Anticipating Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza

That’s the title. Guessing we’ll have a trailer ASAP.

For context:

Ad for the record store Licorice Pizza, Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1983. On sale for $1 off: @duranduran's 'Rio,' plus hot new albums by David Bowie, Thomas Dolby and Bob Seger. pic.twitter.com/z7bHfCy1mP

— Annie Zaleski (@anniezaleski) September 10, 2021

Oh yeah, I remember them, maaan: heyday was really more the vinyl heyday, the late 60s,70s, early 80s---by mid-80s, video rental got to be more of a profit leader, as noted here, w backstory of LP: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-04-23-fi-1244-story.html

Though of course, after video killed the radio star, it reanimated some of 'em, like Talking Heads, abd Bowie, for a while and birthed new radio-via-video stars--before MTV and VH-1 went all "reality"--so yeah, if this is set in 80s, could still be musically vibrant.

Phone rip of the still-not online trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0L6Go4rWw4

this feels like P.T. Anderson doing Wes Anderson, something a little too cutesy about it all, and I'm really done with "Life On Mars" in movie soundtracks.

Kind of came off to me like a mix of Anderson's own style and a Linklater-esque hangout flick.

Co-sign on "Life On Mars", although perhaps they should have gone extra-meta and used the Streisand version.

If I didn't know it was PTA I would have guessed that Linklater had been watching Coen Bros movies, or vice versa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofnXPwUPENo

Proper trailer.

starring alana haim????? wow

this shit looks amazing

i'm guessing cooper hoffman is philip seymour's son

I actually am really excited about this now~~!!!

Choice of Life on Mars was a downer indeed but trailers are trailers, not going to read too much into one*

* I would be reading loads into it if it excited me.

The two leads looked totally different to me in every scene!

Reaction split along the lines of "Looks like Almost Famous - can't wait!" and "Looks like Almost Famous - how unoriginal!"

The longer this guy's career drags on the more convinced I am that his only two good movies are Hard Eight and The Master. This new one could not be more Not For Me unless it was a puppet musical.

Soon to be a campus/sleepover double feature with Lady Bird.

xp I’m convinced The Master and Hard Eight are his two worst films

The title may be a nod to Diane Kurys' Peppermint Soda (never seen it, but supposedly very good)...Trailer is promising--happy he's not in England 50 years ago--song choice could have been more imaginative.

i remember the phantom thread thread opening with a bunch of ilxors crowing "this looks boring" after watching the trailer :)

The title may be a nod to Diane Kurys' Peppermint Soda

Licorice Pizza was a 70s/early 80s West Coast record store chain.

song choice could have been more imaginative

All Streisand or gtfo...

looking forward to P.T. Anderson's Avenue Q now

The stills look like a gritty reboot of Dazed & Confused.

this can only be objectively good if she leaves him in the end

The Bowie song is doing 95% of the emotional labour in this trailer, still curious about the film.

The Master is incredible, WTF. Did not like The Phantom Thread at the time but my memories of it have softened.

the master is truly awesome

it is, and i am pumped about this new one, it looks fantastic

Now *this* is how you make a trailer. Gets your attention, bits of stuff here and there, but no idea what the plot is and don't feel like anything has been ruined or spoiled.

agree though, xp, that having Life on Mars? as the soundtrack to the trailer helps a lot.

however, imo you have to have some wonderful footage/performances to be able to hang with Life on Mars and not get embarrassed, so i take this as a good sign

Deleted Jonny Greenwood tweet:

Oh it’s a lovely film. Only wrote a couple of cues for it - the score is all 70’s source cues (and all the better for that) - you’re all in for a giant PTA-shaped treat…

feels more like adventureland than dazed and confused to me, but with added tom waits so that's cool

i know that they're both of a similar cloth.

anyway, i'm looking forward to pta's linklater film!

