Licorice Pizza (2021)

After a titanic and prestige showing in 2007’s There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson has somewhat returned to form – his particular brand of oddball character pieces driven by episodic plot happenings that seem to follow dream logic more than strict realism. In this way, Anderson has become one of the directors in whose brain I’d most like to rent a room, curl up with a blanket, and snuggle in for a few hours. His latest, Licorice Pizza, is precisely one such cozy dream, a meandering fantasia of late-70s Los Angeles that comfortably finds its groove, if not its purpose.

Child actor and high school entrepreneur Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) falls head over heels with Alana Kane (Alana Haim), a photographer’s assistant nearly twice his age. While Gary tries to convince Alana that the age gap doesn’t matter, he embroils her in his myriad schemes, which include selling waterbeds, opening a “pinball palace,” and jump-starting Alana’s own budding Hollywood career. Her showbiz path takes her into the orbit of a gin-soaked legend (Sean Penn) and his director (Tom Waits), mayoral candidate Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), and blustery film producer Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper).

 

The plot of Licorice Pizza, such as it is, meanders between the twin itinerant protagonists and their respective trials to find meaning and purpose. While Gary Valentine moves from hustle to hustle, Alana works fame like the gig economy, first modeling then auditioning before moving into politics. This episodic structure makes Licorice Pizza feel a bit plotless, but in the compelling and oddly comforting vibe of other recent Anderson films like The Master and Inherent Vice. Perhaps, if Alana and Gary are not the protagonists of the film, Los Angeles is; not unlike the underrated Shane Black film The Nice Guys, LA is here a place of mystery, but it’s an ineffable, unknowable mystery rather than a mystery to be solved.

 

Licorice Pizza is not quite a bildungsroman, insofar as its protagonists don’t seem to have changed all that much by the end of the story. But it’s a film more about a journey than a destination; it’s a love story where the love is peculiar, unlikely, and largely unilateral. At 15, Gary is in love with Alana, who finds his romantic fixation amusing but never reciprocates his frequent professions of love, recognizing them for the immature infatuations they are. This is not a story of predators and prey, but rather one of arrested development; despite being 25, Alana is the youngest and least mature of her sisters, with little in the way of career or romantic prospects until she finds both, such as they are, in Gary. It’s to the credit of the performers that this dynamic never feels creepy. Instead, it’s understandable, human, and perhaps even a little sweet, despite being completely impossible and inherently ridiculous.

 

Indeed, Anderson invents a world without imposing a moral judgment on it, leaving it to the audience to discern that, yes, some of these people are outlandish and absurd. John Michael Higgins, for example, plays a restaurateur fetishizing Japanese culture to the point where the joke is on him, not his Japanese bride(s). Anderson trusts we can figure it out, that the humor is in Higgins’s failure to recognize the irony of his inability to speak Japanese. The others in the film are all in a sense using Alana, projecting their own desires onto her. It’d be spoiling to say what any of those desires are, but never is the tableau clearer than when Bradley Cooper quite literally storms into the picture (leading a woman a few rows behind me to intone, in a momentous whisper, “This is the best part”). As real-life producer and Streisand beau Jon Peters, Cooper is sound and fury signifying only self-aggrandizement, building himself up by threatening the life of a mattress delivery boy while making the world’s most shameless pass at his driver. It’s not hard to imagine that this Peters is the same producer who would famously demand a giant spider in Kevin Smith’s aborted Superman screenplay.

 

There are moments of genuine pathos in Licorice Pizza, as when Alana learns why her mayoral candidate boss has asked her to dinner, that show Anderson is truly in command of a narrative that seems otherwise wandering. While I’m still not sure anyone can recount the plot of Inherent Vice (thanks in no small part to the deliberate illogic of its author, Thomas Pynchon), Anderson takes the same shambolic narrative anarchy but finds his own kind of odd purpose in it. What Licorice Pizza is “saying” is anyone’s guess, but we can feel what it’s doing, even if we can’t rationalize it. Anderson takes the framework of a Hollywood love story, builds his own chassis around it, and guides the plane in for a landing on a runway that looks like “happily ever after” but might not actually be.

 

Licorice Pizza is rated R for “language, sexual material and some drug use.” Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, and Benny Safdie.

