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.

Monster March II: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Seven months ago, we began Monster March on a Mummy Monday with Boris Karloff’s The Mummy, but the first Universal Classic Monster movie was Tod Browning’s Dracula. And so it seems appropriate to return and begin again for Monster March II (cue the spooky music) with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, nominally more faithful an adaptation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gary Oldman as the Count in all his myriad forms. 

I say “nominally more faithful,” because from frame one, Coppola’s Dracula veers wildly from the source material by reimagining the legendary vampire as a Byronic antihero, cursed by his dark past and searching for the reincarnation of his lost love in the person of Mina Murray (Winona Ryder). Alas for the Count, Mina is already engaged to solicitor Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), and so Dracula’s journey to England becomes less a real estate game and more an amorous quest that just so happens to involve a little bloodletting. 

 

Plainly put, Oldman acts rings around everyone else in the cast, even the delightfully hammy Anthony Hopkins as Abraham Van Helsing. Oldman plays Dracula in no fewer than four different iterations, and he aces all of them. Bela Lugosi was iconic, but he seems one-note in comparison to Oldman’s more sophisticated portrayal of a vampire who is alternately tortured and torturer, a lusty bedfellow and a carnivorous lover. The image of Oldman never quite supplants Lugosi, however, proof positive of just how primordial the 1931 original remains, yet Oldman’s “Old Dracula” is a close second as he defies the laws of physics, suckles at shaving razors, and commands your attention in a riveting first act.

 

That opening third of the film, in which Count Dracula holds Harker hostage in his castle, is the best the film ever gets, a note-perfect introduction to an adaptation that never quite lives up to its own beginning. The opening is so compelling, in fact, that you’ll almost forget that Keanu Reeves is madly out of his depth as a young British solicitor, encumbered by the worst British accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins (and perhaps even worse, given that his greeting of “Count Dracula” sounds more like “Count Chocula”). So good is Oldman, and so spooky is his castle, that Coppola might well have stopped the film there and turned in the best short film about Dracula.

 

After Dracula leaves Transylvania, however, the film slows to a crawl in its depiction of Dracula as romantic foil. Oldman is often too psychotic for the work of courtship, and it’s frequently unclear whether Mina is truly falling for Dracula or whether she’s laboring under his hypnosis, his absinthe, or both. Meanwhile, the film spends a great deal of time with Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), her three suitors (Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, and Billy Campbell), and Van Helsing, such that it feels like Coppola wasn’t quite sure which film he wanted to make – the star-crossed lovers or the paranormal medical mystery. Of the two, the latter is more compelling, but it never bears Coppola’s full attention.

 

What’s very clear, however, is that Coppola wanted to make one of the most erotic Draculas ever, filling the film with copious nudity and literalized subtext. In doing so, however, much of the tension of the film becomes inert. To borrow an unfortunately apt line from Alfred Hitchcock, the terror is not in the bang but in the anticipation; the sensuousness of Lugosi’s Dracula was all subterranean, where Oldman’s Dracula is, in the biblical sense of the word, openly ravishing. It’s an interesting forerunner to the Twilight films, of all things, with a doomed immortal languishing as an unabashed romantic, but its erotic dimension is so overblown, so baroque, that it becomes fairly ridiculous. 

 

Coppola’s direction, too, is sumptuous and ornate. Often Coppola is attempting to ape the filmic style of Old Hollywood, with dramatic fades and creative camera angles that would make Orson Welles blush with envy. It’s for those reasons, Coppola’s fiendish attention to classical styling, that the film’s exaggerated sexuality and violence end up distracting rather than amplifying. When Dracula licks the shaving razor that nicks Harker’s throat, it’s icky but spontaneous, yet when the vampiric Lucy vomits blood onto Van Helsing’s face, it’s nauseating for all the wrong reasons. 

 

By dubbing the film “Bram Stoker’s” Dracula, there’s an immediate claim to authenticity, an appeal to authority that suggests this is the definitive adaptation of the novel. Hokey reincarnation notwithstanding, Coppola may have succeeded in spite of himself. The film replicates the novel’s obsession with emerging technology, particularly its intersection with the epistolary mode of storytelling, and the script has a keen interest in Stoker’s most likely inspiration, Vlad the Impaler. And Keanu Reeves aside, this Dracula stars as good a cast as any (including the woefully underrated Tom Waits as the sniveling Renfield). Yet Bram Stoker’s Dracula tries so hard to be grown up that it loses some of the power of suggestion. Lugosi could say more with a discreet bow than Oldman says by leaping into bed with his prey.

 

Put another way, Oldman is no Lugosi, but it’s worth it to watch him try. Gliding across the carpet and whirling a titanic sword, his Dracula is buckets of bloody fun.

 

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is rated R for “sexuality and horror violence.” Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Written by James V. Hart. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker. Starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Anthony Hopkins, Keanu Reeves, Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell, Sadie Frost, and Tom Waits.