He certainly acts older-instantly asking her out and, when she shows up, ordering dinner and plying her with questions such as “What are your plans? What’s your future look like?” He sounds like a patriarch, interviewing a prospective daughter-in-law. Alana is twenty-five, although she seems younger, and Gary is fifteen, although he, if not his volcanic complexion, looks a little older. He’s in the tenth grade, and she’s a visitor, working for a photographer who takes head shots for the yearbook.
#Eugene tangled movie
His mind’s eye is fixed on the past, and “Licorice Pizza” isn’t just planted there, like a flag it dreams of being the kind of movie that was made back then.
It was quite a speech, in fact, and some directors might point up its ironic pertinence to the environmental crisis of today. Those cars are lined up because of a global fuel emergency, and Richard Nixon is glimpsed on TV, in November, 1973, beseeching Americans to trim their gas consumption. Aside from a short trip to New York, it clings to the San Fernando Valley, and we’re firmly stuck in the early nineteen-seventies. The odd thing is that, in terms of space and time, it’s what Bowie would have called a god-awful small affair. It is, indeed, Anderson’s happiest creation to date-blithe, easy-breathing, and expansive. Such speed, however, sprang from desperation, whereas “Licorice Pizza” is bent upon the pursuit of happiness.
#Eugene tangled full
Remember the explosive scene in “The Master” (2015), when Joaquin Phoenix burst through a door and set off across a plowed and misty field, at full tilt, with the camera hurrying to keep up. Wait for the meet and greet.Īnderson’s characters have taken to their heels before. And, at the climax, they both run-Alana going from right to left across the screen, and Gary going in the other direction, equal and opposite. The hero of “Licorice Pizza,” Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), races toward a gas station, past a line of idling vehicles, to the sound of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” For her part, the heroine, Alana Kane (Alana Haim), sprints to a police station, after Gary has been inexplicably arrested. Think of Shirley MacLaine, haring along at the end of “The Apartment” (1960), with her head thrown back, then imagine a whole film in which people dash around with the same urgency, even when they have nowhere special to go. The running time of the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, “Licorice Pizza,” is a hundred and thirty-three minutes, and much of that time is occupied with running.