Thread by @Honors_Zombie

Simply marvelous, and makes me understand what I'm missing about this movie. As neither a Pynchon guy or a dad, the heft of the struggle of protecting a child and a legacy and history coining the new century as it was written, from a guy who lived it...
theringer.com/2025/09/24/mov…

I'm missing the requisite gnaw. Because he's chosen a subject I don't think he's interested in as anything but a reflection of the movie version of itself (PTA is most assuredly *not* a revolutionary), he's telling a political story in a functionally apolitical fashion.

The beauty of those landscapes, the tricky tracking shots through revolutionary actions, the beautiful interplay of unnatural light and haunting sunsets; it's a very cinematic version of something that probably felt cinematic to the people committing necessary crime.

But he himself falls into the trap of fetishizing the struggle as he tries to introduce hardcore reality to his characters by desexualizing them. Like Bob he's after something that never really existed. 'The revolution', such as it was, was short lived and quickly sidelined

So now it's real organizers, food bank workers, and fringe politicians (all six of them or whatever) who are left to try and exact change, macro and micro. But as every fucking cop will tell you, we're back to a place of chaotic unpredictability.

Anderson wants to capture that, but he's doing it through a deliberately stoned Pynchonian cartoon that happens to be as gorgeous as anything Chuck Jones ever drew, but... when there's real bullets flying it feels like not quite enough.

The film is comfortably slotted in a post-revolutionary idiom, but I'll be real: leaving Teyana Taylor behind for DiCaprio was The Wrong Move. Like Costa-Gavras in Z he makes the mistake of aligning sexual deviance with violent deviants.

Bob is a creature of passion, but Lockjaw is the real freak. And obviously there's a tension worth exploring there, but I didn't leave satisfied with the transference of lust or fascination to real love. It's a dad movie, and I guess some dads have to admit defeat before fantasy.

(This is turning out way fucking longer than I planned but I mean this is why I love PTA, he does bring this shit out in me.) The imbalance of moral responsibility, love and lust in Licorice Pizza is enabled by the hazy Charles Burnsian quality of the piece. The 70s as Mars.

The age gap stuff never bothered me because it was just so obviously a movie with a reality cobbled together from 70s movies and 70s irresponsibility. It's ugly, sure, which is why a lot of people looked away, but unlike Boogie Nights it's a vision of a utopian orphanage

People who are allowed to make the mistakes that destroy the characters in Boogie Nights by virtue of having a little freedom and a world not so anxious to crash down on them. Fuck it, I'm just putting this one letterboxd