Licorice Pizza

 

Director Paul Thomas Anderson

Bradley Cooper on the set

 

 

 

 

LICORICE PIZZA                B                                                                                                 USA  (133 mi)  2021  ‘Scope d: Paul Thomas Anderson

A nostalgic 1970’s, coming-of-age, love hurts fantasy, from the director previously responsible for eight features, including HARD EIGHT (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), the last three all set in the San Fernando Valley of greater Los Angeles, yet also There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), and Phantom Thread (2017).  While mostly a personal exploration that feels recognizable and even contemporary, this is a return back to life in the Valley of the director’s childhood, where a common theme throughout Anderson’s career has been a myriad of hustlers and con artists, suggesting he’s a man who enjoys a good scam, including gamblers, pornographers, motivational speakers, oilmen, cult leaders, a stoner private eye, and the dark side of Adam Sandler’s comic persona, which may be a prevalent theme of growing up in Los Angeles, where people never age, apparently, but remain stuck in a kind of arrested adolescence, living in a narcissistic world that revolves totally around themselves, where little else matters.  Anderson tends to take a subset of American culture and use it to explore themes of loneliness, alienation, and a disconnection from family, with Magnolia still thought of as his most epic and intimate film, largely influenced by the death of his father, Ernie Anderson, who was a voice artist, with this director being the only one of his children to follow him into the movie business.  In his more recent films, Anderson’s central characters of Doc Sportello and Reynolds Woodcock were narcissistic, center-of-the-universe figures who felt the world revolved around them, with the director surrounding them with the meticulous detail of their working environment, submerging themselves into it with the entirety of their being.  But then there is the sour relationship between Barry and his sisters in Punch-Drunk Love, the destruction of the relationship between Daniel Plainview and his adopted son H.W. in There Will Be Blood, leading to the tragic figure of Daniel, a staggeringly rich oilman, living alone in his massive house with no one but his servants, and there is Freddie Quell in The Master, a traumatized war veteran whose drunken wanderings and search for any human relationship lead him to a charismatic cult leader, with roots back to the misogynistic pick-up artist/motivational speaker of Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia.  All of this takes us back to P.T. Barnum, an American showman, businessman, and politician remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus, who coined the expression, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  The consumer culture of Los Angeles, with its vast advertising and show business culture, suggests there’s an ever-growing business founded upon the principle of wanting to take your money, giving rise to start-up entrepreneurs and fly-by-night schemes.  Every new Anderson film reminds us of that lengthy LA Times profile written by Patrick Goldstein back in 1999, The New New Wave - Los Angeles Times, revealing a brash new Hollywood auteur who had the ear of Francis Ford Coppola and dined with Warren Beatty, who wanted to be seen in public with his famous friends and drawn into the spotlight that is Hollywood while exhibiting complete creative freedom and an exacting level of control over every aspect of the production and release of his films, right down to editing the trailer himself.  Shot on 70mm by Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Bauman, this is lighter and sunnier than previous Anderson pictures, a brightly embellished and absurdly exaggerated remembrance of things past, with long takes, slow dollies, and contemplative pans galore, where movement is a constant in this film, yet what inevitably stands out are those memorable tracking shots of the lead protagonists running, all rooted with Denis Levant in the Léos Carax film Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986), set to David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” Modern Love - Mauvais sang (2:45), recreated by Noah Baumbach in Frances Ha (2012) with Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha [2013] - Dance in the street - YouTube (1:08).

