19 Comments
Dec 23, 2021Liked by Scott Tobias

I caught Don’t Look Up at the Alamo Drafthouse last week, and if anything 2.5 stars is generous. Social satire is tricky, because it needs to be absurd while still having characters behave in a fundamentally believable way. I didn’t believe 90% of what the characters in Don’t Look Up did. Do I believe that some people would live in denial? Sure. Do I believe that literally no one would take this seriously, including the New York Times? No.

It felt less like a coherent movie and more like McKay’s frustration about covid and climate change devolving into a rant. I get it, I’m frustrated about those things too, but watching this movie was a bit too much like that one friend’s Facebook profile that is nothing but angry political links, memes, and commentary.

On a more positive note, can we talk about how wonderful Nightmare Alley was?

Expand full comment
founding

I really enjoyed LICORICE PIZZA, especially that truck scene, but did anyone else feel like PTA was deliberately trying to evoke TAXI DRIVER with that campaign thread? Glad that was a bit of a red herring.

Expand full comment
founding

What a great slate of reviews to end the year on! Unfortunately, each star for Licorice Pizza is a searing reminder that cinemas here in Quebec have been shuttered indefinitely (absolutely ghoulish of the new variant to ascend around the release of a new PTA). Keeping hope alive that cases will be under control by the time Drive My Car arrives on the banks of the St. Lawrence.

I've been tuned out of Adam McKay features since The Big Short, which I found too self-important for my taste (this is too harsh, but I remember it as the celeb Imagine video but for dumbing down 2008?), sounds like not much has changed... I'm curious how it would play now, taste for this sort of thing has shifted a lot since 2015.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you both Keith and Scott!

Expand full comment

I dug the humor and general vibe of RESURRECTIONS--the whole first hour rips--but once the plot revved up and the action got going it lost me a bit in the chaos. I'm not sure it goes anywhere this franchise hasn't gone before, and the specific developments it trots out struck me as kind of shrug-worthy. Likewise the action set pieces, which (at first blush) didn't even rise to the fluidity and distinctiveness of the APU battles in REVOLUTIONS, much less RELOADED's highway chase or the groundbreaking stuff in the first film. But I respect the effort enough (plus I'm confident I missed quite a bit) to take another stab at it in January.

Expand full comment
founding

RE Licorice Pizza -- I think the film has more of a narrative arc than people give it credit for. Throughout the story, Alana feels like Gary lowers her social cred, so keeps looking for higher and higher status men and careers to make her feel valuable. Gary counters this by trying to raise his own status through his antics and business ventures. When Alana finds out how Benny Safdie's fear of losing face ruins a relationship with someone he loves, Alana realizes that she's essentially doing the same thing. Gary sees this for himself when Alana's missing from the pinball palace's opening night. And that's what makes the climax such a beautiful thing.

Expand full comment
Jan 13, 2022·edited Jan 13, 2022

I just saw Licorice Pizza for the second time...and Alana is definitely 28 years old, not 25, and it is her looming countdown to 30 that motivates most of her choices in the film. When Gary first asks her age, Alana has a slight hesitation before saying, "...25." On a second viewing, it is clear that she is making this number up. Soon after, at home with her family, she goes off on a tirade about how her sisters think she is going nowhere even though she's almost 30, which really means Alana fears she is going nowhere when she's almost 30. Later, when Jon Peters asks her age, she answers, "28" before remembering her fiction and correcting, "I mean 25." The first time I saw this, I almost thought I had misheard the line, but accidentally adding three years to one's age is not a mistake human beings make. So we have a woman pushing 30 who is desperately trying to find a future for herself, who finds that future in a not-old-enough 15-year-old, so pushes against that by trying to find other futures: through a successful and old-enough (but not Jewish enough) actor; through acting and an older actor; through volunteer work, etc. I know from experience that being 28 is very different than 25, when you can still be screwing around. But by 30, you are supposed to have your life together, to be an adult, so by 28 you are actively trying to make that happen. For Alana, in the end, the gravitational pull to Gary, and his many truly positive qualities (which are vividly highlighted by her harrowing dinner with Wachs - who has a thousand good intentions and zero honesty - and his boyfriend), is too strong to resist. Although I truly enjoyed this film, and it is in my top 10 of the year, I have deep misgivings about the choice of Gary's age. Couldn't he have been 17 and very little have been altered? 15 is just SO young, and 13 years at that age is SUCH a huge age difference. I'm not sure what the film is saying about it, and I'm also not sure what it is saying that almost every review I've read lists Alana's age as 25 and ignores the implications of her actual age.

Expand full comment