![]() ![]() Gary, based on former child actor turned Academy Award winning Producer, Gary Goetzman, has had a promising acting career, currently in a film, clearly based on Yours, Mine And Ours, in which the real Gary appeared. ![]() The age difference poses a problem for sure, but Anderson keeps things chaste throughout while still allowing this beautiful depth of feeling to materialize. She refuses, but you know she'll show up anyhow, perhaps simply to toy with him, feel some validation, or maybe, just maybe, meet her soulmate. Although this fifteen year old falls instantly in love with her, Alana swats him away like a fly, but he's made an impression nonetheless with his intense gaze and assuredness. Soon, Alana happens upon Gary (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman). My old friends came flooding back along with the Debra Wingers and Holly Hunters of cinema. I missed people like this in life and on screen, those three dimensional characters with quirks, faults, and outspokenness fueled by equal parts elation and outrage. It's 1973 and twenty-five year old Alana has no time for these San Fernando Valley High School idiots. She's working as a photographer's assistant helping the students get prepared for their class pictures. Alana (Alana Haim from the sisterly pop trio Haim) struts impatiently across a school yard looking for anyone who needs to use her mirror. Paul Thomas Anderson's new film, Licorice Pizza, opens on such a person. I was always jealous of how put together they were with their Izod shirts, corduroys, and suede Wallabee shoes and the way they entered a room as if they owned the place. They had such supreme confidence, mercurial tempers, and smarts. Uncanny Valley - Film Review: Licorice Pizza ★★★★1/2Īs a young, Jewish boy growing up in small town Ohio, I was in awe of the B'nai B'rith girls such as Sue Malkoff, Jodi Raven and Sharon Marks. ![]() Licorice Pizza left me cold and unfulfilled. Too many of the other misadventures feel like table anecdotes brought to life with technical pizazz and minimal accessibility. The best part of the movie, by far, is the segment where Bradley Cooper plays a lascivious and self-absorbed hairdresser-turned-producer John Peters. He's trying so delicately to recreate a feeling of time and place of early 1970s Los Angeles, but the movie doesn't succeed in answering why anyone else should really care about this personal PTA slice of nostalgia. ![]() I don't see the larger thesis or theme in many of Anderson's small asides. They're just kind of annoying and maybe that's the point about looking back. Hoffman's character, based in part on Tom Hanks' childhood friend and producing partner Gary Goetzman, is like a human puppy dog, so overwhelming and sunny and anxious to be liked, but I can't see any more depth to him or her. She's petulant, needling, prone to jealousy but also clearly likes the attention but doesn't know how far to test it. I found Haim's character to be generally unlikable and, worse, uninteresting. He's crushing on her, she's flattered but says it's not appropriate, and over two hours we watch a series of meandering episodic adventures that test their will-they-won't-they determination. Alana Haim plays Alana, an under-achieving 25-year-old looking to better define herself, and Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who appeared in five prior PTA movies, plays an over-achieving 15-year-old that is in a hurry to grow up and conquer the adult world. I'm not certain I needed or wanted to watch either of our lead characters navigate the curious bounds of their possible romantic entanglement. hangout movie, but the axiom of hangout movies is that they only really work if you actually want to hang out with the participants onscreen. It's writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's (Phantom Thread, Boogie Nights) nostalgic L.A. It took me many months but I've finally watched the last of the 2021 Best Picture nominees, and now I can safely say, I just don't understand all the love for Licorice Pizza. ![]()
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