Not really, Matt.

Quote from: Drenk on March 06, 2022, 07:41:45 AMNot really, Matt.

Sorry youre defending wahlbergs wooden acting but dismissing alanas seems a bit unfair pal

An (occasionally forced) comparison between AMERICAN GRAFFITI and LICORICE PIZZA (just for fun).

from r/paulthomasanderson

Nice video about the love and relationships in his films.

New advice from Blau?

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CasSxnyDKB6/

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There was one take in front of the theater that was staged exactly like the Lena-Barry embrace: As Gary and Alana came together, the foreground suddenly filled with cars passing by.

I remember my huge grin of recognition at the self homage.

I think I may have a vid of that buried deep in my phone somewhere...

Licorice Pizza Gets a Night of Glory at the National Board of Review Gala

All eyes were on Paul Thomas Anderson at Tuesday night's National Board of Review awards gala, where the auteur's summery romance, Licorice Pizza, won best film, best director, and best breakthrough performance for newcomers Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman.

"The life of this [film] was so sweet and pleasurable and exciting, to go to work every day with these actors," Anderson said in his tender best-film speech, accepted alongside producer Sara Murphy. "We all need encouragement. This is wonderful encouragement."

The writer-director, currently favored to win his first Oscar for the Licorice Pizza screenplay, also gave a shout-out to his actors in the crowd, including Bradley Cooper, who was on hand to present Haim and Hoffman with their breakthrough awards. Anderson kept his speech on the shorter, humbler side, praising his collaborators as well as the movie's marketing and awards muscle, right down to "all the people who get us fuckin' cars to get here and have to deal with annoying actors and directors and all that stuff. Publicity people, you really work so hard to put this stuff on."

Anderson's closing speech was a lovely cap on a mostly routine gala night where everyone knew the winners well in advance, taking the tension out of the supping and speechifying. It was attended by winners such as Will Smith and presenters such as Julianne Moore and Chris Rock, the latter of whom was on hand to present Anderson with his first award of the night, best director. Rock was one of the night's rowdy highlights, introducing Anderson with an expletive-laden, five-minute speech in which he roasted the director, his cast, and the National Board of Review itself, injecting the night with a much-needed boost of unpredictable energy.

"I've come here for Paul Thomas Anderson—a person who's never cast me in shit!" Rock exclaimed. "Nothing! Not even to wash his fuckin' car." He continued, saying Licorice Pizza was the best movie he'd seen all year, though he'd only seen a handful of films this season. "It's a good thing I'm not hosting the Oscars this year," cracked the comedian who has in fact hosted the ceremony twice, most recently in 2016.

Rock continued, shouting out the film's cast, including, "What's her name? Alana Haim's in the movie! She's great." He also mentioned young Hoffman, whom he's known for years through his late father, Philip Seymour Hoffman. "Cooper Hoffman, fuckin' nepotism at its fuckin' best! Best, goddamnit," Rock joked as the audience roared with nervous laughter. "My father couldn't get me shit."

He also went on a tangent about costar Sean Penn, who was not in attendance at the gala, as he is currently making a documentary about the war in Ukraine. "Sean fuckin' Penn, who I know has something to do with this war," Rock quipped. "Somehow, some way, I know he's mixed up in it. Sean Penn's being waterboarded as we speak."

Then he finally brought Anderson to the stage. "Thank you very much, everybody. I really appreciate it. Chris Rock, ladies and gentlemen," Anderson said, delivering perhaps his shortest acceptance speech ever and quickly exiting the stage.

The gala, hosted by the Today show's Craig Melvin and held at Cipriani 42nd Street, was an overall speedy affair, clocking in at just under two hours once the speeches started going. (Academy producers are green with envy.) Attendees included winners such as Questlove, Aunjanue Ellis, Ciarán Hinds, and Zazie Beetz (representing the ensemble of The Harder They Fall) and presenters such as Trevor Noah and Spike Lee.

