Licorice Pizza (2021, Paul Thomas Anderson) (Patreon)

52/100

[NOTE: Normally I post second-viewing thoughts about brand-new films straight to Letterboxd, as they tend to be very quick hits. This one runs a bit longer, though, and also I don't want to deal with the comments it'd probably generate from my 20,000+ followers there. So you get it first, and they can read it in like 2029 at the rate I'm going.]

Second viewing, up slightly from 48. Opening 25 or so minutes are just glorious, but it once again mostly lost me when the Gary Goetzman anecdotes take over. Having read an interview in which PTA clarifies his intentions...

The thing is, when your source material is just stories…when you’re adapting somebody’s bullshit tales they’re always telling, they jump along exactly like that. They always tell it to you sort of in terms of highlights. Like, “Hey, did I tell you about the time I was on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1968 with Lucille Ball?” Dot dot dot. “Oh my God, wait, did I tell you about the time I was arrested at the Teen-Age Fair for murder?” Dot dot dot. And then what happened? And then what happened? “Well, it all went belly up because of the gas crisis of 1973.” The movie is structured like that, like wild tales.

...I tried this time to think of it as his Radio Days, with the quasi-romance serving as anchor à la Joe's family. Rather than explicitly position Goetzman's "bullshit tales" as discrete, unconnected anecdotes, however, Anderson ambitiously attempts to weave all of them into a single coherent narrative. Masterful if you think it works, but I'm afraid that I just don't—the shoehorning feels blatant, especially w/r/t stuff like Alana's acting ambition, which gets dropped as unceremoniously, once it's served its purpose, as Alana from the back of "Jack" Holden's motorcycle (his jump being the purpose in question). This might actually be my fundamental problem with several of PTA's films, come to think of it; Boogie Nights and Magnolia (both of which I like, but mildly) feel similarly "assembled," which I'd always attributed primarily to his formal Altman and Scorsese lifts. 

Also, "I love you, Gary" as the final line really bothers me—so much, in fact, that I now think it may have retroactively diminished my appreciation for Haim's performance the first time around. Quite unfair, obviously—it's not her fault, and would be dwarfed by her truculent magnificence throughout even if it were. (This is why I make an effort to rewatch celebrated movies prior to submitting my Skandies ballot, on which I'd had her as a token 5-pointer. Not anymore!) But man, the way that line and its dreamy delivery and their positioning (hand in hand, she running behind him, as if being pulled along) and the sudden shift to slo-mo all suggest Alana belatedly/finally coming around, as if the film constitutes her three-year(ish) journey to recognizing how wonderful Gary is (as opposed to the two of them finding each other), makes me cringe way more than do the Japanese-accent bits. Those at least are clearly meant to be grotesque.