I'm probably the right age to appreciate the period detail and shaggy dog approach that Paul Thomas Anderson takes in this disheveled 2021 comedy set in 1973. Applying the ideal baby boomer soundtrack, he channels filmmakers like Hal Ashby ("Harold & Maude") and Robert Altman ("Nashville") with a series of meandering offbeat scenes inhabited by a gallery of equally offbeat characters. The focus is on the embattled love story between the characters played winningly by Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman, but Anderson's scattershot direction takes the characters all over LA interfacing with unexpected people like a hardened Lucille Ball (Christine Ebersole), a drunken William Holden (Sean Penn), and a psychotic Jon Peters (a wild turn by Bradley Cooper). The movie does run too long, and the Japanese restaurant scenes were a bit too racially smug for me.
Review of Licorice Pizza