While the NBR awards aren't always bellwethers for Oscar glory, the gala served as a nice pit stop in a stressful awards season, giving winners months in advance to prepare warm, clever speeches and potentially rub elbows with Academy voters. Tuesday night's gala also served as a helpful boost for Licorice Pizza, whose Oscar chances have only grown in the last few months (in spite of accusations that some scenes in the film contain anti-Asian racism). Tuesday night was, if anything, a preview of the energy Anderson might bring to the Oscar stage if the auteur in fact gets his long-awaited gold.

Make the Case: The Unparalleled, Nuanced Writing at the Heart of 'Licorice Pizza'

Manuela Lazic

"Whatever you do, do it carefully," Alma warns Reynolds Woodcock in Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread. Throughout the film, the young woman proves herself to be more confident, more self-assured, and more dangerous than she'd let on in that hotel restaurant where she and the older fashion designer first met. She ends up shaping the narrative of their love story, to the point that she's the one telling it to the audience while Reynolds is yet again sick in bed. She tames him, and creates a cyclical, almost predictable structure for their life together.

The love story in Licorice Pizza is the antidote to Phantom Thread and its toxic yet expertly concocted romance. One of the first things Alana (Alana Haim) tells Gary (Cooper Hoffman) is, "You're never going to remember me." She begins their relationship full of doubt—about both herself and him—and those feelings only occasionally fade away. Yet theirs isn't even a classic tale of first resisting and then succumbing to love; rather, it repeats that structure over and over again, like a video game that takes you back to the beginning every time you fail. In writing Licorice Pizza, PTA lets go of the calculated, fat-free structure with which he approached Phantom Thread or even There Will Be Blood. He embraces his characters' differences fully, without offering either an ever-after solution (as with the scheduled poisoning of Reynolds) or an absolute end (the death and destruction around Daniel Plainview). It is his most romantic film yet; a movie that cleverly reinvents the romantic comedy; a script that more than deserves the nod for Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars.

Many of the scenes that 25-year-old Alana and 15-year-old Gary share are moments of disconnection. Their meet-cute begins with hostility as Alana rejects Gary's advances, and ends with Alana still rolling her eyes, albeit with a smile on her face. PTA doesn't shy away from the discomfort that Alana feels being flirted with by a cocky teenage boy—she finds Gary almost offensive and plain weird. They also seem to approach life very differently: He's highly ambitious and confident about his prospects, while she almost entirely avoids thinking about the future. Yet Gary has decided: He is really, really into Alana, and the way she maintains her integrity and doesn't try to protect his feelings when he continuously hits on her only makes him like her more.

The sea of differences that separate Alana and Gary render their relationship wholly nontraditional. (To repeat: They meet at a high school, where only one of them is enrolled.) And although some argue that opposites attract, the way Gary and Alana bicker and push themselves away from each other doesn't support that claim. Yet what emerges through their clashes is something deeper and more meaningful: Together, in a very messy way, they figure out who they are as individuals. With Gary, the lost young adult Alana finds some agency and discovers that she can put herself out there: She becomes an entrepreneur, reveals her acting talent, successfully backs a truck down a winding hill in Los Angeles, and realizes how dangerous the world of adults can be. Gary, too, becomes a fuller person. As Alana entertains dalliances with other men throughout the movie, Gary is forced to learn about restraint and letting others make their own decisions, something that the hustler and seducer in him has a hard time with. His biggest lesson comes when he stops himself from touching her breast when she's not looking—a scene that PTA writes as a comical yet meaningful moment of suspense through which Gary grows up. In fact, their entire relationship exists in this realm of suspense and uncertainty: They have no clear direction together, they don't know what they are to one another, Alana often finds Gary very annoying, and although he brings the idea of fate into the picture, confusion seems to be the real guiding principle.


PTA has always had a particularly keen eye for historical and cultural context, and in Licorice Pizza, California in the early 1970s is the backbone of the relationship between the two protagonists. The film's excellent soundtrack helps re-create the sense of freedom and softer morals that defined the decade, and on the face of it, it almost feels as though PTA wanted to challenge contemporary political correctness by setting his film in that time and featuring a relationship with an age gap, overt racism, homophobia, and police brutality. Yet his writing makes it clear that he's not simply nostalgic for a past era—something much subtler and more complicated is at play.

