Licorice Pizza

Movie: Licorice Pizza

Nominated for: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay

When I fell asleep: No. Day Screening

When it had me: Specific characters

When it lost me: I won't say it lost me but I was mildly in it

What I have to say:

I am forever in awe of the power of expectations. I have three friends who really did not care for this movie so I set myself up for a real stinker. I was ready to hate on it and pan it and write a funny review. However, I went in with the bar set so low, the film couldn't help but reach and even exceed that bar and I ended up enjoying this movie. If I had watched it after seeing a string of commercials telling me that this was a masterpiece of film making and a "triumph", I definitely would have felt let down.

What felt magical to me about this movie was the specificity of many of the minor characters; an agent with an intense facial twitch, a grizzled old producer who orders people to do insane things with such authority that they comply, abusive stars and psychopaths. We've seen these kinds of characters before but there was an attention to detail and absurdity to these people that I was instantly positive they were completely true and I enjoyed the feeling of "you can't make this stuff up."

Another positive for the film is that it basically sets up tension around the "will they or won't they" question between two people who should definitely be a hard no but over the course of the film you forget about the proper boundaries. Or at least, I did. This film was filled with moments, sprinkled with a beautiful shot here, a great music cue there, a solid callback here, a hilarious line there. I enjoyed all of these moments and I still don't really know that they added up to more than the individual moments. 

I'm struck by the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson is nominated for Best Director for this but the movie doesn't get any other category nominations. So what directing did PTA do that was worthy of the nomination? He didn't direct any of the actors to their own nominations, he didn't have such a strong vision that cinematography or production design was recognized, his sound and music did not get noticed. He wrote it and got acknowledged for that but what did he do as a director that earned him the look? Is it just that the whole story is so personal that the movie IS him in a way? Is it because the people who vote really like him? Do people appreciate that he cast some unknown people or did a good job of depicting those real specific characters that I enjoyed?

I don't mean to make it sound like I don't think he deserved the nomination, I'm just trying to understand how these things work. On the other hand, you have Denis Villeneuve whose Dune is nominated for Picture, Sound, Editing, Cinematography, Costumes, Make Up and Visual Effects but he did not get a nod for directing. Do we assume that he had nothing to do with all of those departments excelling? Do we think his material just sort of makes itself? Am I looking for a rhyme or reason that probably does not exist? Most likely.

Licorice Pizza might just be an insider movie and so maybe he has a better chance of winning than I realize. It could be filled with more inside jokes than I realize. For example, the title is the name of record shops that existed in LA at the time. They don't tell us that in the movie, but for those who remember, which could be a percentage of the voting Academy, the words are poignant.