Licorice Pizza - Speculation & General Reactions

[wilberfan]

Yeah, my guy that knows a different guy than your guy would be very surprised if Walken was in it. 

[lawavaca]

I don't know about Walken or anyone else, only Stiller, but I would assume anyone else grouped in with those rumors also won't be in it.

[csage97]

^ I second that. It looks slick, some hybrid of PDL/BN visually. Lots of color, gorgeous lighting, many silhouettes. Probably lacks Scorsese-esque camera moves but almost certainly has ambitious tracking shots.

So yeah it does look somewhat expensive, certainly more than Inherent Vice. But I'm not sure we've been show any scenes you could pinpoint as specifically high-budget.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Right, I forgot about what appear to be some tracking shots and such in the trailer! PTA does love his tracking shots.

[jzakko]

I feel like it's certainly going to have more flair than his 1.85 films, but is otherwise going to be more part of his formalist phase. It's going for some striking images like the hands touching, the silhouetted figures (siphoning gas?) by the big truck, and doesn't have as much restraint as Phantom Thread or even Inherent Vice.

But I don't think from the snippets of those shots it's like Boogie Nights in terms of camera movement, coverage, or blocking. Before the blocking was simple enough but the camera movement would swing all over the place, now the blocking is very sophisticated and the camera movement tries to keep it simple, much more about the movement in the frame.

The LP trailer is filled with that kind of complicated blocking paired with a relatively restrained camera move. The simple push-in on the musical(?) shows such beautiful choreography of all the kids around the bunk beds, then later in the trailer all the children running down the school grounds has the camera tracking alongside them but the chaos of the shot is entirely from how the kids are moving in the frame.

We're only getting 2 sec snippets but when we see it in the whole film I think it'll be a lot closer to his current aesthetic.

[RudyBlatnoyd]

I feel like it's certainly going to have more flair than his 1.85 films, but is otherwise going to be more part of his formalist phase. It's going for some striking images like the hands touching, the silhouetted figures (siphoning gas?) by the big truck, and doesn't have as much restraint as Phantom Thread or even Inherent Vice.

But I don't think from the snippets of those shots it's like Boogie Nights in terms of camera movement, coverage, or blocking. Before the blocking was simple enough but the camera movement would swing all over the place, now the blocking is very sophisticated and the camera movement tries to keep it simple, much more about the movement in the frame.

The LP trailer is filled with that kind of complicated blocking paired with a relatively restrained camera move. The simple push-in on the musical(?) shows such beautiful choreography of all the kids around the bunk beds, then later in the trailer all the children running down the school grounds has the camera tracking alongside them but the chaos of the shot is entirely from how the kids are moving in the frame.

We're only getting 2 sec snippets but when we see it in the whole film I think it'll be a lot closer to his current aesthetic.

Agreed. Does anybody really want PTA to try to go back and make a film like Boogie Nights again? It's like wanting Radiohead to redo The Bends. It ain't happening and it would be a bad idea.

[wilberfan]

Does anybody really want PTA to try to go back and make a film like Boogie Nights again?

[edit]  I have trouble understanding why someone wouldn't,  to be honest. The nostalgia, his deep affection for the characters.  The thrill and energy of youthful protagonists ((including the camera--who was a major character in Boogie), the gut punch of emotions when they thrive and/or fail.  If LP has those qualities, I don't see how it can lose--especially if there's an element of romance.   I mean, c'mon!

[RudyBlatnoyd]

Does anybody really want PTA to try to go back and make a film like Boogie Nights again?

[edit]  I have trouble understanding why someone wouldn't,  to be honest. The nostalgia, his deep affection for the characters.  The thrill and energy of youthful protagonists ((including the camera--who was a major character in Boogie), the gut punch of emotions when they thrive and/or fail.  If LP has those qualities, I don't see how it can lose--especially if there's an element of romance.   I mean, c'mon!

Fair enough. I'm expecting something rather more melancholy though. Inherent Vice looked 'zany' in the trailer, too.

[wilberfan]

We might be all well-served if we temper our expectations for LP.   I need to start reminding myself to do that.

In fact, help me remember to do that when the official trailer hits the Interwebs.

[Drenk]

I think it will be better than Boogie Nights.

[MaurizioBunkus]

[edit]  I have trouble understanding why someone wouldn't,  to be honest. The nostalgia, his deep affection for the characters.  The thrill and energy of youthful protagonists ((including the camera--who was a major character in Boogie), the gut punch of emotions when they thrive and/or fail.  If LP has those qualities, I don't see how it can lose--especially if there's an element of romance.   I mean, c'mon!

