Went into this thinking that the discourse online and similar think pieces HAD to be overblown and had to admit, they had good gripes.
If this were almost any other director this film would be such a bigger issue and is that right? Every "cinephile" adores PTA so he gets a pass from people?
Some other thoughts:
- Wanted to leave the film thinking everyone is overhyping Alana Haim, and jokes fucking on me because she slays
- Should a 25 yr old female and 15 yr old male romcom be celebrated?
- Regardless of if they spend the rest of their lives together or not, does that negate the fact that the relationship is being celebrated?
- Should it just be swept under the rug of "welp, this was what the 70s was like"?
- Why does the Asian bit play for laughs?!? Why include it at all when it serves no purpose to the plot and is only a low hanging fruit chuckle from the crowd?
- I love Benny Safdie, but should he have been cast in this role as a closeted individual when there is otherwise so much pressure to accurately cast actors for those roles?
Is this one of the best movies that I've ever seen? No, of course not. But what Anderson has done here is really special. First, I can't remember the last time that I saw a courtship quite like this one. The two leads are absolutely extraordinary. I can't believe that Haim had never really acted before as she is captivating in the role. I think part of the magic that the two of them have together is that while they are dealing with very adult complexities in their relationship there is still a sweetness that wins the day. I don't think this film works without their chemistry.
I think that Alanna's character is an interesting one all on her own. In most scenes she appears to look the same age as Greg but in some scenes (mostly around people older than her) she appears to be made up to look older. In her travels she gets to see different men (regardless of age) in all of their glory - arrogant, womanizing, hustling, etc. While she is often naïve in her own way she gets her own education when it comes to men.
I gave the film a little more credit because of its originality.
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After a string of mature, serious and heavy films, it’s nice to have the old PTA back for a minute. Here we meet the director who isn’t afraid to have fun, the man who loves long tracking shots, the man who knows how to authentically capture the 70s; it’s all in here. The plot’s pretty loose, it’s very much a hangout movie where the main thread focusses on the journey of our two main characters through life. There’s not much of a structure to the rest of it, actors and characters will pop up for certain bits and then get dropped for the rest of the film. None of that matters, because these main characters are so rich and complex, it’s more than enough to carry the film by itself. They’re both toxic in their own right, but also completely understandable and relatable at the same time, and the movie does a great job at not judging anyone in an obvious way. I love the cinematography, the music choices are fresh and tasteful, it’s funny and filled with memorable sequences, it’s subtle and all of the performances are great. Despite this probably being his lightest film on the surface, PTA did not lose his poignant voice as a director here.
8/10
Paul Thomas Anderson managed in this film to invite us to discover the love of a semi-adolescent (and somewhat illegal) couple on a seventies journey of personal discovery and first love. The film shines in terms of its production design, photography and costumes, directed by Florencia Martin, Michael Bauman and Mark Bridges, with whom he had previously worked. All the atmosphere and the lights transport you to another era to live the adventure in which the leading characters enroll. Speaking of leads, what a good choice of actors: Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim take you with their simple faces to the seventies, they have the perfect features to play Gary and Alana. Undoubtedly, the director presented a personal work that invites emotion and perhaps nostalgia, but the script has some elements that seemed unnecessary to me and made the film longer than it should have been, such as the appearance of secondary characters who did not add anything and only distract the plot from its purpose. That's why in the second half of the movie, I started to get distracted and even wait for it to end. It's a nice movie, but not consistent enough to keep the viewer aware of everything that happens until the end.
I can't say I enjoyed 'Licorice Pizza' as much as most, but this flick from Paul Thomas Anderson is a good one.
Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman are entertaining in the lead roles, with Haim particularly standing out - though Philip Seymour Hoffman's kid definitely improves as the film ticks by. There are some amusing roles for more well known faces, my favourite parts of this 2021 release are in fact with one of them - funny stuff with a certain someone (won't spoil who, just in case) who made his film debut in 'Wet Hot American Summer'! Some parts are amiss, mind; e.g. the strange Japanese wives bits.
I did find the dialogue a little pretentious I can't lie, mainly early on as we get to know the characters - once everything is fleshed out and set it's all shipshape, to be fair. The film gets a tad aimless near the end, I'd actually say the pacing is perfectly fine but it does feel as long as it is in terms of the run time - I felt every second of the 130 or so minutes.
All in all, I'd recommend it. Major film buffs will lap it up, evidently.
I really like P.T. Anderson movies, especially Punch-Drunk Love, and Boogie Nights. This one is very much like the latter, and not only because it is set in the 1970s.
