Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021) Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, Benny Safdie
Wikipedia:
Licorice Pizza is a 2021 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who also serves as one of the film's producers and cinematographers. The film stars Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in their film debuts, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, and Benny Safdie.
Richard Brody, in The New York Times, liked this a lot:
Despite the two young protagonists’ Zelig-like proximity to the real-world celebrities and eminences of the time, Anderson never loses the finely woven thread of Alana and Gary’s breathless, rapturous, turbulent, achingly vulnerable relationship, which, in turn, is what holds the wild array of incidents together with an incontrovertible emotional logic. In turn, it’s the spontaneous, ingenuous, charismatic, high-intensity yet gracefully poised performances by Haim and Hoffman—in poignant contrast to the calculated gloss of the movie’s venerable stars, both real-life and fictitious—that bring Anderson’s audacious methods and ideas overflowingly to life. In debunking the myths of classic Hollywood and its stars, Anderson reinvents a mode of authentic stardom. Haim brings a constant and instant focus even to riskily inchoate emotions, and Hoffman lends his driven energumen a lambent glow of innocence. Both inhabit the screen with a sympathetic responsiveness and a rare immediacy. Their incarnation of the ardors and audacities of youth is among the marvels of recent movies, and with them Anderson rediscovers something greater than his own youth—the youth of the cinema itself.
Christy Lemire also liked it:
Paul Thomas Anderson’s golden, shimmering vision of the 1970s San Fernando Valley in Licorice Pizza is so dreamy, so full of possibility, it’s as if it couldn’t actually have existed. With its lengthy, magic-hour walk-and-talks and its sense of adventure around every corner and down every block, it’s a place where anything could happen as day turns to night. Roger Ebert.
Also Mark Kermode:
... this is Gary and Alana’s movie, and it’s them that we will remember: his open-faced smile; her left-handed scowl; the giddy way they run through streets together. “How did we survive?” asks Gary after one particularly reckless episode, a question most of us have surely asked ourselves. Like all the best evocations of times past, Licorice Pizza has no answers – only an enraptured sense of awe that makes Anderson’s joyous film feel like a very personal memory. The Guardian.
I didn't:
I think the reason that this film exists is that Philip Seymour Hoffman died in 2014 and that Anderson had a thing about him and wanted to make a film starring his son Cooper (b. 2003). Why else would there be a film starring a slightly overweight unattractive adolescent (17-18 but unconvincingly playing 15) opposite an even more unattractive 25-yr-old romantic interest (Alana Haim, b. 1991, 30, playing 25 - she looks more like 40 in one scene)? My point is: if you want to make some random dumb kid look interesting, you could try putting him in every scene in a film with a chick who looks like one of the witches from Macbeth (but is less smart).
IMDb page for Licorice Pizza.
Wikipedia page for Licorice Pizza. Excerpts:
Rotten Tomatoes' critical consensus reads, "Licorice Pizza finds Paul Thomas Anderson shifting into a surprisingly comfortable gear – and getting potentially star-making performances out of his fresh-faced leads." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 90 out of 100 based on 55 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by PostTrak gave the film an 87% positive score, with 73% saying they would definitely recommend it.
The film generated controversy around the ten-year age gap between the main characters, and for its inclusion of two scenes in which the character Jerry uses a demeaning mock Asian accent when speaking to his Japanese wives. Director Anderson defended the scenes as being contemporaneous and accurate portrayals of the movie's time period. The group Media Action Network for Asian Americans, however, called for an awards boycott for the movie due to the decision to include these two scenes without any pushback from the characters.
IMDb page for P.T. Anderson.
Wikipedia page for Anderson.
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 6 February, 2022 | Now: 5 March, 2022