While these protagonists are significantly younger, it nonetheless offers Anderson another glimpse into the myriad of his youth, using real-life stories told to him from childhood friend Gary Goetzman, a hero and mentor of Anderson, now a film and television producer, but he was a child actor who starred in a Lucille Ball film YOURS, MINE AND OURS (1968), appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, and eventually started a waterbed company and a pinball arcade, as depicted in the film, actually delivering a waterbed to the home of Jon Peters, a former Hollywood hairdresser to the stars and rampant womanizer, supposedly the model for the Warren Beatty film SHAMPOO (1975), also a former partner of Barbara Streisand.  The outlandish sequence of events becomes the framework for the film, always exhibiting a masterclass of topical musical selections, as this boy meets girl scenario is based on an improbable romance, which is more of an extended flirtation between a 15-year child actor Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a girl ten years older than him, Alana, Alana Haim of the pop band Haim, a sisters pop rock group, with the Anderson-directed music video preceding the film in theaters.  While the phrase Licorice Pizza is never used in the film, it is named after a former chain of record shops in southern California, basically an excuse for Anderson to visualize a series of anecdotes immersed within that whitewashed urban landscape where minorities don’t exist except on the margins, offering a sharply detailed and satirically motivated, yet wry commentary on growing up fast, creating a netherworld between childhood adolescence and adulthood, a place both groups seem to linger for a prolonged period of time, a place between Hollywood and suburbia, becoming a purgatory of lost dreams and adolescent fantasy.  Let’s call it Encino.  Gary is something of a high school hustler and a schemer, possessed with charisma and charm, always coming across as overly familiar, on a first name basis with everyone he meets, as if he’s known them forever.  Alana, on the other hand, feels stuck, working as a photographer’s assistant, yet bored, having no ambition to aspire to anything else, having never quite found her place in the world, so she’s kind of going through the motions.  When Gary immediately hits on her while waiting in line during high school class picture day, she disparages him as just a kid, yet his go-getter attitude is truly inspiring, swooning interest, as if romantically infatuated, immediately asking her out to dinner.  While they immediately click in wisecracks and satirical comebacks, she actually has fun with the verbal sparring, as the kid more than holds his own, surprising herself by actually showing up, but what does she have to lose?  It’s not like anything better is going on in her life, surrounded by older sisters who pretty much frown upon her anyway, with her actual family playing themselves in the film, while Anderson’s own family, including his four children and their friends, all play bit parts as well.  Why not also include Leonardo DiCaprio’s dad, Tim Conway’s son, and Steven Spielberg’s daughter, and feature the Mikado Restaurant, the first Japanese restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, and the now defunct Tail O’ the Cock restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, just a block west of Coldwater Canyon, a place where stars ate while working at nearby Warner Bros. Studios and CBS Studio Center, but their specialty was serving martinis, including the traditional business meeting three-martini-lunch.  Both Gary and Alana are reckless and impulsive, easily carried away by stupidity, wanting to be somewhere, but really finding themselves nowhere at all, with Gary completely full of himself, thinking the world completely revolves around him, while Alana remains stuck in an existential crisis, wondering why on earth she’s hanging out with a 15-year old kid and his friends.  Yet they have fun together, taking a plane ride to New York where she acts as his chaperone for an appearance on a television talk show, with Lucy Doolittle (Christine Ebersole) doing her best Lucille Ball impression, growing thoroughly exasperated by his prankish behavior, perhaps putting the kibosh on his child acting career, where once you enter puberty, you’re done.    

