Licorice Pizza - Speculation & General Reactions

[WorldForgot]

from the IMDB trivia on THX

[pynchonikon]

from the IMDB trivia on THX

[Yes]

Swooning over Alana in those interviews. She's so pure, really happy for her.

[PaulElroy35]

This is my new favourite review of letterboxd

★ Watched by londynhall12 20 Nov 2021

I've realized that white people just enjoy watching other white people be weird and call it  cinema.


So much going on here in just one sentence haha

[mickeywolfman]

Swooning over Alana in those interviews. She's so pure, really happy for her.

She hasn't dropped her ear to ear smile since her first interview! Clearly so genuinely excited & grateful. Can only imagine how it feels to be pta's latest "chosen one." Super happy for her

[HACKANUT]

Very slightly spoilery but I appreciate his take.

[Yes]

https://twitter.com/fromthebunkerjr/status/1462296010605035523

[wilberfan]

Very slightly spoilery but I appreciate his take.

It's so disappointing to me that the age-difference thing is apparently going to remain an issue--especially from people who've seen the film.  (I wonder if it's partially generational?  I will be interested to see if there are younger critics that don't have an issue with it, and older critics who do.)

That tension, that dynamic is the heart of this move!   Paul has said in more than one Q&A that the genesis of this film was walking past the local Jr. High and watching a young kid working very hard to ask out a girl obviously older than he was.  He recognized it and filed it away in his mind immediately as being an interesting dynamic to work with one day.  It's so frustrating to me that people can't see that.  It's like rejecting the relationship dynamics in Phantom Thread because it's 'abusive' or 'weird' or something...  That's what these films are interested in exploring--the complexity of people and their behaviors.

This movie would be so much less if it was just two kids of 'appropriate' ages meeting each other and having adventures.

[RudyBlatnoyd]

Very slightly spoilery but I appreciate his take.

It's so disappointing to me that the age-difference thing is apparently going to remain an issue--especially from people who've seen the film.  (I wonder if it's partially generational?  I will be interested to see if there are younger critics that don't have an issue with it, and older critics who do.)

That tension, that dynamic is the heart of this move!   Paul has said in more than one Q&A that the genesis of this film was walking past the local Jr. High and watching a young kid working very hard to ask out a girl obviously older than he was.  He recognized it and filed it away in his mind immediately as being an interesting dynamic to work with one day.  It's so frustrating to me that people can't see that.  It's like rejecting the relationship dynamics in Phantom Thread because it's 'abusive' or 'weird' or something...  That's what these films are interested in exploring--the complexity of people and their behaviors.

This movie would be so much less if it was just two kids of 'appropriate' ages meeting each other and having adventures.

Quite a lot of people seem to struggle with the 'showing the complexity of human behaviour' aspect of art. I was scrolling through Letterboxd reviews of The French Connection recently and there were some negative verdicts where the users commented on how they didn't like the movie simply because they 'couldn't condone the behaviour of Popeye Doyle'. A baffling take on the movie, in my opinion.

[Drenk]

This isn't insanely complex. A twenty five years old indulging the romantic feelings of a teenager is a creep. The whole: but the adult is immature and the teenager acts older than their age is literally the rhetoric and rationalization of every groomer out there. That's full of shit. The way groomers give the impression that kids are participating is also, further in the like, an element of guilt and why most of them don't talk about it.

My feeling is that Paul Thomas Anderson was a coward and didn't actually want to write the real what if? story behind that anecdote because of his misguided idea that no sexual intercourse makes it innocent. Feels like he reversed engineered it because he wanted to cast Alana; I'm sure that if you ask him to write a fiction about Timothée Chalamet flirting on a waterbed with his teenage daughter, he would write a different story, and this isn't just about the genders being reversed...

You can write about anything, and sometimes your depiction is full of shit, so as an outsider everything I read or see about this relationship seems as real and complex as Sam Mendes vision of the First World War.

It's funny, sex is barely a thing in Phantom Thread outside of the « I'm thirsty » scene. The attraction in The Master is psychosexual, it doesn't seem to matter if they're gay or not, it goes beyond their balls. PDL is very...childish? Daniel Plainview doesn't fuck. And in Licorice Pizza, because the relationship would be insanely creepy, it seems like Gary's sexuality will be a thing? Like: This is okay, Gary's horny? Why wouldn't he be? Alana is sexy! But don't fuck! That would be WRONG!!!!!!! SOCIETY IS FORBIDDING US TO FULFIL OUR LOVE!

ANYWAY. Funny that I'll only write two messages about it once I will have seen the movie.

[HACKANUT]

Very slightly spoilery but I appreciate his take.

It's so disappointing to me that the age-difference thing is apparently going to remain an issue--especially from people who've seen the film.  (I wonder if it's partially generational?  I will be interested to see if there are younger critics that don't have an issue with it, and older critics who do.)

That tension, that dynamic is the heart of this move!

To be fair it seems like, despite wrestling with the idea, the reviewer shares your opinion.

[max from fearless]

Photos from @benitotucker at the Licorice Pizza Premiere...Really dope to see Vicky Krieps there as well...

[wilberfan]

A little stab of envy seeing those...  It would have been a perfect happy ending to my Valley Adventure if I could have wrangled an invite.  

(For those who may not recall, that Instagram account belongs to the projectionist for the Cinematheque (among others) and that ran dailies during principal photography.)   

[HACKANUT]

I didn't realize he ran the dailies too. What a lucky job to have, PTA bringing him day-after-day of cool stuff to look at. 

[wilberfan]

Yeah, both Paul and Bauman have mentioned in Q&As that studying the dailies taught them a lot about whether they were on the right track or not.   Jeremy (?) the Editor, mentioned that "...we actually cut negative..." when editing the film, etc.  Truly Old School.