Fair enough. I'm expecting something rather more melancholy though. Inherent Vice looked 'zany' in the trailer, too.

This is bang-on. I don't really think we can confidently gauge what a PTA film is going to be paced like based on a trailer. Not only Inherent Vice, but even some trailers for The Master gave the feeling of a more frenetic movie than what we finally got.

[wilberfan]

GQ:

The Trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's New Film Licorice Pizza Gives Boogie Nights Vibes

For the past couple of weeks, the trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie––long known by its working title, Soggy Bottom, now named Licorice Pizza after the chain of record stores that once dotted Los Angeles and Anderson's native San Fernando Valley––has been playing ahead of screenings at repertory houses in L.A., London, and Chicago. For the time being it is nearly impossible to see online; cam rips are put up and taken down almost immediately in a furious game of DMCA whack-a-mole. Last night I went to see it at the New Beverly, the one-time porn theatre that became one of L.A.'s leading revival houses and, in 2007, was purchased by Anderson's longtime friend Quentin Tarantino. Before the feature presentation, a theatre employee warned of lifetime bans––and, let's call it, less conventional reprisal––should anyone be caught surreptitiously filming the coming attractions.

What we're able to see of Licorice Pizza is almost painfully nostalgic, a Valley of the 1970s finished in warm tones and soundtracked by David Bowie's "Life On Mars?" While the cast is said to include Tom Waits, Sean Penn, John C. Reilly, Christopher Walken, and Benny Safdie as the longtime L.A. city councilman Joel Sachs, the trailer focuses almost entirely on the two stars: Alana Haim, the youngest of the three Haim sisters, and Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his first screen credit. Hoffman's teenaged character looks to be an aspiring actor in a blossoming maybe-romance with Haim's character; knees touch under tables, fingers creep toward one another, summers seem to stretch beyond the horizon line. The trailer played before Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a movie that believes the future can only bring us sorrow.

It would be silly to draw too many conclusions about the full film based on two minutes of footage, but as a finished piece, the trailer reflects Anderson's mastery of tone––specifically his ability to fuck up familiar story beats while enhancing, instead of undercutting, their emotional effect. See Hoffman's character declaring his everlasting love to Haim's, who calls it "gross" in a way that implies it isn't, or her slapping him when he asks to touch her breasts, which she has exposed to him. Every moment is clumsy but overcharged. It also captures one of the key gauntlets teenagers run through: figuring out which adults are cool and which are merely "cool," the latter embodied in Bradley Cooper's depiction of the film producer Jon Peters, who gravely drills Hoffman in the pronunciation of his girlfriend Barbara Streisand's surname.

Several of Anderson's more recent films take place at the center of bodies that are otherwise opaque: a fashion house that is falling out of vogue, the mansion of a decaying oil baron, Scientology. But Licorice Pizza seems to recall his breakthrough feature, 1997's Boogie Nights, in that it follows those on the fringes of a glamorous industry, who claw at one another for a taste of what they have long imagined. There is no better setting for this than the Valley of Anderson's youth. That part of the County––flat, industrial, impossibly hot––is in fact the image many people have of L.A. proper, its strip mall parking lots and dive bars having become the platonic ideal of those things because it's cheaper to shoot in Encino than in West Hollywood. It can look, especially to outsiders, more like the city than the city itself, but it is unmistakably cordoned off by the freeways, the Hills, the money. The Licorice Pizza trailer blurs the urgency of young love into the desperate feeling of being so close to L.A., and yet unable to reach out and grab it.

[jackhorner]

on YouTube!!!!!!!

Admin edit: the mod team has collectively decided not to allow direct linking or embedding of the bootlegged trailer here, in no small part to avoid potential legal ramifications. Suffice to say, if anyone who hasn’t seen it yet wants to see it, it can be found out there. Just not here. Sorry about that.

all good admin I get it!

[jviness02]

I love Boogie Nights and Magnolia, but I prefer his new style. We've seen plenty of Scorsese and Altman imitations that suck, so PTA definitely brings something to the table with those films that give them their richness, but I've never watched those films thinking "no one else could do this". I thought that about every film post-Magnolia. I'd rather get work that only he can deliver.

That's just one man's opinion.

[jzakko]

We've seen plenty of Scorsese and Altman imitations that suck, so PTA definitely brings something to the table with those films that give them their richness, but I've never watched those films thinking "no one else could do this". I thought that about every film post-Magnolia.

Yes, totally. Starting with PDL is when he became a truly singular filmmaker working on his own wavelength.

[Something Spanish]

Safe to say PTA cut the trailer himself?