Licorice Pizza - Anyone care to explain?

Cafe Society
1

Watched this movie w/ my wife and another couple (all of whom were teens in the 70s).

OK - I’m not going to try to convince anyone that they shouldn’t like this movie or that it wasn’t “good.” But none of the 4 of us even understood what the heck it was supposed to be about? Why we WOULD like it.

A few questions:
-What was the deal with the restaurant owner seeking accented Japanese?
-How long was the movie supposed to cover? Long enough for the publicity tour, then the waterbed business, and then the pinball arcade. But there was no resumption of high school.
-Why was so much time/attention spent on “Jon Peters is a dick”?
-And then, why the extended Sean Penn/Tom Waits bit?
-And then the gay politician bit. I didn’t see how these storylines really developed the main characters or any consistent themes. Instead, they just seemed like a mishmash.
-Why was the title about records? Music didn’t impress us as playing much of a part in the movie.
-Was the main guy really a successful actor? And did his mother work for him? If they were successful, they sure lived in a modest home. Was his acting career going downhill? Or was it damaged by his “ad libbed” joke on the promo tour?
-Was the backwards driving part supposed to be “realistic” or something else?

I don’t think I’ll ever get around to liking the film, but I’d appreciate just gaining some more understanding of what the heck it was about and why people think it was good.

2

Some more:

  • The “Streisand” pronunciation bit. Hasn’t that been done in countless sitcoms?
  • Why the flamboyantly gay “butler”?
  • Why did they flood Peters/Steisand’s house? And why was it not noticed?
  • Was the arrest a complete non sequitur? Did she run all the way to the police station?

I just don’t understand how all of these “bits” fit together. How much was supposed to be “real”, and how much fantasy?

3

I wondered about the Sean Penn/Tom Waits section myself. I also thought the entire Peters sequence was overly long and largely without point. At the end of it, she was watching how the others were acting in a juvenile fashion, but that was an extraordinarily long way to get there. If they wanted to show her noticing that/being disenchanted by that, surely they could have got that point across without all that screen-time.

4

From Licorice Pizza (2021) - Trivia - IMDb

“Gary Valentine’s character is based on Hollywood producer and actor Gary Goetzman. Many of the incidents that happen in the film come directly from stories that Goetzman told to Paul Thomas Anderson. Like Valentine, Goetzman began as a child actor and appeared in Yours, Mine and Ours (1968), a film about a family with 18 children (Christine Ebersole’s character Lucy Doolittle is based on that film’s star Lucille Ball). Goetzman also went on to open a waterbed company and a pinball arcade, and once delivered a waterbed to Jon Peters’ home. Today, Goetzman is known for founding the production company Playtone with Tom Hanks.”

The inspirations for a number of other bits can be found on the same page.

The film is chock full of things a person who grew up in the area would be immediately familiar with; and it is further convoluted by the blurring of time with regard to its myriad cultural and social references.

As far as “fitting together” as a story, I think it is more about establishing the milieu of a time (range) and place that had special meaning to the writer-director growing up. With his track record of past films and the addition of well-known actors in supporting roles, Mr. Anderson - the son of Ghoulardi - Wikipedia - was able to convince influential people at MGM et al, to give him money to make the film despite the fact that most of the people presumably seeing it were not going to be familiar with (or care very much about) the milieu it attempts to portray.

5

Hmmm. I’ve been whining for weeks that it’s a terrible movie — or at the very least a terrible screenplay. You say it’s an insanely personal film only accessible (comprehensible?) to someone who grew up when and where PTA did.

Could we both be right? Can the fact that it’s an insanely personal film only accessible to someone who grew up when and where PTA did mean that it is, therefore, a bad movie? Or at least a bad candidate for wide release?

Anyway, to the OP: The kid was a fairly successful child actor. His mother didn’t work for him, she was his manager. In addition, the two of them worked together in their PR company (although I assume that on paper it was her company). Once the movie gets underway, though, he (apparently) gives up acting and becomes a serial entrepreneur.

