Licorice Pizza

I meant 2021!!!!

A 25-year-old's relationship with a 15-year-old is creepy. Also, in an Orthodox family, she would have been married or a teacher.

Marred substantially by the very unappealing lead actors

R2 But the family in the movie is Alana Haim's family and she and her sisters are in a band.

I found the leads appealing

I found them realistic.

R2 It wasn't a sexual relationship.

I wondered how long it would take for the troll at r3 to show up — she was all over the posts about this movie hating on it because the actors didn’t look like supermodels.

R8 Yes I have seen that person appear whenever the movie comes up

Cooper Hoffman is much more cute here:

It got the look and feel of the time just right.

But thank God that I did not live in the Valley …bleech. We were poor compared to those kids, but at least we were in the South Bay—Beach cities.

It would have improved with sound, but that wasn’t to be until the late ‘20s.

R11 I lived in Sierra Madre in the time I mentioned. It was very quiet in the '70s (still is, I think) and we weren't near beaches but we were near mountains. The South Bay is nice, though. I went to the beach there 2 or 3 times, and to Balboa Fun Zone. Ha.

It IS Licorice Pizza!

Sierra Madre is lovely —my sister’s college boyfriend is from there. Yet: The movie Testament was terrifying, no?

Otherwise, Balboa Fun Zone isn’t exactly near the Beach Cities…that’s way down the 405…

I was only 12-13 when I lived there. I'm in my mid-60s now. Which ones are the Beach Cities? I didn't have time to memorize all of Southern California.. Balboa Fun Zone was/is in Newport Beach, I figured that's a beach city (?)

^R15

It's such an unappealing title for a movie.

The title is so unappealing I can't even bring myself to THINK about watching it.

None of the previews or trailers were even slightly appealing.

I can't imagine a LESS appealing movie than this, to be honsest.

It's a nickname for an LP record (and the name of a record store).

R15 Testament was made there after my time. Oppenheimer has a scene there, too, in front of the Playhouse (used to be the - tiny - movie theater in town). My aunt and uncle and cousins lived there. It was in Sierra Madre Canyon.

Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo Beaches are the beach cities of LA County’s South Bay area.

R21 Yeah, I really wouldn't know. We really went west, more, to Will Rogers or those beaches. My aunt liked Trancas. We also went to Arrowhead sometimes.

Anyway, back to the movie...

Christine Ebersole was funny in the Lucy/Ed Sullivan Show number, the Yours, Mine and Ours takeoff - and in the dressing room afterwards.

One thing I didn't really get was that they changed the name of that movie to Under One Roof, but the song they used (from the actual movie) was still Yours, Mine and Ours.

I wish there was a clip of Ebersole on Youtube.

I thought it well done and I didn’t enjoy a single minute of it.

A title invoking the worst candy of all time coupled with looking at a hideous Haim sister for 2 hours literally turns my stomach. And I know it's dead slang for vinyl records but Licorice Pizza conjures up a truly disgusting flavor profile.

R26 IT WAS THE NAME OF AN OLD RECORD STORE. From the time period. This has already been stated.

Also the title of a movie is really not that important after the movie starts.

It's sad you think every movie has to star a model, doesn't matter if they're just playing a regular person. Everyone in movies has to be pretty. In 2024. Really sad.

I preferred the original 1921 sound track

I never ever would have stepped foot in a store named licorice pizza. Seriously, those two words together make me want to puke.

Did they do any test screenings or anything to get feedback?

Does this movie win "The worst movie title in history" contest, or what?

Luck for us you’re not in the movie business. I bet you thought Tower Records was a skyscraper.

"Tower Records" isn't a vile nauseating disgusting name, R30. So thanks for proving you don't have a fucking clue. It doesn't MATTER what the name means or refers to. The name ITSELF is disgusting.

Wow, an actual troll.

What’s with so much vitriol from a few posters across multiple threads at this hour. The anger is palpable, and so misplaced. Try posting without the fucks and the cunts in every post. Or just step off the ledge—

I liked the movie quite a bit, but I have a love for shaggy-dog story movies like The Big Lebowiski.

I liked the fact that the leads looked like real people, not movie stars; and loved the way it captured the way we kids were mostly on our own in that era, even though it was exaggerated for narrative purposes.

It was self indulgent boredom from a director who has traveled so far up his own ass without a map that he'll never be heard from again in the real world.

Both leads were quite good, though, especially Hoffman, who I'd love to see more of.

