Anticipating Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza

That’s the title. Guessing we’ll have a trailer ASAP.

For context:

Ad for the record store Licorice Pizza, Los Angeles Times, April 22, 1983. On sale for $1 off: @duranduran's 'Rio,' plus hot new albums by David Bowie, Thomas Dolby and Bob Seger. pic.twitter.com/z7bHfCy1mP

— Annie Zaleski (@anniezaleski) September 10, 2021

Oh yeah, I remember them, maaan: heyday was really more the vinyl heyday, the late 60s,70s, early 80s---by mid-80s, video rental got to be more of a profit leader, as noted here, w backstory of LP: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-04-23-fi-1244-story.html

Though of course, after video killed the radio star, it reanimated some of 'em, like Talking Heads, abd Bowie, for a while and birthed new radio-via-video stars--before MTV and VH-1 went all "reality"--so yeah, if this is set in 80s, could still be musically vibrant.

Phone rip of the still-not online trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0L6Go4rWw4

this feels like P.T. Anderson doing Wes Anderson, something a little too cutesy about it all, and I'm really done with "Life On Mars" in movie soundtracks.

Kind of came off to me like a mix of Anderson's own style and a Linklater-esque hangout flick.

Co-sign on "Life On Mars", although perhaps they should have gone extra-meta and used the Streisand version.

If I didn't know it was PTA I would have guessed that Linklater had been watching Coen Bros movies, or vice versa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofnXPwUPENo

Proper trailer.

starring alana haim????? wow

this shit looks amazing

i'm guessing cooper hoffman is philip seymour's son

I actually am really excited about this now~~!!!

Choice of Life on Mars was a downer indeed but trailers are trailers, not going to read too much into one*

* I would be reading loads into it if it excited me.

The two leads looked totally different to me in every scene!

Reaction split along the lines of "Looks like Almost Famous - can't wait!" and "Looks like Almost Famous - how unoriginal!"

The longer this guy's career drags on the more convinced I am that his only two good movies are Hard Eight and The Master. This new one could not be more Not For Me unless it was a puppet musical.

Soon to be a campus/sleepover double feature with Lady Bird.

xp I’m convinced The Master and Hard Eight are his two worst films

The title may be a nod to Diane Kurys' Peppermint Soda (never seen it, but supposedly very good)...Trailer is promising--happy he's not in England 50 years ago--song choice could have been more imaginative.

i remember the phantom thread thread opening with a bunch of ilxors crowing "this looks boring" after watching the trailer :)

The title may be a nod to Diane Kurys' Peppermint Soda

Licorice Pizza was a 70s/early 80s West Coast record store chain.

song choice could have been more imaginative

All Streisand or gtfo...

looking forward to P.T. Anderson's Avenue Q now

The stills look like a gritty reboot of Dazed & Confused.

this can only be objectively good if she leaves him in the end

The Bowie song is doing 95% of the emotional labour in this trailer, still curious about the film.

The Master is incredible, WTF. Did not like The Phantom Thread at the time but my memories of it have softened.

the master is truly awesome

it is, and i am pumped about this new one, it looks fantastic

Now *this* is how you make a trailer. Gets your attention, bits of stuff here and there, but no idea what the plot is and don't feel like anything has been ruined or spoiled.

agree though, xp, that having Life on Mars? as the soundtrack to the trailer helps a lot.

however, imo you have to have some wonderful footage/performances to be able to hang with Life on Mars and not get embarrassed, so i take this as a good sign

Deleted Jonny Greenwood tweet:

Oh it’s a lovely film. Only wrote a couple of cues for it - the score is all 70’s source cues (and all the better for that) - you’re all in for a giant PTA-shaped treat…

feels more like adventureland than dazed and confused to me, but with added tom waits so that's cool

i know that they're both of a similar cloth.

anyway, i'm looking forward to pta's linklater film!

I'm very territorial when it comes to '70s' soundtracks. I'm wildly looking forward to the music here (looks like his first full-out pop movie since Boogie Nights), and I know I'll be excessively critical if it doesn't comport to how I, clemenza, think everything should have been done.