I'm very territorial when it comes to '70s' soundtracks. I'm wildly looking forward to the music here (looks like his first full-out pop movie since Boogie Nights), and I know I'll be excessively critical if it doesn't comport to how I, clemenza, think everything should have been done.

It's funny, this looks much more like Boogie Nights-meets-Dazed and Confused than anything else to me.

I also haven't seen any of his more recent movies, tbh, because I stopped going to the movies for more than a decade.

gonna watch the hell outta this

kinda looks like Bradley Cooper learned to smash car windows from Frank Mackey

This looks like it's probably enjoyable but the trailer was obnoxiously trailery

i love this already GIVE IT TO ME

I guess it's hilarious that Cooper's in the role of Streisand's boyfriend after his turn in A Star is Born

Not to be a buzzkill because it generally looks great and I'm excited to see it, but am I the only one slightly weirded out by 29-year-old Alana Haim's love interest being 17-year-old Cooper Hoffman in Licorice Pizza?

— Bonnie Stiernberg (@aahrealbonsters) September 28, 2021

are people utterly unable to detect subtext anymore?

people don't know how to watch things

They could swap this trailer out for the one for the Sopranos prequel and no one would notice

huh?

I think that was meant to be supporting evidence for Brad's assertion

Oh that makes sense, I read it as a dismissive thing about it being another period piece with an actor's kid.

Awards Blogger/Movie Lefsetz Jeffrey Wells serves up the hot takes re: the casting of Alana Haim

https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2021/09/i-say-again/

FWIW, up until now I didn't know how old she is, but have people suddenly forgotten that actors (particularly those playing young folks) aren't playing their exact ages most of the time. I can certainly buy her playing younger, definitely either side of 20, which is what it looks like she's doing in the film.

a handful of really amazing scenes but I did not like this for probably bad boring reasons (same goes for The Master ha ha, still not seen Phantom Thread)

Scrolling through this thread, I'm reminded that there's some audio of Vin Scully in this.

I only barely finished watching this film. The person I saw it with viscerally hated it, saying afterwards that the leads were completely uncharismatic and uninteresting, that the age difference between them was gross, and that the meandering plot was unbearably bad

I appreciated a lot of the details of the story and the appearances not by celebrities but by obscure relatives of celebrities, as well as the music. I will wait a few years and watch it again. In some ways it almost seems like an updated version of Boogie Nights to me

"They're all shits, aren't they?"

Licorice Pizza as a description of a vinyl record and as a title getting at the essence of 1973 is really great

I think I posted in the "puns you took a long time to get" thread about LP, thinking for the longest time that it was just a hippie, weird combination of words thing, like Strawberry Alarm Clock.

seems you haven't gotten "Strawberry Alarm Clock" yet

jk

Ha!

Finally saw this. Skillfully made but definitely not my cup of fuzzy nostalgia.

I can’t figure out if I actually like this less the more distance I get from it, or if I simply care less about it one way or the other.

This movie was not good.

Very well made, I guess, but the "plot" was incredibly disjointed. The attempt to suddenly raise the stakes through the Bradley Cooper diversion didn't do it for me, at all. Just lurching for drama.

raise the lols, not the stakes

^^^

the film that most captures my high school experience in the 1970s is still Dazed and Confused. It was a more rural and much less sophisticated world than that depicted in Licorice Pizza.

PTA was only just born in 1970 so he does not really know from experience what 1970s high school was like. The movie seems like a fantasy from a kid’s point of view about high schoolers and adults back then

maybe that's what redeems it though, kind of. It still seems very shaggy and unfocused

I don't think this film is making very much of an effort to portray a realistic high school experience either

It's definitely making very much of an effort, that's for sure.

I've decided this is Telegraph Avenue: the Movie.

When I’m pausing and coming back to the movie over multiple days during my first viewing of it is probably not a good sign of where I’d place it in my PTA power rankings. Have no problem that it’s nowhere near grounded but maybe it was a little too far off the ground for me.