I'm wondering if people today saw Liza Minnelli in The Sterile Cuckoo, or Charlie Bubbles, whichever one she did first...they would freak out because she isn't gorgeous.

R34 Yeah that's a good point, we were on our own a lot, but it's so familiar in the movie I didn't even think about it (reminding me so much of my own experience). Also - a kid could sit at a bar in those days, having a coke. What really struck me though is how there wasn't all that much media influence in our lives. If you had questions, you couldn't go online or ask Siri. You couldn't contact someone else from wherever you were, or wherever they were.

The Teenage Fair seemed so familiar, too. Where they'd advertise some celeb from TV would be there, and everybody would be talking all week about going.

The Sean Penn/William Holden stuff was a little too obscure. Alana is supposed to be auditioning for the part of "Rainbow" I think. This was in reality Breezy, the title character of a Clint Eastwood movie about a hippie (Kay Lenz) and an older man (William Holden). A good movie, actually. And the other references are to The Bridges At Toko Ri, and Grace Kelly. But you need to be a movie buff or something close to it to get the references.

R8 & R9 it isn't just one person.

Many of us, on and off DL, agreed that the film would have done better financially with good-looking leads.

Nobody wants to stare at ugly people for over two hours.

And like it or not, most people root for conventionally attractive characters than homely ones.

I know 'woke' is all about trying to be unorthodox and crapping on time-honored traditions -- hence the many fat. grotesque, and/or too tall actors nowadays -- but you can't force audiences to sympathize with fugly.

Hollywood is currently hemorrhaging money, and it would be raking it in if it was still conventional, but nobody ever accused socialists of being good businesspersons.

R38 they care more about pushing a 'woke' agenda than making profits.

I liked it. I wouldn't care to revisit it but it was good and I thought the leads looked like normal, attractive people. Their looks had nothing to do with the story.

[quote] Nobody wants to stare at ugly people for over two hours.

They aren't ugly people. They're attractive. Just not unrealistically gorgeous. Not the best looking people in Sherman Oaks. They story wasn't about those kinds of people.

Do you think The Graduate would have been better without Dustin Hoffman? Not sure where you're even coming from. Cooper Hoffman's father was not handsome. Cooper is actually better looking. Yet his dad was a movie star.

I’ve seen it twice. I really like it, and had different reactions each time I saw it. The first time I saw it, I hadn’t read anything about it and didn’t know that much of it was autobiographical.

R42 Same here.

I also felt some of the dialogue and scenes were unclear. When the movie started I didn't know what Alana was supposed to be doing at the high school. Alana Haim is young looking - I thought she was a student. I didn't get the part about the mirror and the comb. The dialogue - especially Cooper Hoffman's - was hard to understand. The 2nd time I saw it I understood it all better and liked it more.

r27 The store owner didn't come up with "Licorice Pizza". The name was based on an old term used to describe vinyl records.

R44 I know. But the film title is taken from the name of the store.

"Licorice Pizza was a Los Angeles record store chain that inspired the title of Paul Thomas Anderson's 2021 film of the same name.[1] The term is a colloquial expression for vinyl records, comparing them to the color of licorice and the shape of a pizza.[2]" (Wikipedia)

I liked the original 1921 film better

I didn't think Lillian Gish was attractive enough to watch for two hours.

We lived in the San Diego area during the 70s and 80s and it was a treat when my Dad, who loves music and has an extensive vinyl collection to this day, would take us to Licorice Pizza in Escondido, CA so he could buy a new album. It was such a great place with so much music.

Do you think PTA was fucking Alana Haim?

I don't know, but she's been cast in his new movie.

The troll who thinks casting non-beautiful actors in movies is part of “Hollywood’s woke agenda” is unhinged even in the batshit heavy discourse of 2024.

Is it German Expressionism?

R49 Idk, it's hard to believe he would include her religious parents in the film if he was fucking her. Also I think her father would probably kill him. I mean because he's a married man with 4 children. But she does seem like his muse or like he's obsessed with her.

Why do you think so? Or, just no reason, just a hunch?

r51, this person has probably never seen a movie from the 70's. The movies from that era had some very average lead actors.

Absolutely hated this film except for the scene with Harriet Sansom Harris. The two young leads were both ugly as sin and absolutely charmless.

The leads reminded me of screwball comedy leads (classic film), at times - which was, for me, a good thing. Rather than telegraphing feelings, they would often play the opposite feeling. Alana being pissed at Gary a lot - every time she found herself being attracted to him or even platonically liking him. It reminded me of some younger relationships I had. I thought it was very cute. PTA said he was influenced by Billy Wilder somewhat.