The illegality of Alana and Gary's relationship is only the most superficial way in which the different, confusing, and sometimes backward mentality of the time influences the story. Gary's scamming attitude and "song and dance man" act echo more loudly how powerful liberal capitalism and commercial entertainment were at the time—and how they shaped men in particular. He expects everything to be available to him, be it money, accolades, or girls. In that way, he's not too dissimilar from Jerry Frick (John Michael Higgins), the American man opening a Japanese restaurant and using a horribly offensive Japanese accent when addressing his immigrant wives; or from Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), a swaggering, violent buffoon who can't stop talking about how he's dating Barbra Streisand. They all feel entitled and PTA frames their racism, misogyny, and sense of superiority as consequences of that. In contrast, the writer-director signals Alana's difficulty in navigating this sexually liberated yet macho world subtly and overtly. When the school photographer slaps her on her behind after she's met Gary and she barely registers it, PTA isn't trying to make a grand statement about feminism, but rather highlight how casually absurd a woman's experience could be: In the '70s, flirting and affection could so swiftly be succeeded by unrestrained degradation.

In their encounter, Alana and Gary confront their opposing places in society directly. When Alana struggles to sell a waterbed to a customer on the phone, Gary suggests she talk sexier, which she proceeds to do successfully despite her simmering anger toward him. In turn, Gary becomes possessive and annoyed that she can so easily flirt with a customer. He indirectly discovers what misogyny and objectification are and how they can affect him, too. Every big clash that separates them is, in fact, due to their preconceived ideas of what society has told them they should want and deserve. After Gary has a fling with a more age-appropriate girl, Alana gives acting a real chance, both to spite Gary and to satisfy her own shaky ambitions. She also accepts an invite to go out with an older, respected actor she meets at an audition, Jack Holden (Sean Penn), and parades their flirtation in front of Gary, at the restaurant she knows is his second home. In that moment, she's also trying to fit into one of the roles available to ambitious women at the time: that of the ingenue whom older men can project their twisted and self-aggrandizing ideals onto, and whose success is dependent on men. After Holden tells her she reminds him of Grace Kelly, he proceeds to talk at her about his past cinematic glory, not even acknowledging Alana when she asks, "Are these lines or is this real?" Guided by PTA's writing, Haim performs both the role of the mindless sex object and that of the confused and dismissed woman perfectly, switching from one to the other as naturally as many women have learned to do. And while Alana feels the pain of limiting herself to an idea, across the room, Gary is going through his own realization. An actor himself, he usually behaves similarly to Holden when he visits this bar; he probably aspires to be Holden. Yet on this evening, all he can see is how far he's pushed his friend away; how she's not being true to herself because of him.


PTA manages to delicately weave this complex social context with romance because while Alana and Gary's different positions in the world keep driving them apart, what brings them back together can't be reduced to circumstances or ambitions. To put it simply, they remain together because they realize that they care about each other. Calling them soul mates might seem counterintuitive, but the way PTA portrays their connection as based on a kind of care that allows them both to grow gives new meaning to the expression. When Jack Holden rides off on his bike and ignores the fact that he's let Alana fall behind, Gary sprints to her aid, worried only about her safety. In such moments, when they both notice their feelings for each other, PTA makes the world that has so profoundly shaped them fall away. In slow motion, they come together and remain speechless, as though neither they nor PTA have a good word for what they are sharing. What follows these suspended moments is pure glee, in which the director writes the characters going against the current, running against the flow of the crowd or through the city to find each other. We've seen these kinds of romantic chases before, but PTA deepens their meaning by making them about breaking free from not only one's environment, but also from one's preconceived ideas of what they want and need.

