about pontificates
about pop culture, Ron and Report with Mark Ronner.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
K FI Later with Kelly. It is now time for
the Runner Report with Mark Ronner.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Tonight, we're going to talk about one battle after another
from director and writer Paul Thomas Anderson. Here's some trailer
and it's similar to the one Mo played, but I
had to find one without any dirty, filthy job ending
words in it.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Oh what I'm doing here, I'm creating a closed circuit.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Very important to keep your cap shunted like this so
you don't accidentally nate you're charged stuff. Oh, I should
create a show, a revolution. The message is clear.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I'll be seeing you very soon.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
None of us see you first.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
For bringing justice to the vigilante group known as the
French seventy five. We are here to award Steven lot
of John with the Medal of Honor.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
You have to understand, and we'll let.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Me and Mom. We used to run around and do
some real batch. They got hurt. Now they're coming after us.
I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
I didn't ask for this.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
That's just how the cards were rolled out for me.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
It's not cards. You don't roll cards, it's dice, dach,
what is wrong with you? You're right, let's go. Okay,
that's plenty of that. When Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will
Be Blood came out back in two thousand and seven,
I was still kind of processing what i'd seen, but
it was deadline time and I had to file my review,
and I said it was some sort of instant American classic,
and I think it did turn out to be one. Also,
(02:08):
I walked around telling people I'd drink their milkshake for
quite some time after that. We're just gonna go with
PTA from here forward, and figure that you won't take
it for the Parent Teacher Association in this context, or
that kind of spongebath you take when you can't have
a real shower. You're not gonna go with PTA or
one second here technical there we go. I'm not quite
(02:29):
ready to say that PTA is the modern Stanley Kubrick,
but I think he and Christopher Nolan are the closest
we've got, and anything they do is worth seeing, even
if you don't immediately love it. I respected but didn't
love Inherent Vice or Punch Drunk love or Phantom Thread,
but I do love Boogie Knights and Licorice Pizza, and
I think one battle after another falls pretty squarely on
(02:49):
that side of the ledger. If I have to tell
you what it's about, and I really think it's best
for you just to strap in for the ride and
see where it takes you, here's what I'll say. It's
about a revolutionary played by Leonardo DiCaprio who belongs to
a group that rescues immigrants from detention centers, among other things.
His partner girlfriend, Old Lady Perfidia Beverly Hills, is played
(03:09):
by Tiona Taylor, and she's a fairly theatrical badass who's
pregnant and also attracts a military whack job played by
an absolutely jacked Sean Penn with the spectacular name of
Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw. That's our starting point. The story
spans years into where the kids now a teenager being
menaced by Colonel Lockjaw after the revolutionary group is more
(03:31):
or less scattered to the winds, and Leo's character with
the polar opposite dull name of Bob Ferguson, is a hapless,
drunken stoner with a man bun and a bathrobe and
he needs to save his daughter. I can barely even
tell you what kind of movie one battle after another
is drama, satire, comedy, some action and violences to all those,
and it's kind of nuts. I'm not the world's hugest
(03:54):
Leo fan, but I really admire his lack of vanity
in becoming this Putts, who's sort of like a cross
between his Rick Dalton character from Once Upon a Time
in Hollywood and the dude from The Big Lebowski. You
probably wouldn't like this guy if you met him. He's mediocre,
he's irritating, but he loves his daughter. And we got
to talk about Sean Penn as Colonel Lockjaw. Whatever you
(04:14):
might think of Sean Penn in the real world, well
I don't care. He's a fantastic heel in this movie,
and it's as much his movie as Leo's. PTA's channeled
his frightening intensity. It really is frightening into something I
think is sure to get an Oscar nomination, and not
a perfunctory one. Nothing about this movie is perfunctory. And
for a movie whose characters have such comic book names
(04:36):
like perfidy of Beverly Hills. In Colonel Lockjaw, it's an
actress whose actual name is Chase Infinity who stands out
is Leo's feisty daughter. So what if her name sounds
like a mid priced sedan. If you missed Moe's interview
with her, you can hear it on the later podcast.
I see that One Battle after Another's got something like
ninety eight percent on Rotten Tomatoes now, and you'd usually
take that with a huge grain of salt, especially after
(04:59):
last year's best lists the Oscars and Anora and Amelia Perez.
But this ninety eight percent isn't the result of a
bunch of pretentious, out of touch hacks. One Battle after
Another is a quirky, idiosyncratic movie that is the work
of a distinctive filmmaker, and an Ai could never crank
out something like it. It might be the kind of
movie critics think they should like, but it's also legit good.
(05:21):
It's also nearly three hours long, but I will watch
it again. When I compare Pta to Kubrick, one part
of that is that movies by both of them are
worth revisiting as time passes when you're at different ages yourself.
