Licorice pizza review

[Westside Steve]

Licorice Pizza

Focus

R.        132 min

 

 

Continuing this issue’s theme of possible best picture nominations keep in mind that everything Paul Thomas Anderson does is going to get some attention, his movies are weird and often brilliant and face it, Ghoulardi is this guy's dad!

As with most of Anderson's films a quick synopsis probably doesn't do it justice but it seems to me that the blend of the mundane and bizarre adds up to a pretty imaginative product. A quick description; that a couple of kids form a relationship that has some high and low points but they seem to find happiness in the final resolution. That could be anything right? Well first let's take a look at the two young people. Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, is Gary Valentine a 15-year-old already washed-up child actor (he had been part of an ensemble cast of a fairly popular show similar to Eight is Enough) who has a seemingly endless array of harebrained get rich quick schemes combined with the self-confidence and charisma to actually pull them off. He is smitten with Alana Kane (Alana Haim) a non-traditional beauty bent on becoming a star. Did I mention she's 25? (Not to worry that relationship becomes less creepy as the film goes along) the film itself is a series of funky snippets which border on the nonsensical. For instance, Gary becomes a budding waterbed entrepreneur add sells one to producer and Barbra Streisand boyfriend Jon Peters. During the delivery and installation, we find out at Peters is actually a lunatic as that section of the film turns into a slapstick sequence centered on the early 70s gas shortage. Seriously. By the way none of this seems do you have any basis in fact. Another sub plot involves Alana becoming enamored with an up-and-coming politician Joel Wachs only to have her hopes shattered by his dark secret. Apparently, there was actually a Joel Wachs who ran for office at that time, no idea if that secret has any truth to it.

In a couple other oddball scenes, a restauranteur, played by Christopher Guest, while not actually understanding any Japanese, speaks to his Japanese wife with a fake Japanese accent. It's silly it's funny and sure to draw the ire of the woke crowd. Those are just a few of the offbeat situations that add up to LICORICE PIZZA. It's one of those films that grows on you; as I gave up the idea that I should take things seriously my letter grade rose from a C- all the way up to a B+.

Besides Guest some other actors who have signed on include Tom Waits, Sean Penn and Leonardo DiCaprio's father. I was a bit worried that the occasional minor sexual overtone  would cross the border into unpleasant but it never really did.  Like most of Anderson's films this one has the offbeat charisma that sets it apart from the pack.

B+

WSS