I think the kid just stopped going to high school. Unless he was a senior when the picture-taking was happening, and we just weren’t shown his graduation. (Yes, I know he was 15. But he’s so hypercompetent at everything else, he could have been a 15-year-old senior. Maybe.)

Yes, the backwards driving was supposed to be realistic.

I’ve never heard anyone mispronounce “Streisand,” either in real life or in sitcoms, so I was baffled by that bit. I guess your experience is wider than mine.

The Penn/Waits segment 1) was incredibly faithful to real life (see IMDB), and b) served to bring the kid and the woman back together when he (and only he) rushed to make sure she was OK.

It’s possible Peters had a flamboyantly gay assistant in the 70s. I just took it as a character choice and not something that was supposed to pay off later and didn’t … unlike everything else in the whole fucking movie.

So yes, the answer to all your other questions is: It was a non sequitur with no real meaning or purpose except for what Dropo said.

I loved the production design, I really loved the performances of the two main actors — neither of whom had acted before! — but in general, the movie just made me angry.

ETA: OP mentioned the schtick with the restaurant owner’s Japanese. Like everything else, it had nothing to do with the rest of the movie, but I thought it was very funny. And also pretty goddam offensive.

6

I know I’ve seen that sort of bit before, where one character perceives a pronunciation difference that no one else can. One example that comes to mind is Brooklyn 911, where the one cop says his kid’s name is pronounced (some Eastern European sounding name). The other guy says the same thing, but keeps getting “corrected.” Not particularly funny or novel.

The Japanese language thing got a chuckle from me the first time he said something to her, but then - like nearly everything else in this movie - I said “Why?” And it ceased being funny, and was just weird and offensive.

Doesn’t sound to me like the recipe for a best pic nominee, but what do I know? I guess I strongly prefer my movies to have SOMETHING in the way of a story.

7

I thought I heard the characters saying ‘StreisanD’ and ‘Streisann’. It sounded like one had a harder D than the other. It’s so absurd that I’m guessing it’s based on a real event from when he delivered the waterbed to Peters’ home. But I assume that it was fleshed out and puffed up a bit for the movie.

I also think the movie was a bit of a mess from a movie-making perspective. It was fun to watch and I enjoyed the performances, but I feel it could have been made into a better story with a little bit more rework. I had many of the same questions myself. I was spending a lot of time in the movie wondering how much was fantasy or reality and trying to fill in the plot holes.

8

I think that anyone who read this thread and had never heard of the movie would be very surprised upon learning that it’s in the category of movies considered universally acclaimed, was nominated for and won some awards, and is by a director who, if he made a terrible movie with a terrible screenplay that was just a big mess from a movie-making perspective, not only would that be his first one of those but it would also be the first one he missed on, like, at all.

I think if you don’t enjoy the movie that’s perfectly reasonable. If your reasons for not liking it are the story goes in wacky directions and includes pieces that are sort of airlifted in and don’t particularly serve to directly advance any narrative purpose, I think that is extremely reasonable and is based on fair observations. You’re allowed to only be there to be told a story that has an ending that satisfies you and all fits together and seems crafted for that purpose.

But I don’t think it’s fair to say that, because you didn’t enjoy that the movie was made that way, that actually means it was not about anything, or you don’t even know what the movie was about. I expect each of you could recite back what the movie was about if there was like a cash prize for doing so. I think almost all of the questions in the OP are answered by “it’s a movie about being a certain kind of person in a certain time and place.” The movie didn’t try and fail to plot out a straightforward X vs. Y kind of dramatic arc, it just wasn’t a movie that was trying to do that. Not all movies are made up of discrete narrative events, that’s all.

I think this could be read as a kind of movie snobbery, which isn’t what I’m going for. It’s just that PT Anderson is really really good at making movies, and is about as un-sloppy at making them as anybody in the world, and a question like “how could anyone think this is good” feels a little out of place when, like… everyone thinks it’s good.

9

I read a glowing review of Licorice Pizza, recognized the director as the creator of Boogie Nights and several other acclaimed films I’ve seen, and went to see the movie as soon as it came out.