This one obviously reflects and comments on stuff going on
now with the iced attention Gulag, as well as a
(05:41):
preposterous secret white supremacist group, But there's lots more going
on than just riffing on current events. In fact, there's
enough going on for different people to find different things
in the movie. But one facet that appealed to me
was if you have to do something about things you
find unjust and intolerable, there's always a cost. There's this
scene with Leo getting load in his bathrobe watching the
(06:01):
nineteen sixty six classic The Battle of Algiers. It's about
Algerians fighting for independence from France, and you realize instantly
he's not that serious of a person. He wouldn't fit
in in that movie. Maybe he doesn't fit in in
this one. But this is where he is and where
his daughter is, and we all have to live and
act where we find ourselves. Character is revealed in how
we respond to terrible things or don't respond, or cheer
(06:24):
the terrible things on and get off on him. Am
I being too opaque here? There's some Doctor Strange love
level humor in this movie speaking of Kubrick, not just
from the loons and the racist you'd expect, but also
the revolutionaries and their insistence on proper procedure, which Leo's
stoner character has serious problems with. It's a little more
dry than shouting. There's no fighting in the war room,
(06:46):
but it's still pretty funny. He's got a huge cast.
Benicio del Toro plays a beer Guzlin karate instructor. Kevin
Tig from the old Emergency TV show pops up in
a small role. The movie's based on a Thomas Pinchon
novel which I haven't read, called Vineland and Inherent Vice
was also from Pinchon as well another one I didn't read.
(07:06):
I don't think one Battle after another is your typical
movie crowd pleaser, but I also don't see how anyone
who loves movies could miss it. I'm still processing it,
but I think we might have another classic on our hands.
This one's going on my best of list, along with
Sinners and some others. There's your on a report, Moe,
are you going to go see this? I'm going to
see it this weekend without a doubt at a boy
probably Sunday. Yeah, be prepared as long as it is.
(07:30):
It did not drag it all for me. I mean
the movie that we talked about last week him. I
was looking at my phone clock about every two or
three minutes. I just wanted the hell out of there.
I was not doing this in this It's just really
a masterful piece of filmmaking with a bunch of stuff
going on. The sound, the music by Johnny Greenwood is
(07:51):
overpowering and really adds to the thing. It's quite an experience. Now,
do we have a couple of minutes left over? No,
you got tom go ahead? Do you in our remaining time?
I think we got to talk about Alien Earth, which
wrapped up this week, Oh God, with its eighth and
I fear not final episode. I have rarely seen a
show that started off so strong as such a worthy
addition to the Alien movies, only to end up making
(08:14):
me feel like I needed a well a pta bath
and yelling at the screen after seven episodes of build
up and letting the Zeno Morph's loose on the Earth.
As the title promises, what we get is a shift
in focus to the handful of young android hybrid people
who may never know if they're real or just copies
of the kids whose consciousnesses were put in the artificial
(08:37):
enhanced bodies. They decided they're going to run the show now,
and it just stops there. To quote John McEnroe.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
You can't be serious, man, You cannot be serious.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
That is exactly how I felt. You saw this, didn't you, mo.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
I saw it, and I feel similarly, if only because,
and this is partly my fault, I went into this
thinking that it was going to be like a limited series,
one season beginning middle, and tell a very specific story,
which is two years before the Nostromo and Alien the
original movie. Instead, we got the beginning of a story
(09:13):
that they're going to drag out probably two or three
seasons if they have their way to tell, a story
which is not going to have anything to do with
the first Alien movie, and it seems like a cash
grap It started off wonderfully, beautifully, accurately, and then it
descended into something that was meandering with no real direction
(09:34):
and definitely no conclusion.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
Yeah it's dull when we agree, but you're exactly right
about that. And I think it almost would have been
better if the show sucked from the start, because it
started off so promising that the letdown was much much stronger.
How can they not.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
See that that ending was going to be trashed in panned.
I mean, how could someone look at those seven episodes
and then say, Okay, we got a code for episode
eight here. We need to do something. We need to
reshoot something, we need to rewrite something.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Oh, it is a galactic code Brown, And I just
I want to know what happened behind the scenes, because
I've rarely been as infuriated without a show ended, except
for maybe the Lost finale.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
It was similar in that regard because it left you think, like,
what's it's over, and the way they set it up,
it will setting itself up for this big moment and clash,
and I don't want to give it away. If you
haven't seen it and you don't get it, you don't
get to see it. And it's almost like they want
to make it like a some cliffhanger for next season
that we don't know that we're going to get and
(10:38):
we may not even care if we do get it.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
I'm okay if the show is euthanized, I don't need
another season. They have lost all my good will and
now I've vented. I'm not going to spoil anything else.
We agree, Damn it damn it, the hell
Speaker 1 (10:51):
You're listening to Later with Moe Kelly on demand from
KFI AM six forty
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