Gangster Squad (2013)

Gangster Squad, a movie about assembling a team for a top-secret mission, is a film whose story resembles its own structure, in that the film is as much an assembly of component parts from other prominent films in the genre.  Whether this collage method hurts the film is up for debate (though I contend that the comparisons do violence to the film), but the final product before us is a stylish and reliably enjoyable experience.

Los Angeles, 1949, is the playground of mobster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), who lives beyond the reach of the corrupt law force until Chief Bill Parker (Nick Nolte) establishes an extralegal “gangster squad” to take down Cohen without the sanction of their badges.  Among others, “Sarge” John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) recruits smooth-talking Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) to join the squad, unaware that Wooters has been romancing Cohen’s girl Grace (Emma Stone).

When I initially described the movie as a cross between the plot of The Untouchables and the look of L.A. Confidential, I tried to do so without derision, recognizing almost immediately that Gangster Squad is not of the same A-list caliber as those two instant classics.  In fact, my chief complaint about Gangster Squad – that it doesn’t do anything particularly new with the genre – stems from my familiarity with the other two films to the point of absorption; knowing The Untouchables as well as I do made the similarities apparent to the point of prediction and distraction.

What Gangster Squad does not do, then, is break new ground.  But does it have to?  On one level, probably, because who wants to see remake after remake, but on the other hand my proclivity for writing favorable reviews stems from my chief intention when going to the movies:  I want to have a good time.  And Gangster Squad allowed me to do just that.  I admit the film isn’t perfect – the Manichean worldview with accompanying narration is a bit heavyhanded, and we never really find out Grace’s angle – but what works in the film is the atmosphere of old Hollywood mixed with the contemporary aesthetic and sense of humor.

Brolin and Gosling turn in reliably engaging performances, and the other members of the squad – though likely not authentic – possess a modern sensibility and delightful self-awareness, particularly Robert Patrick’s Wild West throwback.  The biggest surprise is not Stone finally playing a postwar vamp (a type, incidentally, into which she fits quite well) but rather Penn’s performance as Cohen.  Obscured behind Dick Tracy makeup, Penn never plays too cool for the room nor hides behind his Oscar cred (or otherwise irksome off-screen persona); instead, he gets right into the spirit of the movie and embraces the hammy characterization required of his villainous role.  While Gosling is clearly a rising star (if he’s not there already), it’s hard not to say that Penn steals the show even more than De Niro did in The Untouchables.

Gangster Squad exists somewhere in the gray zone between modern mobster movie (i.e., The Departed) and retro gangster chic (i.e., Boardwalk Empire).  But the blending of the two modes works for the film because of how unapologetically stylized it is; nothing seems accidental, and the film seems aware of its own indulgences, particularly the video game-esque shootout sequences.  I’m usually opposed to movies that play the “video game card,” but Gangster Squad knows itself well enough to ramp up the visuals in order to compensate for that potential distance from the audience.

It isn’t an instant classic, to be sure, but I suspect that the people who will be drawn to Gangster Squad are exactly the kinds of people for whom the film was made – those who will find themselves entertained by the time the credits roll.  Count me among them.

Gangster Squad is rated R “for strong violence and language.”  The film is surprisingly bloody, almost Tarantino-lite, and the language is standard “R” fare, with a few implied sexual encounters for good measure.

On Thursday, our road to the Oscars continues with Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty.  Stay tuned!

Monday at the Movies - March 5, 2012

Welcome to Week Ten of “Monday at the Movies.” While I had never intended this series to be themed each week, it seems that it’s worked out that way so far. And so in that spirit, here are “Movies You Might Have to Watch in School!”

Persepolis (2007) – Adapted from Marjane Satrapi’s much-loved graphic novel, Persepolis is the memoiristic story of Marji’s coming of age during the events of the Iranian Revolution. The film captures the tone of the original perfectly, blending hilarious humor with profoundly moving pathos, and the unique visual style of the comic is not lost in translation to motion. There are a few interpolations – several color sequences and a delightful scene in which Grandma and Marji go to the movies to see Godzilla – which enhance the visual experience. While I haven’t watched the French language original, I can vouch for the English language track, featuring (among others) Chiara Mastroianni as Marji, Sean Penn as her father, Gena Rowlands as the wise yet witty Grandma, and Iggy Pop as the brave and heroic Uncle Anoosh. While there are moments when Penn seems to be phoning it in, Rowlands and Iggy Pop are perfect choices, as is Amethyste Frezignac, who voices young Marji with just the right amount of joie de vivre. The story is deeply affecting, nuanced without reducing the story to an endorsement or rejection of the Revolution, and it hits the audience on several important emotional levels – humor, tragedy, sympathy, love. The film lost “Best Animated Feature” to Ratatouille, but in this case I’m not convinced that Pixar made the better film that year (as much as I love Ratatouille and the idea of a red-headed protagonist).

