Say what you will about Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Magnolia). Whether you are a fan of his directing or not, his movies feel like they are so much longer than they need to be. Painfully so, sometimes. He hooks you with his rich characters (often played by some of the finest actors in the industry) and what feels like is going to be a soft, gentle story. But then his movies tend to drift aimlessly, going down so many different wormholes before finally arriving at an unsatisfying conclusion. Such is the case with Licorice Pizza, a boy meets girl, coming-of-age story that is likely to earn some Oscar nominations despite its waning story and crawl to the finish line.
Category Archives: Paul Thomas Anderson
Phantom Thread (2017)
Daniel Day-Lewis (The Last of the Mohicans, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) is the Brett Favre, Sugar Ray Leonard, or Michael Jordan of acting. I say that for two reasons. He’s the best at what he does (and there aren’t many out there who would disagree, and even if they tried, they wouldn’t have much of a foot to stand on), but also because he threatens to, and often does, retire from his craft, only to, after a non-predetermined set of time, return to peak performance. He retired from stage acting in 1989 when he walked off the stage during a production of Hamlet. After 1997’s The Boxer, he took up cobbling for five years (where he made exactly one pair of shoes before Martin Scorsese pulled him out of retirement to star opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Gangs of New York, a film that netted him his third Best Actor Oscar nomination at the time. He then went into hiding for another three years before