Weekly Reel, February 8
Licorice Pizza, Origin Story Fatigue, Oscar Nominations, New Frontier of Gaming Company Acquisitions, and a Film Studio in Space
(Note: From doing the Weekly Reel for almost a year, I’ve found that film news is trite or krypto studio propaganda written by fellow-traveling “journalists.” For this reason, among others, I’ll feature a review and essay commentary with the news in the appendix. As always, this is always a work in progress and will often be re-arranged. Thanks and enjoy!)
Licorice Pizza (2021, Paul Thomas Anderson, Canada/US)
To name a best picture of the year is a hubristic task for any group of people, let alone a group that silos most things subtitled. Oscar season is in full launch as the Anglo-American films vie for “for your consideration” advertising spots with the end goal of a gold-plated piece of bronze resembling the T-1000 in its default liquid metal form. With this comes a glut of films in theaters from prestigious filmmakers that’s supposed to make up for the months of bad films before and after. One of these is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, a coming-of-age dramedy more on the Punch-Drunk Love side of the scale opposite There Will Be Blood. Like Tarantino, who also has nine films and shares many interesting career connections (for instance, There Will Be Blood influenced Tarantino to make an epic WW2 period piece film), PTA’s films are events rather than releases that feature an extremely competent and consistent master at work. Before today, PTA had eight Oscar nominations (four as writer, two as director, and two as producer). While going head-to-head against No Country for Old Men in 2008 was unfortunate, the Academy has a way of correcting itself in the form of delayed largesse—prime example: Scorsese winning Best Director for The Departed, thirty years after Taxi Driver, twenty six years after Raging Bull, and sixteen after Goodfellas. I don’t support this tardiness, but it would do some good for the Academy to stop kidding itself on who should win this year. (Campion is also long overdue.)
Notwithstanding that prefatory exhalation, I genuinely think Licorice Pizza shows PTA at his audiovisual storytelling peak worthy of recognition. It has the confidence of Phantom Thread mixed with its ambiguous dealings of an uncommon relationship, which PTA feeds to us from his palm. But while Phantom Thread leaves one stuck in a cold, mid-century London, Licorice Pizza, like with Magnolia and Boogie Nights, revels in S.F. Valley iconography as well as the latter film’s orange and purple seventies glow. PTA’s preferred home in which he was born and raised lends Licorice Pizza an intensely personal feeling, more than with any of his other films: many of the children extras are his and Maya Rudolph’s own, his late best friend’s son is the male lead, and the female lead’s mother, Donna Haim, was PTA’s elementary school art teacher—PTA supposedly found part of this film’s muse in his schoolboy crush on her. Perhaps this explains why he directed music videos for the three Haim daughters’ band and their cameos in Licorice Pizza.
Even many of the plot points seem to keep one foot in reality. The two debut feature film leads, Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana Kane (Alana Haim), meet during picture day with Alana going through the line of kids asking if they want a mirrored touch-up. PTA claims this introduction was based on a similar event he witnessed while walking past Portola Middle School in 2001. He noticed the persistence of one of the boys talking to a female attendant, which in his version led to Gary showing a hustling confidence (well exceeding his age) towards a charmed Alana, who keeps her distance because of their ten year age gap. He asks her out on a date, which she makes sure to acknowledge is not a date. Their friendship/relationship further grows after starting a semi-successful waterbed company together, which falls apart because of vinyl shortages during the oil crisis, and then a pinball arcade, which took advantage of the Los Angeles pinball ban reversal in 1973. Gary Valentine is based on Gary Goetzman, a child actor that started a waterbed business and pinball arcade. And like with Goetzman, Valentine delivers a waterbed to Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), a hairdresser, film producer (for the 1976 A Star is Born), and former partner of Barbara Streisand. PTA received permission from Peters for this portrayal, but to a degree of coke-rage that may have surpassed expectations.
As Alana and Gary’s relationship develops, we get more amusing cameos. Sean Penn plays a William Holden rip-off who manages to land a fiery motorcycle jump at the urging of director Rex Blau (Tom Waits). Benny Safdie shows up in the final act as Joel Wachs, the longtime closeted LA councilmember. We’re even graced with George (Leo’s father) DiCaprio’s presence in a short scene, who sells Gary his first waterbed. As is obvious from the genre and story, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and American Graffiti (and the unacknowledged Dazed and Confused) influenced PTA the most, as he stated in a presser. Fast Times, which featured a young Sean Penn also in the Valley, shot a scene in one of the Licorice Pizza record stores. Although PTA claims the name Licorice Pizza comes from a nostalgic word-associative game, it’s hard to see how the popular LA record store chain of the seventies and eighties wasn’t the more immediate connection. And luckily PTA chose this name over its scrapped antecedent, Soggy Bottom, which, as Alana pointed out in the film when arguing with Gary over a waterbed name, sounds more dysenteric than nostalgic.
Without playing the film’s hand too far, it’s worthwhile to note, as PTA accurately did when asked about the ten year age gap with an underage boy and 25-28 year old woman, that “there’s no line that’s crossed, and there’s nothing but the right intentions. It would surprise me if there was some kind of kerfuffle about it, because there’s not that much there. That’s not the story that we made, in any kind of way. There isn’t a provocative bone in this film’s body.” Alas, the online-fuelled age-gap criticism became another classic exercise in (sorry for the expression) much ado about nothing.