It's funny, this looks much more like Boogie Nights-meets-Dazed and Confused than anything else to me.

I also haven't seen any of his more recent movies, tbh, because I stopped going to the movies for more than a decade.

gonna watch the hell outta this

kinda looks like Bradley Cooper learned to smash car windows from Frank Mackey

This looks like it's probably enjoyable but the trailer was obnoxiously trailery

i love this already GIVE IT TO ME

I guess it's hilarious that Cooper's in the role of Streisand's boyfriend after his turn in A Star is Born

Not to be a buzzkill because it generally looks great and I'm excited to see it, but am I the only one slightly weirded out by 29-year-old Alana Haim's love interest being 17-year-old Cooper Hoffman in Licorice Pizza?

— Bonnie Stiernberg (@aahrealbonsters) September 28, 2021

are people utterly unable to detect subtext anymore?

people don't know how to watch things

They could swap this trailer out for the one for the Sopranos prequel and no one would notice

huh?

I think that was meant to be supporting evidence for Brad's assertion

Oh that makes sense, I read it as a dismissive thing about it being another period piece with an actor's kid.

Awards Blogger/Movie Lefsetz Jeffrey Wells serves up the hot takes re: the casting of Alana Haim

https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2021/09/i-say-again/

FWIW, up until now I didn't know how old she is, but have people suddenly forgotten that actors (particularly those playing young folks) aren't playing their exact ages most of the time. I can certainly buy her playing younger, definitely either side of 20, which is what it looks like she's doing in the film.

I enjoyed Inherent Vice a ton when I saw it in the theater, way more than my friends who I went with, haven't seen it since then. But it's such a literal interpretation of the book that I don't fully think of it as a PTA movie, a la 'No Country for Old Men' and the Coens.

i do not really agree but i have watched inherent vice a lot. there are things the film does that the book cannot do, cf. the superimposed image of shasta after doc starts smoking a joint, which, as probably several pta threads on ilx bear out by now, is literally my favorite scene in any movie

idk, the ending dialogue between shasta and doc in the car, with the light streaming over them, plus the aching tenderness the characters have for each other through the entire runtime... these are the movie's terrain

movie also snips one of doc's threads of inquiry, can't remember which, but it's for the better

That's true, and the book is longer and shaggier than the movie for sure

yeah i was shocked he was able to pull a coherent adaptation out of such a nutso book

movie also snips one of doc's threads of inquiry, can't remember which, but it's for the better

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, September 29, 2021 3:09 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

movie gets rid of the book's Vegas digression, which contains one of the best summations of Pynchon ever:

“Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.”

To some extent they morph this digression into Doc's encounter with Mickey in the asylum but I don't recall if it covers this passage.

I haven't read the book, but in the synopsis I did see (and that posted excerpt), it seems including that part would skirt extremely closely to bat Fear & Loathing country.

That sentence is a perfect example of why I've never been able to finish Gravity's Rainbow.

On a different note, this cleared up what I thought was just a psychedelic choice for naming a record store:

It’s from a self-deprecating joke by the comedy-folk duo Bud and Travis, who joke around the 9:30 mark of this video that one of their vinyl records is so unsuccessful that it’s being marketed as “licorice pizza” — since records are black and round.

Also initials L. P.

i like hard eight. it’s not his best, maybe even in his bottom 3. but it’s really good imho. i love philip baker hall

i get why a quirky LA neo-noir about people fucking up wasn’t the most original concept 3 years after pulp fiction. but it’s still a lot of fun

We have soundtrack: https://pitchfork.com/news/paul-thomas-anderson-licorice-pizza-soundtrack-announced/

Barabajagal, yessss

Well...He transformed some real junk in Boogie Nights, so anything's possible. (I can see him doing something memorable with "Diamond Girl.") Underwhelming, though. "My Ding-a-Ling" for Chuck Berry? That's insulting (and irredeemable, I'm guessing).