In the 2004 romantic comedy Along Came Polly, Ben Stiller plays Reuben, a risk-assessment expert whose presumptions about adult life and relationships are shaken when he meets the wild and freewheeling Polly (Jennifer Aniston)—she's the Gary to his Alana, making him uncomfortable in an often salutary way. Stiller's best friend Sandy, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is an ex–child actor still living off the glory he achieved as a kid, convinced of his own dubious coolness. And yeah, it may be a stretch to imagine Licorice Pizza as a prequel to Along Came Polly and Cooper Hoffman as playing the younger Sandy, but the parallels and differences between the two films are notable and telling in regard to PTA's writing. At the end of Along Came Polly, Reuben learns to loosen up and Polly gets her life more organized—they both shape-shift a little while accepting the other's peculiarities. In Licorice Pizza, after Alana and Gary make up one last time (in the time frame of the film at least), it isn't long before Gary is making her roll her eyes once again. PTA doesn't promise us they will be happy together forever after or that they will even get all that used to each other's annoying tendencies. It seems highly unlikely that either of them will ever fundamentally change. But Alana and Gary do exchange a kiss, a sign that perhaps, somehow, they will always care for each other.

Have we seen this yet?   

Paul Thomas Anderson brings the sophistication of the French New Wave to a tale of L.A. youth in the '70s

I saw the movie a while ago but never posted about it. I didn't see it right away because I wanted to wait until I could find an empty theater and I sorta succeeded (well, there was one other person).

This post is probably going to sound like "PTA fan in denial but trying to be charitable" or something but that's really not it...I did like it. I want to watch it again. I'll do that in the summer, I think. This was supposed to be a summer movie after all, and I think those little external things can help a viewing experience (IV = great summer movie, PT = great winter movie).

It's probably too early to say but right now, just on a gut level, I think I'd be more inclined to re-watch The Master or IV? Unlike every other PTA movie, I didn't walk away with a strong sense of the ideas or qualities that will draw me back to LP for future viewings. I'll figure that out later. I think that's maybe a good thing, or a good sign that he's not on auto pilot (see my next paragraph). My sense of the movie is still percolating, so we'll see what future viewings bring. I also respect that this movie has opened up PTA's career to perspectives that weren't really explored in his older films.

I'm not saying I walked away from it totally unaffected. There were a lot of beautiful visual touches and the same emotionality and lack of bullshit/phoniness that I like in other PTA movies. I respect how oddly paced this movie is too, and how it seems like PTA isn't conceding to anyone's tastes or pandering to his own fan base or to really anybody. There's a lot of integrity in the way the movie was put together.

I was surprised to find myself slightly more impressed by Cooper Hoffman than Alana Haim, mostly because the press and the audience reactions seem to focus mainly on Alana. She is for sure great here and fits with zero awkwardness into PTA's world/style. However, Cooper as Valentine may be the most immediately likeable character in PTA's work since...Reilly or PSH in Magnolia, maybe? Not that likability is so important in a movie but it ended up being an important part of the motor that kept this movie going, like how Freddie's chaotic mindset really keeps the story moving in The Master.

Oh and when Alana crossed the street to meet the guy spying on the campaign office, my first thought was that the guy sorta looked like a younger PTA circa that behind the scenes YouTube video, or maybe a bit like PTA from the Boogie Nights era, and the effect was kind of spooky for a moment or two...but this is almost 100% just my own weird little subjective experience.

I don't post this with any pleasure--more a nod to posterity and the Xixax Archives. There's nothing new here--but on the eve of the Oscars (but after the voting has closed), I suppose it has some historical value. It will be interesting to see how history regards the film--and the controversy.

'Licorice Pizza' made Asians a 'punchline.' And the fallout is bigger than the Oscars [LA Times]

Jen Yamato
March 23, 2022 3:12 PM PT

Paul Thomas Anderson's shaggy '70s coming-of-age dramedy "Licorice Pizza" has garnered more than 125 award season accolades, including a BAFTA screenplay win and three nominations at this weekend's 94th Academy Awards. But the film, which is up for best picture, director and original screenplay Oscars, has also faced accusations of anti-Asian racism due to a pair of scenes some have called harmful at worst and tone deaf at best.