There is a lot of story packed in here, but it focuses on our two main characters: first, Gary, then, Alana. The movie takes us on a ride with them individually, then together, repeat.
While I was watching this, I was fully invested, but once the credits rolled, I was hit with the disappointment of "is that it?"
I think the primary issue here is the world Alana, and Gary live in. We get loads of colorful characters that are common in Anderson's films, but they just feel like cogs in a machine: they just show up, then they leave.
Another problem here is the disfunction between Alana, and Gary. This is supposed to be a love story, right? There is the issue of the age difference, but what's worse is how Alana will sometimes become angry out of nowhere, yet it plays more like a plot device: "We need drama here. Act like you have BPD, Alana!" This is all well and good, but I'm supposed to like the characters, right? I'm supposed to want them to end up together, right?
Anyway, the title doesn't make sense. If you're a P.T. Anderson fan, this is a must watch, come on. That being said, I'd never watch it again.
Licorice Pizza is the most Hollywood movie made last year. It was such a non film like i just didn't care about anything that happens because despite the movie being over two hours long it still doesn't even manage to justify its existence. The problematic aspects weren't challenged and didn't add anything to the plot it was boring and the aesthetics weren’t even as interesting as they could have been. Plot points and storylines are introduced, never being touched on further in the film or even effecting the plot in the slightest.
I get the point is trying to be made that Alana is aimless and somewhat of a social climber looking for fame, but nobody seems to react to anything like a normal human being would. She just shows up half naked at her Orthodox Jewish parents house (where her older sisters and her still live with them instead of being married) and he yells a bit but...that's it. The scene just ends.
The plot goes absolutely no where, with the less than mediocre and one-note acting not even helping it along. Felt like a 15 year old wrote it and kept going, "and then this happens" which I thought was going to be the payoff at the very end. I was actually rooting for the leads to breakup and leave their separate ways, so the ending didn't really come off as sweet or emotional to me.
I genuinely feel like I watched a different movie than everyone else because holy shit this film is the epitome of overhyped Oscar-bait with lots of famous actors and relatives of famous actors.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2022-02-21T06:17:17Z
[7.0/10] I love the texture of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies. There are few filmmakers working today who are better at evoking a particular time or place with all the light and color of the cinema. As in the seminal Boogie Nights, Anderson again conjures an image of Southern California in the 1970s that is simultaneously nigh-magical and viscerally real at the same time. To dip into one of his cinematic worlds is a treat in and of itself.
But I don’t really like Gary Valentine. I don’t really like Alanna Kane. And while there’s something to be said for Anderson putting together a slice-of-life collage of a peculiar childhood, I don’t need to see those vignettes hung onto the spine of a dysfunctional romance between an adult and a high schooler. Licorice Pizza is nice to dip into for the craft on display in almost every moment. But it doesn’t just feel shaggy. In places, it feels pointless, and sometimes even unpleasant.
Mainly that comes down to the two main characters and the fact that Anderson and company anchor the movie around a romance I don’t really want to see blossom. I can set aside the age difference for the purposes of cinematic storytelling. Gary and Alana look and act similar in age, so while intellectually there’s a discomfort in the distance of years between them, the look and level of maturity between them seems to put them on the same level psychologically for a work of fiction.
But there’s not much to latch onto in their relationship. Gary Valentine is an operator, a schmoozer, who lures Alana more than he ever seeks an honest emotional connection with her. That’s fine! He’s fifteen! People thrice his age struggle to make honest emotional connections with people. It’s just hard to invest in a relationship founded on that, especially when Valentine calls to mind the practiced preciousness of indie movie teens like Max Fischer in Rushmore without ever having the sort of humbling and turn toward the true and earnest that Max does.
For her part, Alana is a combative jerk, ready to respond with any show of affection or interest with a proclamation of “Idiot!” or some other insult, occasionally accompanied but mild but menacing physical violence. There’s parts of her personality which are endearing -- her sense of being the black sheep and wanting to get out which put a chip on her shoulder -- but her combination of nigh-teasing friendliness paired with frequent, jarring acerbic turns makes her a hard one to warm to.
That’s life though. If there’s a defense for Licorice Pizza in that regard, it’s that as one character says toward the end of the film, “They’re all shits.” It seems meant to remind Alana that she’s met a lot of assholes over the course of the film, but for all his immaturity, Gary’s the only one who’s actually shown care and kindness to her. But it fits as something broader, where all the general jerkery that goes on between Alana and Gary can be chalked up to real people having dysfunctional friendships that are messier than those we normally see on the silver screen.