Like the OP, I emerged disappointed and puzzled. How could the film have been so disjointed? Paul Thomas Anderson is such a celebrated director, so what was I missing? I went through critics’ reviews and user reviews on the Internet Movie Database to try to understand it better.

The best explanation I came across for the common thread in the film’s vignettes was that Alana Haim’s character tries repeatedly to find her place in the adult world but fails.

Be that as it may, many people online were baffled and put off by Licorice Pizza’s incoherence and the director’s self-indulgence.

I decided to give the director one more chance. Later that week, I watched Punch Drunk Love. And now I never want to see a Paul Thomas Anderson film again.

10

Yeah, I understand “different tastes” and all. I liked Boogie Nights, thought Phantom Thread OK, There Will Be Blood not terribly interesting, and Magnolia unwatchable. I guess by this point, I should figure if he directed it, it is likely not my cup of tea. Similar to David Lynch. Great that people like his work. I don’t.

I don’t need my movies to be strictly linear with a satisfying resolution. But I do want to give a damn about at least one character. I like to know WHY certain things happened. Simply “Life can be random” is not enough to maintain my interest. And I like to know if it is supposedly real or fantasy. Not a big fan of movies that switch back and forth leaving me to wonder, “Wait, did that REALLY happen?”.

Sure, young woman and young man try to find themselves - and each other. But the loosely connected vignettes didn’t take me anywhere of interest worth the investment of 2+ hours.

So how long of a time period did the movie supposedly cover? A few months? A few years?He seems to revert to the same rhythm and meter.

12

That movie pleased VERY few. (I was NOT among the few.)

13

I saw Punch Drunk Love about 20 years ago as the English-Language video store in Budapest didn’t have a heck of a whole lot of very current films. It’s the only movie I’ve seen with Adam Sandler I really liked. I loved that movie. I don’t remember it much at all right now, other than it being a quirky love story and that Adam Sandler was convincing to me in his role instead of being a comic book buffoon, but movies just kind of stay in my medium-term memory for a few weeks or months and are deleted off my brain pretty quickly. Now that I know PT Anderson did that one, too, I’m more inclined to see Licorice Pizza and, so far, the description of it appeals to my tastes.

14

I agree with you on this part. But not on the movie as a whole.

15

I had the same thought. I don’t think he was 18.

16

Ok, let me expand it to this was the role Adam Sandler was made to play. Perfectly cast. Perfectly believable. Not the annoying-as-shit Adam Sandler roles he typically plays. Engagingly awkward, as opposed to over-the-top silly. (Now I’m curious to rewatch the movie to see if I like it as much as I originally did. When I first watched it, I expected to hate it, because of Adam Sandler, but I rented it because I was bored and saw nothing better to rent. Perhaps my expectations were already set so low.)

17

One issue that I feel falls squarely on the shoulders of the director is that I didn’t understand why everyone was so ga-ga over Alana. The charm or magnetism of her character did not come through, so I didn’t believe that Gary, Gary’s co-star from the film, the agent, or Sean Penn’s character would be smitten with her. I though her character was a little abrasive. Perhaps Gary was struck by Cupid’s arrow, but I didn’t see what put Alana ahead of all the other people that run in those Hollywood circles. I think the actors who played Gary and Alana did a great job at portraying their relationship and I though they had realistic chemistry, but I didn’t see that extra sparkle to Alana’s character that would make me believe all the other people would be drawn to her. This is something that I feel the director should have done a better job with. I would have liked the movie better if I was able to feel what others on the screen supposedly saw in her.

18

I’d posit that Sandler did respectable work in 2009’s Funny People, too. Of course he was playing a professional comic actor in that one, so any annoying schtick he might perform was a necessary part of the role.

Anyway, I’ll cease the Sandler discussion as it may be a bit of a digression. I guess discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson remains relevant, though; I’ve seen maybe half of his movies and wasn’t crazy about any of them, though clearly he’s no hack. (Most recently seen (on cable): 2012’s The Master. I had a lot of problems with that one, too.)