The controversial vignettes unfold early on in Anderson's rambling ode to the San Fernando Valley of his youth. Actor John Michael Higgins, playing Jerry Frick, the real-life owner of the Japanese restaurant the Mikado, speaks to his wife, Mioko (Yumi Mizui) — and later his second wife, Kimiko (Megumi Anjo) — in overly exaggerated Japanese-accented English. Defenders of the film counter that exposing Frick's racism is the point. Its critics say his wives, two of the only nonwhite characters in the film, are robbed of agency and are themselves stereotypes that play into anti-Asian tropes.

Although interpretations of its intent vary, "Licorice Pizza" drew a small but vocal outcry as it rolled out in theaters and prompted articles in the Hollywood Reporter, The Atlantic and NBC. With few exceptions, Anderson and stars Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim — who appear in the scenes as the main characters Gary and Alana, respectively — have largely ignored the controversy while promoting their film. (It likely helps that they have barely been asked about it.)

When Anderson has addressed it, his responses have been viewed as attempts to sidestep any concerns. In February, well into its Oscar campaign and after months of discourse, Indiewire's Eric Kohn asked the filmmaker about complaints over the Frick character.
A man sits in the driver's seat and a woman in the passenger's seat of a car at night

"It's kind of like, 'Huh?' I don't know if it's a 'Huh' with a dot dot dot. It's funny because it's hard for me to relate to," Anderson said. "I don't know. I'm lost when it comes to that. To me, I'm not sure what they — you know, what is the problem? The problem is that he was an idiot saying stupid s—?"

To the suggestion that Frick's racist accent, played to the rafters by Higgins, gives the audience permission to participate in his racism rather than condone it, he answered, " ... that's a possibility. I'm certainly capable of missing the mark, but on the other hand, I guess I'm not sure how to separate what my intentions were from how they landed."

Amid a wave of hate crimes targeting Asians and especially Asian women in the U.S., Anderson's failure to confront the criticism more forthrightly has been particularly deflating. "It's frustrating," says Michelle Sugihara, executive director of the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, which works to advance representations of Asian American and Pacific Islanders in Hollywood, "because it's as if we're invisible and our voices don't matter."

In the first scene in question, Gary watches his mother, Anita (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), present shallow ad copy for the Mikado to Frick and Mioko. Frick "translates" for Mioko in English, using an over-the-top mock Japanese accent; she responds to him in Japanese. Her words are not subtitled, suggesting that Anderson never meant for her to be understood by the other characters and a primarily English-speaking audience.

In the second, Gary mistakes Kimiko for Mioko, suggesting that he can't tell the difference between the two women, an echo of the casualness with which Frick treats his Asian female partners as interchangeable and disposable. But the punchline comes when Alana asks Frick, who is speaking to Kimiko in the same offensive Asian accent, to translate — and he admits that he does not speak Japanese.

Frick's fetishism of Japanese women may be intended as a cringe-inducing joke at his expense, but it falls flat for viewers who identify more with his wives than with Frick or the film's protagonists. For some, the discomfort adds a provocative dimension to Anderson's quasi-nostalgic love letter to the Valley. For others it feels like Anderson playing with explosive ideas but not sticking the landing, or pressing on a bruise with a bit out of step with the rest of the film.

    I have reached my final galaxy brain Licorice Pizza take which is that it's a movie about fetishization: PTA's fetishization of the Jewish valley girls he grew up around, and that's where the Mikado scene with the guy who fetishizes Japanese women fits in
    — Molly Lambert 🦔 (@mollylambert) March 15, 2022

Even with its 91% Rotten Tomatoes score, several critics flagged the Higgins scenes as clunky detours from the film's otherwise sublime charms. "Strenuous comic nonsense," Times critic Justin Chang wrote of the Frick character in his otherwise enthusiastic review.