I just don’t much care for PTA when he seems focused, at the end of the day

some of the reactions to this — lolita, really? — are so predictably bourgeois… anyway I really enjoyed this review I saw on letterboxd:

https://boxd.it/2pUpCn

― auld gang syne (k3vin k.), Wednesday, January 12, 2022 4:47 PM (nine months ago) bookmarkflaglink

thank you for posting this review, it's really great and very precise about what's going on with the central relationship of the movie.

That is a great review

Phantom Thread is the only one of his movies I still haven’t seen.

Loved LP.

Inherent Vice is the only dud.

*clutches heart* ah you wound me :(

also that review is so good - illustrates so clearly what i loved about it — now i wanna watch the movie again

I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t think PTA has at least three duds

I really liked this film, but Alana carries the overwhelming majority of it. Didn’t think the Gary role was very well acted.

he just smiled and gave me a licorice pizza

I finally saw Hard Eight, leaving Phantom Thread as the only one I haven't seen. Hard Eight is fine, a little slight and way too in thrall to that whole '90s thing of how every flick had to turn needlessly bloody and violent in the final act, but Philip Baker Hall and John C. Reilly save it from being a dud.

Of the ones I've seen I'd probably rank 'em

Boogie Nights
Magnolia
Inherent Vice
Licorice Pizza
There Will Be Blood
Hard Eight
The Master
Punch-Drunk Love

Descending order:

Phantom Thread
The Master
Inherent Vice
Boogie Nights
There Will Be Blood
Hard Eight
Magnolia
Punch-Drunk Love

i watched hard eight pretty recently and its better than my memory of it (which was favorable btw), v direct & affecting imo

I would have loved the hell out of Hard Eight had I seen it back in 1996, but from 2022, I wanted more of the first two thirds - just Hall and Reilly talking and bumping up against Vegas weirdos.

Magnolia is the only one I think is bad.

PTA is 9 for 9, fuiud

i haven’t seen hard eight but i agree w whiney basically

What am I missing in Inherent Vice? I watched it a second time and likes it even less. It just…. wanders. It’s kinda like the Big Lebowski if you drained the humor out of it.

inherent vice is very funny

if josh brolin chewing and swallowing a lit blunt doesn’t make you laugh, idk

inherent vice is a whole vibe & it is glorious

i mean fuck, it’s basically freaked-out chandler + weed x paranoia … what could be more enjoyable

and yeah, it’s funny as hell

It's a weird movie for sure. I like it a lot but I get why people don't. There's so many similar vibe, shaggy dog neo-noirs from the '60s/'70s that leave me cold and I'm still not sure why Inherent Vice worked for me when like, The Long Goodbye didn't

Just watched this, can I say it's simultaneously a good movie and a lousy one?

Good: Alana Haim is spectacular, Hoffmann is convincing enough, I did believe the relationship (though I don't have great hopes that it will last, it's so contingent on the specific points they're both at in their lives), I appreciate the continuing Haim family multiverse (see also "No Body No Crime")
Bad: the plot that moved the characters between emotional checkpoints...boring and way too long. Especially the Hollywood stuff that I've seen before. I wish I could have seen the same characters in a different film.

Ultimately the only PTA I've liked is Inherent Vice (have not seen The Phantom Thread), maybe we're not meant to be.

rewatching, can confirm still great

“Ugh, Danielle I’m eliminating property tax for the elderly and saving the mountains and you’re talking about free Pepsi”

that part in licorice pizza where you hear the todd rundgren radio ad is the closest i've come to experiencing asmr

— boss crude (@bosscrood) December 15, 2022

lol i love that part

the way Alana is reading Jack Holden’s face like an ancient text for ANY clue of what the fuck he’s talking about

For some reason (the title I guess?) I thought this was a movie about the music industry in the 70s; I watched it for about an hour last night thinking "Enough with the waterbed shit, when is s/he going to get a record deal?"