I also loved the restaurant guy and his Japanese wives - that some people found offensive. *eyeroll* I loved it when he was asked to translate what his 2nd wife said and he said he didn't speak Japanese. He just spoke English in a heavy Japanese accent. It was very absurdist humor. Again, kind of old school.

Harriet Sansom Harris's scene was great, I agree.

i tried to find this for free on various streaming platforms (as well as the ones i pay for) and couldn't.

Oh well. I can wait.

At least it’s forgettable. Not like ‘The Fabelmans’, which maintains the pain.

R58 I got the blu ray from the library.

I went in thinking I’d see fun bits about the lead character being a young actor in film/TV but they dropped that halfway through to make him a huckster and that was NOT what I was interested in seeing.

I think Gary says right up front he has a publicity company and employs his mom, so he's not just an actor. Apparently the real-life guy it's based on, Gary Goetzman, did go from being a kid actor to selling water beds and all the other hustles he has in the movie. (Top row, left.)

He went on to produce Mama Mia, A Man Called Otto, etc.

I loathed every minute of this movie, and the gwo ugly, amateurish leads. That it was a critic’s darling nauseated me.

Gwo! gwo!

R53, yeah just a hunch. And that Maya seems sad.

He's obsessed with her long face and close-set eyes, for whatever reason.

I guess this generation's Molly Ringwald obsession of John Hughes and his films.

I know I should have constructed that sentence better, but I'm a little drunk. Not wrong, though.

She's a pretty good actress, for someone who never acted before.

Funny, though, I thought every kid for the past 30 or 40 years has gotten braces, even for slight imperfections.

I love those movie.

She actually did have braces.

I thought she was great in the role she looks very 70s

OP- I prefer

MYSTIC PIZZA

I always thought the yuppie on the right was really good looking and Goren was so slim and young in this movie.

She has a nice body, too - in the '70s way, not worked out.

(At least, not too much, not overly athletic.)

I have to think the movie would have done better with a different title.

I thought it was great. There was too much pearl-clutching in some quarters about the age difference between the lead characters, it’s not like it was a 40-year old dating a 13 year old or something.

I look at “Licorice Pizza” as the flip side of Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”—both directors in their own way affectionately looking back on the LA mythos of their youths, but in their own distinctive styles.

I wonder if its financial failure will mean PTA will go back to directing his usual dark and disturbing California dramas.

(That I don't particularly care for.)

I think Cooper Hoffman actually being 18 or 19 had a lot to do with mitigating that concern, somehow. That and the fact that it's not a very lustful sort of relationship that's being depicted, and neither one of them seems particularly experienced.

Actors in films don’t have to be gorgeous, they can be plain or “pleasant-looking” but Alana Haim is not easy on the eye. She does, however, have a nice body. Perhaps she is charismatic or charming in person.

I find Alana Haim charming

R49 and R50, PTA is a friend of the Haim family. Alana's father and sister have bit parts in "Licorice Pizza."

R82 Her mother, father, and syisters are in the film.

Sisters

This movie was set up for me to LOVE it...the director, the 70s setting, the soundtrack.

I HATED it. I am NO pearl clutcher....I am usually the one accusing others of doing that...but I found that relationship so unappealing and wrong and I dont mean wrong in a moralistic sense (though there's something to that), just in a dramatic and character driven way. How am I supposed to root for a woman that at at least 25 is such a fucking loser she cant socialize and share things with people her age and only feels comfortable around a pimply horny 15 year old that lavishes attention on her because she has da boobies and occasionally will show them to him? How romantic. Epic love story right there. And the end seems like something out of a bad rom com made even worse by how many layers of how very not right and honestly icky that relationship is. I didnt even like them as friends (they legit just seemed like an older sister/younger brother relationship with added teenage horn boy skeeviness) let alone the epic romantic couple the director practically begs us to root for.

In short the film is as bad as what I imagine Licorice Pizza would taste like.

It’s impossible to explain the mid-70s to people who didn’t experience it.

OP does it star Rudolph Valentino? He's dreamy.

Review”

I loved her truck driving scene. It’s such a random idea executed perfectly.

Who was supposed to be William Holden? That singer?

What singer?

Marc Singer

Sean Penn was ridiculous casting as a William Hokden type. Holden was much more of a Hollywood romantic leading man and Penn is a total nebbish.