Writing for Time, Stephanie Zacharek called the scenes "excesses that could have been excised," writing that "Anderson can't resist including not one but two scenes in which John Michael Higgins speaks loud mock Japanese, for alleged laughs — as if retro-mocking white boorishness of the past were in some way a corrective."

Author and critic Walter Chaw put the insult more plainly: "At its worst, you're reminded of how painful casual racism is when it's used as a gag with not a point but a punchline."

The debate comes only a few years after similar criticisms called out Quentin Tarantino's depiction of Bruce Lee in his L.A. valentine "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood." When clips of "Licorice Pizza" went viral recently, Jenn Fang, founder of the Asian American feminist blog Reappropriate, watched social media flood with reactions to the scenes, in which stony expressions and reaction shots offer sparse clues as to Mioko and Kimiko's interior lives.

"This scene is classic in terms of having an Asian American character serve as a plot device that is there to develop a white or non-Asian American character, rather than a character who is a full-fledged person in their own right," said Fang, who has not seen the full film. Since the women's roles exist solely to make a point about Frick, she argues, Anderson's film lands in a long lineage of problematic Hollywood stories.

"Especially in this moment where we're dealing with the one year anniversary of the Atlanta spa shooting and this massive pattern of anti-Asian racial violence that has predominantly targeted Asian American women," said Fang, "it is particularly heartbreaking for this scene to reinforce a long Hollywood history of Asian American women not being the subject of the story, but rather window dressing."

Anderson was not made available for comment for this article. But his head-scratching responses to questions about the scenes have only added fuel to the flame.

Before the Indiewire interview, at the time of the film's limited release last November, Anderson explained to the New York Times' Kyle Buchanan that the scenes rang true to their 1973 setting and "it would be a mistake to tell a period film through the eyes of 2021.

"You can't have a crystal ball, you have to be honest to that time. Not that it wouldn't happen right now, by the way. My mother-in-law's Japanese and my father-in-law is white, so seeing people speak English to her with a Japanese accent is something that happens all the time," Anderson said, citing the stepmother of his wife, Maya Rudolph, Japanese jazz singer Kimiko Kasai. "I don't think they even know they're doing it."

Film critic Ryan Swen, a contributor to Film Comment and the British Film Institute who writes at the website Taipei Mansions, offers a more positive assessment of Anderson's intentions. He argues for reading the scenes, which "walk the finest tightrope," closely for what is unsaid.

Watch Mioko's face as Gary's mom reads her stereotypical presentation out loud and "the expression on her face changes in this very pointed way," said Swen. "I think that's important." Another clue as to what Anderson is attempting comes after the "I don't speak Japanese" punch line, when Alana runs into a white waitress in Japanese garb in the Mikado ladies' room, implying that Frick, and by extension his business practices, are more invested in superficial Orientalist aesthetics than authenticity.

These moments are clearly critiquing Frick, Swen added, but the bigger question is: "How do viewers feel about the film showing people engaging in Asian caricatures in order to critique them?"
A man in a facemask, left, looks on as another man points to something

There is such a thing as being too subtle in depicting racism without also depicting consequences or addressing it elsewhere in a film, argues sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, author of "Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism."

"The argument is that those [offended] are just people who were not reading it right," said Yuen. "But ... there's no context. There's no repercussions. There's no discussion. You don't even understand what the women are saying. They might be saying, 'F— you,' but we don't even understand that. It's too subtle for people to say, 'Oh, well, he's racist and it's terrible, and that's what's happening in this scene.'"

Several Asian American moviegoers have shared experiences of going to see "Licorice Pizza" in a theater and hearing strangers laugh at Frick's antics.

"Picture this: You're watching 'Licorice Pizza.' It's brilliant," tweeted podcaster Dave Chen. "Then, early on, a buffoonish character drops an Asian caricature. The (mostly white) audience laughs. And now, you gotta think about that laughter the rest of the film. Did you picture it? Because it f— sucks."

    The character is certainly depicted as a fool. But did your audience laugh at it? If so: What do you think they were laughing at? SOLELY the guy and how stupid he was?