While there’s a sweet innocence to their growing relationship, never devolving into sex, it’s a passionate affair nonetheless, with Alana helping out on his grandiose, get-rich-quick moneymaking projects, joining in on the genuine enthusiasm, where at least for a short while they feel like they’re actually doing something important, fulfilling an order or providing a service, yet Gary remains something of a goofball, while Alana always remains outside the showbiz world that he thrives in, something he braggishly reminds her about all the time, yet she has the chutzpah to remind him, “You’re not my director,” so there are rough edges that at least suggest to viewers this will never work.  Yet somehow, it does, even if the attraction is largely lopsided at first, buoyed by male hormones, yet there’s no one else in her life filling the void, often leading to moments of petty jealousy and extreme disappointment.  Arguably the most emotional sequence happens on her own, attaching herself to a struggling mayoral campaign of Joel Wachs (Bennie Safdie), where she’s called late at night to meet him in a restaurant, only to discover he’s gay, and that she’s been unceremoniously called upon to escort his gay lover home, Matthew (Joseph Cross), both clearly embarrassed at having to hide who they are, offering him a hug when no words could possibly capture that feeling of deflation.  Still, the couple captures the complicated emotions that come with an untraditional relationship, exploring all the ecstatic highs and devastating lows of young love, with Alana questioning what her future will look like if she continues hanging out with him.  Gary is used to the rigors of being a child star, but discovers he’s in no way prepared for adult responsibilities, while Alana is also put in an uncomfortable position, learning that she hasn’t quite figured out what she wants to do, an age-old dilemma for teenagers and budding adults.  She’s embarrassed to have awkward conversations with her family about her ambivalence regarding having no plans for the future, yet both characters realize that they have much more in common than they initially expected, with both exhibiting a fierce independent streak.  While Gary and Alana are more mature and self-sufficient than most other romance films about young adults, they aren’t sure how to express their feelings for each other, as he is very open and often manically expressive, while she is more reserved and emotionally closed off.  This certainly bears a similarity to Tarantino’s equally nostalgic trip down memory lane in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019), but there’s no historical revisionism going on here, with Anderson creating a warmer, hilariously deadpan comedy filled with absurdist moments that may have more in common with Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998) with its 15-year old protagonist (also born into Hollywood royalty) with romantic aspirations who similarly speaks to adults as if he’s on the same level and has his own harebrained schemes that run amok, or the self-deprecating humor of Submarine (2010), which follows a lonely 15-year-old who makes a checklist of everything he wants to accomplish by the time he graduates high school, where at the top of the list is having his first relationship, which doesn’t exactly go as planned.  And of course, the granddaddy of all nostalgia films is American Graffiti (1973), with a wall-to-wall musical score referencing the 50’s, similarly exploring the music, culture, and social changes that defined young people during this particular period in history.  Although layered in humor, Anderson tells an authentic story about real people, whose hopes, fears, and emotions are genuinely realistic given the circumstances they are in, a skill Anderson shares with one of his contemporaries, Richard Linklater, the unofficial king of hangout movies and maker of Dazed and Confused (1993) and Everybody Wants Some !! (2016), both revealing the hilarious and heartbreaking mistakes that young adults make when left to their own devices with no adult anywhere to be seen.  While Gary and Alana are very naive, they may have more wisdom than any of the adults in the story, revealing something about fading Hollywood movie stars, like the heavily inebriated Sean Penn as an aging William Holden and Tom Waits as filmmaker Mark Robson, or the breakout performance of Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters, embellished with a comic exaggeration, as they cling to their youth with a kind of delusional obsession by continually reliving past glories, apparently lost without them, pathetically viewing them as highlight reels on a continuously repeating cycle, sadly embellishing their stories over cocktails to anyone willing to listen.  Although looking back at a pivotal decade of social change in this country, where the divisive stain of the Vietnam War was still everpresent, the environment Alana faced included the Women’s Liberation Movement in full swing, Roe v. Wade had recently legalized abortion, more women were college educated than any other period in US history, yet only 13.3 per cent of those with a BA degree entered the work force, while the oil crisis was an alarming reminder that economic stability was not certain, which may explain why Alana is queasy about the future, yet Anderson doesn’t really address any of that, which may reveal his limitations as a director, never really addressing social concerns, creating instead an apolitical film that is a reminder of what it feels like to be young.  Despite the wide breadth of years between them, they bring an unbridled enthusiasm to the screen, free to screw up and make mistakes on their own, with a tendency to pull the audience in with the rush and mad exhilaration of a wild ride.