The Tempest (2010) – If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s Shakespeare at the movies, and this film had enough to lure my butt to a seat: director Julie Taymor at the helm (I loved Across the Universe and especially her other Shakespeare flick, Titus, with Anthony Hopkins), striking visuals, great source material, and an intriguing gender reversal with Helen Mirren as Prospera in place of old wizard Prospero. I love Titus and could watch it many times over, but I’m less impressed with The Tempest; it’s a perfectly adequate adaptation, but it seems to rely too much on the Prospera gimmick without doing anything inventive with the rest of the material – especially when it comes to the setting, which is lifeless and uninspiring. It’s a classic case of “nothing wrong” – even Russell Brand as one of the drunken clowns (with Alfred Molina) isn’t irritating or offensive. Perhaps worse, the film doesn’t weigh in at all on the Caliban controversy, arguably the current focal point of the play’s cultural significance. While I admit to being bored to tears with postcolonial readings of this play in particular (there seem to be other things going on, as well), the fact that Taymor almost ignores Caliban, especially when Djimon Hounsou is doing such fascinating work. But she handles the comic scenes well, with sufficient clowning in abundance, although the effect is that one wishes more for a “Stefano and Trinculo” sitcom than for the rest of this adaptation.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

The Game (1997)

It's a good thing director David Fincher is so articulate, because I can't think of a better way to describe his 1997 thriller The Game other than "a fashionable, good-looking Scrooge, lured into a Mission: Impossible situation with a steroid shot in the thigh from The Sting."

Michael Douglas is Nicholas Van Orton, an investment banker reminiscent of Douglas's turn as Gordon Gekko in Stone's Wall Street. A visit from Nicholas's brother Conrad (Sean Penn) sets into motion Nicholas's involvement in a game perpetrated by the shady and mysterious business Consumer Recreation Services. The game begins innocuously enough, but soon Nicholas finds himself fighting for everything - literally, everything - he has in order to win the game.

Kudos to Fincher - director of cult favorites Se7en and Fight Club - for keeping the film moving without ever really giving the audience anything concrete to latch onto. The screenplay is extra-strong here, its postponed questions facilitating the bait-and-switch Fincher deftly pulls on the audience. For two hours, the film careens from plot twist to surprise misdirection, without ever really revealing its hand until literally the last scene of the film. Fincher never gives the audience more than an inch in this one, keepng me on the edge of my seat while asking, "Okay, he's in on it? No, wait, she is? Is he? Whose side is she on?" Like Nicholas, the audience is kept in the dark for most of the film, and so the film is a great deal of fun as far as unpredictability goes.

Where performances are concerned, Douglas is superb as always. Having proved himself adept at thrillers in both Fatal Attraction and Don't Say a Word (perhaps the closest thematically to his performance here), Douglas is, to borrow a line from his co-star Sean Penn, "one of our finest." Penn does a great job in his first scene, which sets up a stark and immediate difference between the Van Orton brothers, but he's nowhere near the presence that Douglas is in the film (if memory serves, Penn only has about three or four scenes total). And Deborah Kara Unger, as a waitress who gets caught up in the game, doesn't do much but serve as a focal point for a few twists - the only ones I can profess to have seen coming.

The Game is not for everyone. It's not for those who like their movies cut and dry, black and white. It's not for those who can't handle top-notch suspense, and it's certainly not for those who get disturbed by movies that ask "How would you handle this?" It is, however, an excellent film for those of us who like a movie that keeps us guessing, that never lets up, and that is as finely crafted as a whittled whistle. The Game is delightfully always one step ahead of its audience.

The Game is rated "R for language, and for some violence and sexuality." Language consists of the occasional F-bomb, and violence begins to escalate only as the game gets closer to the finish line - neither of these are excessive because the real tension is all in your head. Sexuality comes with a few suggestive photographs that are used as part of the game.