    Or is it maybe possible that they were laughing at us?

    Anyway: that's what was on my mind.
    — David Chen (@davechensky) November 19, 2021

A 2021 study by CAPE, Gold House and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that Asian and Pacific Islander characters served as a comedic punch line in 43.4% of Hollywood films from 2017 to2020. More than a third of characters (35.2%) fell into stereotypes such as the "Forever Foreigner," "The Lotus Blossom" and the "Dragon Lady."

According to Stop AAPI Hate, between March 2020 and December 2021, a total of 10,905 hate incidents against Asian American and Pacific Islanders were reported, 69.8% of which were directed at women. The majority of reports (66.9%) were incidents of harassment.

In 2020, the year "Licorice Pizza" was filmed, anti-Asian hate crimes in Los Angeles increased by 76%, according to the L.A. County Commission on Human Relations, as well as nationwide, per the FBI. Preliminary data shows that anti-Asian hate crime in major U.S. cities skyrocketed by 260.5% in 2021, according to Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism's director, professor Brian Levin, and an ongoing wave of shocking anti-Asian violence across the country has many in the AAPI community in fear.

A December statement from Media Action Network for Asian Americans, which urged Academy voters and other groups to not nominate the film for awards, slammed the "Licorice Pizza" scenes as existing "simply for cheap laughs." "What people subconsciously get is the behavior, not the intent," a MANAA spokesperson said. "And that subconsciously can lead to a dehumanization of a race."

Given how much content consumed worldwide is created in Hollywood, said Sugihara, the creative industry has an opportunity and a responsibility to more deeply consider its impact. "What we watch on our screens affects how we feel and act, not only about others but about ourselves," said Sugihara.

It's important to distinguish between intention and impact, Sugihara says. "If you're saying it's a scene about racism or essentially a teachable moment within the confines of entertainment, but you still don't unpack it, you can't say 'that's racist' without at least an acknowledgment that this is really the intent."

One Asian American Oscar voter, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the topic, said he did like "Licorice Pizza" and hadn't taken issue with the "cringey" Frick character. The "white buffoon" was a reminder of many instances of exoticizing racism he'd directly experienced himself. This voter had even witnessed one such incident occur recently on the awards circuit to a female filmmaker of color currently nominated for an Oscar.

Higgins "wasn't Mickey Rooney in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's,'" the voter said, comparing it to arguably the most egregious yellowface caricature in Hollywood history.

But seeing how Anderson responded to complaints about the scenes made the voter reconsider supporting the film, and it subsequently dropped way down his Oscar ballot. "PTA," this voter said, "should be more transparent about why he had that character in there."

RIP media literacy

Quoting someone who admits to not having seen the full film. Great journalism!

Quote"This scene is classic in terms of having an Asian American character serve as a plot device that is there to develop a white or non-Asian American character, rather than a character who is a full-fledged person in their own right," said Fang, who has not seen the full film. Since the women's roles exist solely to make a point about Frick, she argues, Anderson's film lands in a long lineage of problematic Hollywood stories.

This is a good point at face value and goes to the whiteness of PTA's films in general. But it's worth noting that the Asian American women are not really being used to enrich Frick's character, just to maximize his buffoonery. (He doesn't occupy enough screen time for a fully-formed character to have been a goal anyway.) In fact the women seemed slightly more real and human than him. The eyerolls are key.

I just don't understand why Momma Valentine's eye-rolls and Gary's snicker in the background has been dismissed by so many? The first wife is given an empathetic close-up and expresses her wishes for a better business model as opposed to the exploited orientalism Frick wants. In the second scene, Frick dismisses Gary's proposition because this is an "American business", and Alana is the only one who shows respect bowing.

And it's also strange (though, understandable) these moments have been examined, but not the anti-Semitism of the talent agent, or the sexism of both the photographer and Sean Penn. Or the repressed sexuality of Joel Wachs. All part of the text!

But hey, it is what it is.