The Dead Don't Die

Director Jim Jarmusch

THE DEAD DON’T DIE                  C+                  

USA  Sweden  (105 mi)  2019 d:  Jim Jarmusch             Official site [United States]

Kind of a cheesy and lightweight comedic genre film by this director that somehow got selected to open the Cannes Film Festival, receiving less than stellar reviews, surviving apparently on the fumes of this director’s reputation, though it has a remarkable all-star cast.  It’s not a particularly good zombie flick, but it distinguishes itself by being reverential to the masters of the genre, where snide and sarcastic references to George Romero’s subversive commentary run throughout the film, but there’s very little actual story.  Instead it’s more of a mood piece that uses apocalyptic zombie references to comment on oversaturated consumer culture, with individuals spending all their time on self-centered social media, where their smartphones are literally attached to their bodies, inseparable, doing all the heavy lifting that their brains used to do, rendering mankind into a brainless state of confusion completely reliant upon their electronic gadgetry to survive, without which they have no significant life to speak of.  This comment on passivity may be the key to the film, as too much of it lends itself to overly dire circumstances, suggesting a certain fatalism (like the current state of our nation), where we begin to resemble the walking dead.  Jarmusch already made a vampire flick, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), a gangster flick, GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI (1999), and a western, Dead Man (1995), so he’s tinkered with genre films before, but this is easily his least effective as it barely scratches the surface.  In typical Jarmusch style, however, the film is so deadpan that the characters themselves barely come alive throughout the film, which may itself be a commentary on the state of our lives, where the high point may be a mysterious conversation that makes mocking, self-reverential humor about the director himself, which is completely out of character from the rest of the film, or even this director’s career, with Bill Murray as himself calling him “a dick” at one point after he feels slighted by what he perceives as unequal treatment, offering behind-the-scenes insight into the personal relationships, which is amusing, but it can’t save this film from its startling deficiencies, where many may find this a complete waste of time.  It does, however, have its own theme song, Sturgill Simpson - The Dead Don't Die [Official Video] - YouTube (3:51), heard on the radio by two cops making their rounds, Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and his partner Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver), where the chief thinks it sounds very familiar, only to be told by his partner that “it’s the theme song,” where everyone in the film feels a connection to the song, as if they’ve all heard it before, giving the film a déjà vu theme.  Set in the tiny Pennsylvania town of Centerville (from Frank Zappa’s 1971 surreal mockumentary 200 MOTELS), population 738, described as “a real nice place” on the sign driving in, while Zappa’s film describes the town as “a real nice place to raise your kids up.”  When it doesn’t get dark at night despite the lateness of the time, with watches and cellphones all going dead, there are signs of an impending apocalypse, though few are capable of anticipating the enormity of the situation, despite calamitous warnings from newscaster Posie Juarez (Rosie Perez) that no one takes seriously, as who really believes in a zombie infestation?

