Licorice Pizza

The bummer for "Licorice Pizza" is that Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman didn't get nominations for their acting. It was the first film role for each, ...

Oscar nominees “King Richard” and “Licorice Pizza” are imperfect films, but they accurately show what it takes to succeed in California, says Joe Mathews.

But what both films get right are their depictions of what it takes to achieve success in a place like California. This state demands that you cross lines and behave unreasonably. “That’s what I’m meant to do.” “I’m a showman,” Gary says, in explaining one escapade. They break and bend the law, and they mold the truth to their wills. No recent movie scene so well captures the pure joy of recklessness and risk-taking. We’re here to make you rich,” he says to one of many tennis establishments who dismisses his entreaties.

For his ninth feature film, writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Punch Drunk Love, Inherent Vice, There Will Be Blood, Magnolia) turns his ...

Their chemistry is natural and relaxed. This is Anderson at the height of his creative powers. The star-studded, veteran supporting cast includes cameos by Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, Tom Waits, Maya Rudolph and John C. Reilly.

Fall in love with our February cover star, Alana Haim's starring film debut in director Paul Anderson's award-winning comedy. By Sabrina Park.

"As the director of the film, there isn’t a scene I don’t think [Alana]'s anything short of a miracle in. Imagine that your sheer existence alone inspires an esteemed director to base an award-winning film on you. Paul Anderson's acclaimed 2021 film, Licorice Pizza, stars the muses themselves—namely BAZAAR cover star and musician Alana Haim—in their collective acting debut as the Kane family.

Paul Thomas Anderson's script is the loosest, most romantic one he's ever written, but what makes it Oscar worthy is everything happening just beneath the ...

The illegality of Alana and Gary’s relationship is only the most superficial way in which the different, confusing, and sometimes backward mentality of the time influences the story. In the 2004 romantic comedy Along Came Polly, Ben Stiller plays Reuben, a risk-assessment expert whose presumptions about adult life and relationships are shaken when he meets the wild and freewheeling Polly (Jennifer Aniston)—she’s the Gary to his Alana, making him uncomfortable in an often salutary way. In fact, their entire relationship exists in this realm of suspense and uncertainty: They have no clear direction together, they don’t know what they are to one another, Alana often finds Gary very annoying, and although he brings the idea of fate into the picture, confusion seems to be the real guiding principle. In Licorice Pizza, after Alana and Gary make up one last time (in the time frame of the film at least), it isn’t long before Gary is making her roll her eyes once again. In their encounter, Alana and Gary confront their opposing places in society directly. In slow motion, they come together and remain speechless, as though neither they nor PTA have a good word for what they are sharing. When Jack Holden rides off on his bike and ignores the fact that he’s let Alana fall behind, Gary sprints to her aid, worried only about her safety. The sea of differences that separate Alana and Gary render their relationship wholly nontraditional. They also seem to approach life very differently: He’s highly ambitious and confident about his prospects, while she almost entirely avoids thinking about the future. In writing Licorice Pizza, PTA lets go of the calculated, fat-free structure with which he approached Phantom Thread or even There Will Be Blood. He embraces his characters’ differences fully, without offering either an ever-after solution (as with the scheduled poisoning of Reynolds) or an absolute end (the death and destruction around Daniel Plainview). It is his most romantic film yet; a movie that cleverly reinvents the romantic comedy; a script that more than deserves the nod for Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars. “Whatever you do, do it carefully,” Alma warns Reynolds Woodcock in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Throughout the film, the young woman proves herself to be more confident, more self-assured, and more dangerous than she’d let on in that hotel restaurant where she and the older fashion designer first met. Their meet-cute begins with hostility as Alana rejects Gary’s advances, and ends with Alana still rolling her eyes, albeit with a smile on her face.

Do you think it's weird that I hang out with Gary and his friends all the time?” Alana asks. “It's whatever you think it is,” her sister Danielle responds ...

While Gary is not responsible for her own self-reclamation, he is her support, which is something that most women in the 1970s did not have. She finds purpose and a voice in a friendship, business partnership, and a will-they-won’t-they relationship where she must advocate for herself. The viewer gets slammed with the realization that Alana is floating in a world meant for her to drown, and her coming of age story is given floaties through the companionship of Gary, a grown-up teen – even through his lucrative water bed business. After Gary asks her out on a date in which Alana asks how he would pay for it, they run into a man her age, who slaps her in the butt. “Do you think it’s weird that I hang out with Gary and his friends all the time?” Alana (Alana Haim) asks, as she takes a moment to contemplate how she ended up surrounding herself with a group of 15-year-old teenagers. Set in the San Fernando Valley in 1973, “Licorice Pizza” tells the coming of age story of the twentysomething Alana. First introduced to the viewers, she meets the teenager Gary (Cooper Hoffman) at his high school.