BEFORE: So long January, and HELLO February! If you've hung around the Movie Year for a while, then you know that as soon as I flip that calendar page, I start my theme month (or month-plus) where all the films are about romance - or relationships. I sort of equate the two with Shakespeare's "comedy" or "tragedy", not all films about love are happy ones, so if there's a darker film here in the bunch, well, OK it's about "relationships" then, and not all of them work out, so I feel I'm justified including a few tragedies in the mix.
Sean Penn carries over from "Flag Day" (reminder, "The Weight of Water" has been re-scheduled for March) so this was the plan all along, to start with "Licorice Pizza". HA! Of course it wasn't, I had this whole chain flipped over and I even tore it apart once or twice and built it back together again. I maintain my right to make changes until I'm happy with the entire sequence, and even beyond that point, if necessary. What happened was, I had created a chain that I was fine with, and then I double-checked it to find I had two movies next to each other and they DID NOT share an actor or actress. WHAT? Why didn't I notice that before mid-December? I scrambled over the holiday break to find a new way to put the SAME films in a DIFFERENT order and then I triple-checked the path to make sure it would work.
So now, a bit about this year's chain - it's 40 films long, which I know, that's more days than February has, so we're going to run into March BUT since I have close to 120 films about romance (or relationships) on my radar, I've got to make a big dent in that number, or I'll be just as flooded with love films next year, and I won't feel like I'm making progress. St. Patrick's Day is just 45 films away, so this chain was designed to end on a film that will be just a few steps away from TWO films set in Ireland - and they share an actor, of course.
Also, this chain was cobbled together from a bunch of smaller chains, and I looked for films that would connect those small chains to make the bigger chain. Also, some of those little chains were leftovers from last year or the year before, they got stranded and unlinked when certain films were suddenly not available on HBO Max or Netflix - so in addition to fitting perfectly into the space I had for it, this chain was designed to rescue a bunch of films that were previously left behind. So if it seems disjointed, it's because I really struggled to get back to those poor unwatched, orphaned films - I can save them all, I know it! Plus I love a tough challenge - and I'm only going to strand one or two more films by watching these 40. 24 out of the 40 films I already had on DVD or on my DVR, and the other 16 are coming from streaming services - but I'm not going to say which films are the bricks and which are the mortar, we can all find out together.
Bottom line, here in my fifth year with a perfect chain (so far) I really can look at this year's line-up and say, yep, this is about the best I can do with this topic at this point. So here are the links for the rest of February, after Sean Penn: Benny Safdie, Michaela Watkins, Gillian Jacobs, Julie White, Daniel Eric Gold, Keira Knightley, Eleanor Tomlinson, Jack Farthing, Kristen Stewart, Melissa Leo, Becky Ann Baker, Wolfgang Novogratz, Lea Thompson, Jesse Bradford, Dan Hedaya, Debra Monk, Alec Baldwin, Brad Garrett, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Greg Germann, Liam Aiken, Bruce Altman, Luke Kirby, Wallace Shawn and Ethan Hawke. If you want to know in advance what I'm going to watch, just pick two consecutive people on that list and find a movie with the two of them in it. Be careful, don't hurt yourself, remember, I'm a trained professional.
THE PLOT: The story of Alana Kane and Gary Valentine growing up, running around and going through the treacherous navigation of first love in the San Fernando Valley, 1973
AFTER: I worked a lot of screenings of "Licorice Pizza" in the last few months of 2021 - I guess because somebody thought it would be eligible for a number of Oscars - and it was, it got three nominations, plus a SAG Awards nomination, a DGA nom and a PGA nom. (It would go on to win ZERO Oscars, but nobody knew that at the time.). The big draw at the theater where I work, though, was that some of the screenings were on 35mm, which is a rarity these days. Some people came out JUST to watch a film on film, the way it used to be, everything's all DCP and digital these days, except for once in a while. So quite a few guild screenings took place in my workplace, and for one of the screenings I worked, there was a panel afterwards with the director and the two leads, Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim. So after putting the chairs out on the stage in front of the screen, I was standing there in the dark RIGHT NEXT to Paul Thomas Anderson, and I was waiting for the cue from the projectionist so I could cue him to walk out on stage. That's it, that's the story - thankfully I didn't freak out and start asking him questions about "Boogie Nights" or tell him what a great film "Magnolia" is, still, after all this time. He knows.
Another thing I had to do for the screenings was check inside the theater every 20 minutes or so, you know, just to make sure the picture looked good and the sound was audible and there wasn't a riot going on for some reason. (Why? I don't know, maybe somebody was talking too loud or their phone rang or something. I just have to check.). So I'd seen a few clips from the film, here and there, something about selling waterbeds and something else about a truck running out of gas. I just hoped that when I finally sat down to watch the whole film, those scenes would make some kind of sense, there would be bridging material that would allow me to grok the whole narrative. Nope, didn't happen. As best I can tell, this film is just a bunch of vignettes that are strung together, without a consistent throughline that justifies and explains everything.
Not that that's necessarily a dealbreaker, because what were "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia" but a series of events, little vignettes that were strung together, overlapping each other and all being connected in some way, even if we weren't aware of exactly how. And both of those films worked out, right? I mean, "Boogie Nights" started in one place and then got WAY off track, with some weird cop movie that the porn stars were making, that part didn't really work for me. But "Magnolia" is like PTA's "Pulp Fiction", you're not necessarily going to realize how everything geniusly fits together until you watch it for the third or fourth time. Maybe "Licorice Pizza" is like that, maybe on the third viewing you'll say, "OH, I GET IT NOW!" because you see how something very subtle in one scene foreshadows something else, or that THIS guy turns out to be the father of THAT guy, and wow, that really ties everything together. But I doubt it.