When half-eaten bodies are discovered laying in their own blood on the floor of the diner the next morning, the chief knows something is up, but it takes Ronnie to figure it out for him, as all signs point to zombies, the undead, ghouls.  Meanwhile, a local gas station run by Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones) is also a haven for the occult and all things weird and strange, selling vintage comic books and horror paraphernalia, where he’s also an expert on how to deal with the undead.  It’s surprising that in times of real apocalyptic need, it’s the fringe characters that know how to survive, as the rest are overly predictable conformists who refuse to believe this day is any different than any other.  This film is more about cameo appearances than storyline, where there’s a certain delight in who shows up next.  Rounding out the police crew is the straight-laced Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny), who’s a bit freaked out by what she sees, serving the role of the screamer when the time is right.  While there’s never any real accumulation of suspense, the first zombies we’re introduced to happen to be Iggy Pop and Sara Driver, Jarmusch’s longtime companion rarely ever appearing in his films, not since MYSTERY TRAIN (1989).  They also happen to be caffeine addicts, where we learn zombies return back to what they liked best about the living, mumbling out a desire for “coffee,” with Carol Kane making an appearance as an undead with a thirst for “chardonnay,” or Sturgill Simpson has a hankering for a “guitar,” while others cry out for “Xanax” or “Wi-Fi,” carrying iPhones that are mysteriously charged even though no one else can get a signal.  When a group of unsuspecting kids driving on the road head into town to fill up on gas, Zoe (Selena Gomez), Zach (Luka Sabbat) and Jack (Austin Butler), described by locals as hipsters from the city, they happen to be driving a Pontiac LeMans, the same vehicle featured in Romero’s THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968).  Meanwhile there’s a group of teenagers housed at the Juvenile detention center, Maya Delmont as Stella, Taliyah Whitaker as Olivia, and Jahi Winston as Geronimo, with the running gag being these big beefy security guards continually remove Geronimo from the women’s quarters as a violation of rules, as the three of them are inseparable and continue to hang out together.  Glued to the television news reports, their astute commentary is among the more intelligent in the film, completely unrecognized by anyone else, apparently, though they have the wherewithal to survive in the end when everyone else fails.  The star of the show, however, is none other than Tilda Swinton as Zelda Winston, the funeral home director, who weirdly has her own habits that others find strange (Murray attributes it to her being Scottish), like decorating the corpses in colorful make-up, speaking to them as old friends, like playing with dolls, or always walking in straight lines, or better yet her mysterious samurai sword routine performed before a golden image of Buddha, carrying the sword with her wherever she goes, easily decapitating zombies as she walks down the street unobstructed.  Her fearlessness sets her apart from the rest, easily mingling with the undead, viewing them as little different from the living.       

In a film where irony is like a foreign language, accentuated by the music from Jarmusch’s own band Sqürl, what’s clear is no one has a strategy of what to do while under zombie attack, as handling a few is no problem, but handling a surge of relentlessly attacking living corpses feasting on your flesh is another story altogether, as they tend to overpower even those with the best survival instincts, where the best plan seems to be to stay away from them altogether.  Unlike Ruben Fleischer’s ZOMBIELAND (2009), still the most commercially successful zombie flick of all time (a sequel is coming out in the fall), zombies are not used for target practice, or wiped out in record numbers like playing some demolition derby video game.  Instead they become recognizable figures come back to haunt the living, including some of the living characters seen earlier in the film who return later in the swarms of the undead, where it’s hard not to still think of them as human and among the living, plaguing the consciousness of those that knew them.  This is a new twist on a familiar theme, but Jarmusch doesn’t do much with it.  Instead he uses a social misfit narrator to comment on what we’re seeing, Tom Waits as Hermit Bob, a scruffy outsider resembling Bigfoot who’s been living in the woods for decades, becoming a mythical creature, but also an expert on survival.  Watching it all through binoculars safely tucked away behind the trees, he offers a cryptic condemnation of the modern world, revealing a society that “sold its soul for a Gameboy.”  Jarmusch seems to be doing the same, using Steve Buscemi as Farmer Miller, an acknowledged racist wearing a red Trump MAGA hat that instead says “Make America White Again,” as he’s a loathsome and despicable character that no one likes, getting his just due by the end, completely clueless about the undead, where he sees no difference between the living and the dead, hating them all, making vile comments about trespassers on his property while they start eating him alive.  According to the news reports, all of this was caused by the unrestricted access energy companies had to drive exploratory holes into the earth through polar fracking, actually causing a shift of the Earth’s axis, literally altering the world as we know it, opening a Pandora’s Box of mythological plagues and turmoil suddenly unleashed into the world.  In this version, zombies spill burnt ash instead of blood, and must be decapitated to die, craving the blood and flesh of humans for which they have an unquenchable thirst.  While this may attempt to resemble Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) in terms of a nightmarish doomsday scenario, what’s missing is any element of dread or suspense, or a feeling like zombies are taking over the world.  It never really establishes that kind of momentous impact, feeling more like a bedtime story where it will all be different when we awake, perhaps needing an amusing end coda that never comes, instead leaving viewers sucked into a B-movie end-of-the-world scenario where it all just “ends badly.”