(I see it's a version from 1967 with the Steve Miller Band. So maybe it started out life sounding like Chuck Berry's supposed to sound.)

Kind of wishing there was more Have A Nice Day junk tbh, like I can totally see him doing something great with "How Do You Do?" or "Chick-A-Boom". Related: I really wish the trailer had been cut to Dwight Twilley's "I'm On Fire"...but then again I wish all trailers were cut to that.

Would look forward to either of those first two, basically the equivalent of what he did with "Sister Christian," "Driver's Seat," and Apollo 100's "Joy."

This looks like it’ll be fun.

Maybe he's paying tribute to the Canadian film Paperback Hero (1:15:45) with "If You Could Read My Mind," the one song on that list I unreservedly love (also used memorably in Mr. Robot).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ig2EL6WBEs

Walter Chaw: https://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2021/11/licorice-pizza-ghostbusters-afterlife.html

I rewatched Inherent Vice, hoping that I would like it without the burden of expectations. I liked it a little more, but was stunned several times upon realizing there was still x much time left. "45 minutes? fuck..."

The original viewing put me off so much that I avoided the Phantom Thread. I also have a mild problem with costume dramas, but I should probably have a go at it. Licorice Pizza has me hopeful.

I also have a mild problem with costume dramas, but I should probably have a go at it. Licorice Pizza has me hopeful.

A movie set in the 1970s *is* a costume drama.

Yeah, what's a costume drama?

I watched Inherent Vice again recently, and somehow the pacing and tone settled in a lot better than on the first viewing. I don't think I had inappropriate expectations when I first saw it, but maybe having a vague memory about what was about to happen allowed me to pay more attention to what was occurring in the moment.

Yeah, what's a costume drama?

MOVIE REVIEWS

'Licorice Pizza' Is Paul Thomas Anderson's 1970s Power Ballad - and the Funkiest Love Story of the Year
A spiritual prequel to 'Punch Drunk Love,' the filmmaker's look back at a bygone era couldn't be more personal — or have better performers at its center
Have not read rest; ads are fucking w my computer:
https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/licorice-

Were there 1970s power ballads? "Fade Away and Radiate"?

Kiss's "Beth" The 70s were full of them.

Styx "Lady" comes to mind

Dust in the Wind

Buncha Elton: "Candle In The Wind"; "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me"; "Levon" etc.

PLUS THE FUCKIN' EAGLES

BOB GODDAMN SEGER

read a positive review of this which confirmed my lack of desire to see it

LYNRYD SHITKICKIN' SKYNYRD

Yeah but the 'power' in power ballad connotes an explosion of electric guitars and thundering drums

Otherwise it's just a ballad

ELECTRIC MELLONFARMIN' LIGHT ORCHESTRA

Yeah but the 'power' in power ballad connotes an explosion of electric guitars and thundering drums

Some if not all of those bands did that.

Ballads are Ballads but part of the "Power" is the showstopping, reach for the rafters sing-along chorus.

ANTHEMS

Possibly substitute Queen for ELO.

Juice Newton - “ Angel of the Morning” is a total 70’s powerballad

candle in the wind is just a ballad imo

I've always maintained that Whitesnake's Here I Go Again is just a rewrite of Angel of the Morning

Whoa Juice has kind of a crazy-eyed Kate Bush thing going here... pretty awesome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTzGMEfbnAw

Nazareth: "Love Hurts" so good (their covers of "Hollis Brown" proto-folk-metal ritualizm, the Joni cover, though blanking on title, more ov a power folkie-ballad)(they should have done "Candle In The Wind," then it would have been proper power ballad) But I was thinking more "tasteful romantic move by 80s metal etc."

Joni cover = "This Flight Tonight"

Ramones had a few!

For an acoustic guy, Cat Stevens had a ton of these.

Licorice Pizza Love Jams

I don't even own a Film Twitter, but sorta surprised the grievance Chaw had that's getting run with is the age difference thing and not the racial thing, but OTOH I guess the former is easier to address without having yet seen the movie.