I think it's much more likely that there's nothing TO get, or maybe I should say there's not much to get, because there's certainly something here, I just don't think the pieces add up the way the director intended, and so therefore I have to treat it like a series of NON-connected scenes, except that at least one of the main two actors is in every one of them. It's supposed to be about how difficult it is to be in love for the first time, because you're not sure if you're moving too fast, or not fast enough, or if this is really the right person for you, or if you're just happy that you're finally getting some action, and that kind of colors your perceptions. I do approve of this theme, plus it's also a great way to kick off my romance chain, by exploring the initial stages of a romance between a 15-year old boy and a 25-year old woman. Is she 25, though? Because her stated age seems to change a lot during the film.
Look, I get it, when I was a freshman in high school, I had a crush on a senior, who was also involved in the same community theater groups that I was, so I thought, well, maybe there's a chance I'll be in a play with her and we have to kiss or something. Didn't happen. And I let several opportunities to tell her I liked her go by, because I was too shy, plus I had no idea what the hell I was getting myself into. I had a few crushes in high school that I never acted on, because the few times I did reach out, I got shot down. So I didn't have that first real relationship until the third year of college - and looking back on it, my perceptions at the time were probably colored by the fact I was finally getting some action. Hey, you live, you learn, you get married, get divorced and you try to do better next time.
So Gary is a teen actor who's also got big business plans - he opens up a waterbed business at JUST the right time, and then it turns out to be the wrong time. He gets into pinball machines and decides to open up an arcade - this is all very ambitious for a 15-year old, right? Is this based on an actual person? Because most 15-year olds in 1973 just wanted to get high and somehow make it through midterms, right? Very few would have the wherewithal and the means to start not just one, but TWO businesses.
And after meeting Alana on school picture day, he sets his sights on her, just like that, despite the age difference. The rest of the film is them circling each other, dating other people, then wondering why they don't just fall for each other and simplify things. I'm down for this, but is tha really enough to fill up two hours? No, it's not, which is why there are these sidetrack vignettes about Jon Peters having a crisis during the gas shortage, and another actor played by Sean Penn being convinced to do a late-night motorcycle stunt. This is all great fun, but these things have almost nothing to do with the main narrative, our young not-a-couple not-lovers.
I'm thinking a lot of these asides came from Paul Thomas Anderson's life, or at least his memories of what 1973 was like, or, since he was born in 1970, what he imagines that 1973 was like. I'm going to go check now to see if any of these things really happened to him or to people that he knew. But I learned during the Q&A panel that "Licorice Pizza" was the name of a record store in the Valley, and from that I surmise that "Licorice Pizza" might also be slang for a vinyl record (LP), but this is a bit unclear. (Ah, IMDB once again has the answer - Gary Valentine is roughly based on the life of Gary Goetzman, who was a teen actor in the film "Yours, Mine and Ours" and later opened both a waterbed company and a pinball arcade.)
There are a bunch of people in this film who seem one degree removed from fame, like Leonardo DiCaprio's father plays a waterbed salesman, the lead actor is obviously Philip Seymour Hoffman's son, Maya Rudolph is married to the director and their daughter has a small role in the film. There's also a few Spielbergs and Demmes in the credits, relatives of the famous directors - what's the hot term these days, "nepo babies"?
I'm going to be a bit generous with my rating tonight - because this served as a great kick-off to the Romance Chain - ultimately it's about two people getting together, and that works for my theme. The ultimate message is that even if people don't see each other as romantic partners right off the bat, if they spend time together and do enough things together, there's still a chance they can change their minds. Two people don't have to be the perfect couple, it can still work out if both of them just plain run out of other options. Hey, that's tonight's "Love tip", maybe.
Also starring Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Tom Waits (last seen in "Domino"), Bradley Cooper (last seen in "Hit and Run"), Benny Safdie, Skyler Gisondo (last seen in "The Starling"), Mary Elizabeth Ellis (last seen in "How It Ends"), John Michael Higgins (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Christine Ebersole (last seen in "The Wolf of Wall Street"), Harriet Sansom Harris (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Ryan Heffington, Nate Mann, Joseph Cross (last seen in "Mank"), Isabelle Kusman, Destry Allyn Spielberg, George DiCaprio, Iyana Halley (last seen in "The Hate U Give"), Ray Chase, Emma Dumont (last seen in "Inherent Vice"), Yumi Mizui, Megumi Anjo, Maya Rudolph (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Tim Conway Jr., Emily Althaus, Milo Herschlag, Danielle Haim, Este Haim, Moti Haim, Donna Haim, Griff Giacchino, James Kelley, Will Angarola, Dan Chariton (last seen in "Glass Onion"), Phil Bray, Greg Goetzman, Max Mitchell (last heard in "The Boxtrolls"), Lori Killam, Ray Nicholson (last seen in "Promising Young Woman"), Zoe Herschlag, Pearl Minnie Anderson, Henri Abergel, Rogelio Camarillo, Eloy Perez (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Jon Beavers, Luigi Della Ripa, with a cameo from John C. Reilly (last seen in "Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny") and archive footage of Richard Nixon (last seen in "Summer of Soul")
RATING: 6 out of 10 newspaper ads for porn movies
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