PTA wrote the script with Alana in mind to play Alana, which she accepted in the summer of 2019. Gary was a harder casting because of all the classically-trained, young socal thespians that couldn’t nail the naturalism required to co-star alongside non-actor Alana Haim. Fortunately for all, PTA knew a teen boy that could not improbably be hereditary inserted into any role if needed. They shot the film between August and November 2020, masks between takes and all, in PTA’s home neighborhood of Encino. Not relying solely on retro set-pieces and post-production color grading, PTA, as co-director of photography with lighting chief Michael Bauman, captured Licorice Pizza on 35mm Kodak film stock using two Panavision Millennium XL2 cameras with Panavision C-series Anamorphic lenses from the sixties and seventies. The finished product is one of the finest films of the year because of its beautiful images, confident direction, and natural acting.
The fashionable complaint to launch against mainstream movies nowadays is how everything is a sequel, prequel, spinoff, remake, and reboot (soft and hard). A subset of the prequel is gaining more attention: the origin story in which characters, usually not main ones, are given a story to themselves to explain how they got to the original story. But not all origin stories are made the same. Origin stories are natural for introducing science fiction, fantasy, and comic book characters—four of the six phase one Marvel films are origin stories. It only makes sense to see why Luke Skywalker left home or the spider that bit Peter Parker. The problem arises when a film executive committee—with crystal ball in hand—finds it necessary to see why Han Solo is on the run or the symbiote that latched onto Eddie Brock. Oftentimes this is done with some throwaway piece of dialogue that then becomes the main plot point of the origin story because of the committee’s inability at being creative and making sure there’s some fidelity between reaching out to both old and new audiences.
The record is mixed when it comes to the public perception of these tales. It can either shut down the Lucasfilm single-film spinoff strategy indefinitely (Solo: A Star Wars Story) or win two Oscars from eleven nominations and make over a billion dollars (Joker). As part of Disney’s grand plan of re-hashing all things that worked before, Maleficent revealed a money-making strategy of origin films for villains from older Disney animated films. They performed the same graft last year for the dalmatian-skinning Cruella de Vil. Whereas the former made almost three quarters of a billion more than the latter at the box office (due to Covid), Cruella earned greater acclaim among critics and audiences and will give the green-light to similar story strategies. The precursor to the present Disney era and granddaddy of all origin stories, George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels holds the record of having the most mixed record. It made over two and a half billion USD at the box office, raked in a countless amount from merchandising, but was mostly received rottenly. And while nobody asked for seven hours of international space bureaucracy content, how can one quantify the enjoyability of memes generated from those seven hours?
Film journalist and author of the newly released “Women Vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film,” Helen O’Hara has had “Enough with the origin stories. Film-making has become too risk-averse.” She claims that the trend is an industry-wide, creative ennui:
But it centres on a character called Buzz Lightyear, derived from its Toy Story series, and appears to be yet another case of a film studio giving an unnecessary backstory to a character who arrived onscreen fully formed.
For decades, fans and critics complained about Hollywood’s endless sequels, which eventually run out of steam by either ratcheting up the action to ludicrous heights or losing sight of what made their heroes interesting in the first place. Instead, to keep those same franchises alive, studios responded by pivoting to reboots, prequels and origin stories. These initially seemed more fruitful – a fun flashback origin opens Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with River Phoenix’s young Indy gaining all his character tics in a single eventful afternoon – but now we have an endless parade of such flashbacks masquerading as standalone films.
Han Solo, Cruella de Vil, the wizard of The Wizard Of Oz, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees: they’ve all had unnecessary origin stories. And all of their films share the same basic problem as the sequels: studio executives only seem to feel safe when they’re greenlighting films based on popular existing franchises, and that is self-defeating.
The problem is not that Hollywood is out of ideas or original characters; we have a more diverse and daring crop of film-makers than at any time in film history. The issue is timid studios that prefer endless rehashes of the same characters because no one ever got fired for saying yes to a sequel or prequel. If your star gets too established and expensive, make an origin story and replace Johnny Depp with the younger, cheaper Timothée Chalamet, such as in the new Wonka film.
The ouroboros:
The origin-story prequel has become a popular – with studios – way of reinvigorating dead or aged-out characters over and over. They’re not all bad, but the drama of prequels is inherently limited. We know that the hero of Solo: A Star Wars Story will survive his adventure; we also know he’ll make friends with a Wookiee and get a ship called the Millennium Falcon. But worse than that, none of this backstory adds much to his character. Han Solo arrived onscreen perfectly formed. We didn’t know what the Kessel run was; we just knew that the guy who did it in “less than 12 parsecs” was the coolest man alive. Learning that Darth Vader was once a sad little blond boy, or that Hannibal Lecter was scarred by the second world war only detracted from their effectiveness. It’s a rare prequel that adds useful context to an indelible character without stealing their mystique: The Godfather Part II is, if anything, the exception that proves the rule.
In 2022 we have these origin story prequels, sequels, spinoffs, reboots, and remakes to look forward to: the third installment of the Harry Potter prequel series Fantastic Beasts, Thor: Love and Thunder will introduce Natalie Portman’s newfound Thor-like powers, the enemy of Shazam will be getting his origin story in Black Adam starring The Rock, another villain spinoff from Spider-Man called Morbius, The Flash is finally getting his own feature, Lightyear will reveal the origins of the Buzz Lightyear action figure, and who isn’t excited for the upcoming untitled Marion film by Nintendo?
News:
Oscar nominations: Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman were snuffed, Dune got ten nominations but nothing for acting or directing, and Spielberg’s eighth nomination for directing.
Wall Street analysts see the recent Microsoft plans to buy Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion to be a precursor to other media giants—Disney, Netflix, Sony, etc.—getting in the increasing cash cow of gaming subscriptions. When cord-cutting led to declining television subs, which were the conglomerates’ previous cash cows, they’ve been moving towards online streaming and gaming subs during the early years of this era of the Metaverse and Internet 3.0.
Space Entertainment Enterprise, producers for Tom Cruise’s future feature film in space, won the rights to build a film studio in space that will dock on the commercial wing of the ISS.
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