Licorice Pizza reviewed by Mark Kermode

so let's do licorice pizza this is the new paul thomas anderson film this opens in the uk uh on the first and i mean i'm a huge paul thomas anderson fan as you know i i particularly love punch drunk love which is just i think you know it's just an absolutely wonderful film i i love phantom thread i love boogie nights and the thing about paul thompson's films is that you don't just watch them you kind of experience them at least when they're at their best you you sort of you're completely involved in them and that's kind of how i feel about all his best work and particularly with this this is a a kind of heady evocation of the san fernando valley in the early 70s it has some of that nostalgia of like american graffiti but in a much more sort of strange and edgy way so cooper hoffman who is the son of the late philip seymour hoffman is gary valentine who is a high schooler he's 15 and he he meets uh alana haynes alana alaihim from the you know from from the family band um he meets her because she's there working with somebody who's doing high school photographs and he immediately sort of asks her out and he's he's also and she says well you know how and she says well you know i'm an actor successful child actor i'm also an entrepreneur i've got all these things going on and she says where are your parents while all this is going on and he's well okay fine he's a teenager but he seems to be sort of leading this weird kind of you know half boy half man existence so he then needs a chaperone to go to new york for one of the tv specials that he's doing because he's a child actor all of his child acting career he's coming to an end because he's you know he's he's grown up and so she becomes his chaperone to take him to new york and then she meets his co-star who she then sort of falls for and makes the terrible mistake of bringing the co-star home for a family meal with her family who in the film are played by her family and it all goes very badly wrong so what then happens is and this plot has got a kind of pinballing freewheeling feel to it gary becomes interested in waterbeds and sets up a waterbed business in which alana is his partner his business partners by the fact she keeps insisting that they will never be together and the film is partly inspired by the early life of gary goetzman who then became a tv and film producer and worked with tom hanks and the the story sort of as i said pinballs around i mean actually at one point the pim pinballs are involved in it there's a teenage fair there's stuff happening up in the encino hills there's an encounter with this william holden-esque screen veteran played by sean penn there is there's a political subplot with ben saftey as a mayoral hopeful there is police raids when suddenly people get arrested for apparently no reason all this plays out against the backdrop of the opec oil crisis you know it's the end of the world we're all running out of petrol and then there is this completely unhinged encounter with john peters you know the hairdresser turned producer played by bradley cooper is this absolutely mad wild eyed character who what begins in that scene starts out like a kind of reprise of the alfred molina scene from boogie nights which was always so terrifying and then suddenly out of nowhere turns into wages of fear but in los angeles and then comes back and then you know goes back to the other movie and while all this stuff is happening the thing that makes it work is that you completely believe in the two central characters and you completely believe in the performances and even while all this sort of madness is going on around them and it's the madness of being a teenager it's the madness of being at 20 something it's the madness of the fact that there are these years between them therefore they're not in a relationship but they are kind of they are together as partners in something and he said you know this is the girl i'm going to marry and it's who whoever knows where the where the relationship is going to go other than that they're both involved in this slightly crazed again punch trunk love is in the back of this there's a touch of harold and maud in there in fact there's more than a touch of hell ashby in general particularly in the way that the the music is used there's one lovely bit in which alanis she says she said he says do you think it's weird that i spend my whole life hanging out with gary and his 15 year old friends and the answer is well it's whatever you think it is and i think the thing that's really smart about the film is the way in which that's absolutely true it is whatever you think it is the first time i saw it i was a bit kind of breathless like where's it going where's what's the water beds and the pimp of the thing and the what and that you know and it has that feeling that boogie nights had these kind of strange episodic things all kind of crashing into each other but i realized that what was working was that i completely invested in these two central characters both of whom are kind of they're fish out of water i mean he's you know he's this kind of man boy and she's this sort of girl woman and they what they find in each other is a similar misfit quality in the middle of a world which is crazy which is just completely strange and weird and yet somehow magical and nostalgic and like i said i mean it very much tonally like punch drunk love that same sense of you feel you feel the atmosphere you could you can you can breathe in the air i laughed all the way through i mean i haven't i haven't laughed so much in a paul thomas anderson film in quite a long time because obviously phantom thread is brilliant or the phantom thread has got some really funny moments in it that thing i don't want to hear it because it hurts my ears but i really love this you sent me a thing the other day saying what are the bafta things i should be looking out for and i said licorice pizza i just thought it was great i really really loved it really loved it you

Channel: kermodeandmayo

Views: 173,070

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Id: NS9jhllQdL8

Length: 6min 9sec (369 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 24 2021