There’s two problems with that though. The first is that much of the time Licorice Pizza plays like a fantasy, or certainly a very heightened reality. Supposedly the screenplay is based on actual life events of one of Anderson’s friends as a kid. Suffice it to say, the experiences of being a child star flown out to New York for press junkets, opening a waterbed store and pinball palace, running into Hollywood bigwigs who leap flaming pits on motorcycles or threaten bystanders over gas shortages, and helping to manage a mayoral campaign seem downright fantastical, and certainly unrelatable, to those of us apparently unlucky enough not to have grown up in Encino in the 1970s.
The upshot is that there’s a disharmony between the seemingly exaggerated world that Gary and Alana occupy and the “warts and all” friendship the film wants to dramatize between them. It’s hard to take the messiness as real when it’s juxtaposed with a hodgepodge of over-the-top adventures that seem to have little tether to reality or clear cause and effect between them.
The second is that Alana and Gary suck to each other. Okay. They’re young. They’re impulsive. They’re still both works in progress. But their entire M.O. throughout the film is for one to be aloof to the other until the other one makes them jealous, which starts the cycle anew. Even if you can get past the age difference, it never feels like a healthy relationship, or one that could blossom into that, just two kids taunting and poking at each other until they decide the rest of the world they’ve been chasing sucks even more.
The key is supposed to be that when the chips are down, they look out for each other. Gary’s mistakenly arrested for murder (another bizarre interlude in the conveyor belt of disconnected episodes here), and Alana races to the station on foot to help him. Alana falls off the back of a motorcycle during a stunt, and while everyone’s eyes are on the actor who makes the jump, Gary rushes to look after her. Running is a recurring visual motif here, brought back at the end of the picture, when the two young people run in search of one another and exalt when they both finally admit their affections.
These scenes are meant to show that despite the outward prickliness and schmoozing, deep down the two truly care for one another. But it’s not enough to make up for the other ninety percent of the movie where either they play cruel games for one another or, at best, don’t seem like a healthy fit.
That wouldn’t be such a big problem if it weren’t the skeleton the rest of the movie is built around. Take away the romance, and all you have is a bunch of random vignettes that work better as individual snippets rather than part of a larger narrative. Licorice Pizza is a patchwork quilt of these standalone portraits, vaguely united by the common characters involved, but mostly an excuse to stitch together a random assortment of stories from someone’s SoCal youth without any real connective tissue or sense of build or unity between them.
And yet, I’d take many, if not most of them on their own. Anderson knows how to construct a scene, even if the broader compendium of them comes off a little wonky and misshapen. Harriet Sansom Harris nearly steals the show as an eccentric but memorable child talent agent in a one-scene wonder. Tom Waits is as garbled-yet-effervescent as ever as an old director who spurs his actor buddy to perform an impromptu stunt. And Joseph Cross offers the most touching interlude in the film, as the boyfriend of a mayoral candidate torn up over how the clash between political aspirations and their homoseuxality leaves him always having to put his needs to the side. Some of the episodes in the film go a little too over the top, but there’s something there, something worth keeping, in almost all of them.
Occasionally, that comes down to the pure craft of the moment. Anderson and co-cinematographer Michael Bauman are wizards with light. Whether it’s evoking a smoke-filled bar in low light while an old actor tells his tales, brightening the cacophony of colors of 1970s fashion and decor, or lighting Alana in silhouette from a distance, the two of them and their team evoke moods and simply present striking images which take full advantage of the medium.
At the same time, Anderson pulls off still more of his famously well-choreographed longer takes. There’s a regular sense of motion in this film, with extended shots that follow the characters as they walk down one throughway for another, capturing the energy of movement and even chaos as it stalks them around the streets of these Los Angeles neighborhoods. You may not always love the people pounding the pavement, but you will almost always feel like you’re there.
Maybe that's enough. Perhaps without the nostalgia for this time and place, it’s harder to connect with people like Gary and Alana. It’s tough to wonder why Anderosn didn’t just release a series of shorts about a grab bag of experiences in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s, rather than smushing them all together when they don’t fit. It’s more difficult to see why we should root for a romance between two people who don’t seem to know how to be kind to one another, even if they do like each other.
But Licorice Pizza does bring you into their world, the peculiar ecosystem of eccentric Hollywood stars, child entrepreneurs, and luminous dreams that painted block after block and row after row. Wherever Anderson goes, he takes you with him, and that’s worth something, even if you’re not enamored with the fellow passengers he’s selected for the ride.