Licorice Pizza 2021 is how PTA beats Besson at his own game, while getting a Best Picture Oscar nomination

  Blender Dumbass
October 25, 2025

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#LicoricePizza #PaulThomasAnderson #PTA #film #review #movies #cinemastodon

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As I explained in my article on the matter a quality of a film could be measured in how well it "corrupts" the audience. And being a motherfucking genius Paul Thomas Anderson decided to show everybody, who's the boss. His 2021 film Licorice Pizza which was nominated for the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Oscars. And has a fairly decent 90% score on Rottent Tomatoes, is doing the same thing as Luc Besson's Leon: The Professional, but better. To put it lightly, it shows a romance between a minor and an adult. And it says that "it's okay, actually".

The first technique that Paul Thomas Anderson uses to pull this off, is that he gender-swaps, making the kid a boy and the adult a woman. And also he makes the boy kind of creepy, in a way, which balances out the creepiness. In a way the woman is almost a victim in some instances. But it never goes anywhere further than some harmless social awkwardness. So that we would not hate on them actually ending up being together by the end of the film.

Paul Thomas Anderson's frequent collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman died from drug overdose in 2014. Which kind of made a bummer out of his movies, because Philip Seymour Hoffman was a motherfucker of an actor. He was arguably the best actor ever. But then not everything was completely ruined, because Philip Seymour Hoffman had a son. And that son was approaching the age of the boy character in this movie. The boy is 15. So we get a motherfucker of a teenage actor ( he is physically too big to be called a child ) Cooper Hoffman playing the main male character of this movie.

To make the whole child-adult relation less creepy, Paul Thomas Anderson made out of this teenage boy a fucking business protege. He is serious. He owns a restaurant, which he bought from his money as a child-actor. And he is all and all an amazing entrepreneur. By his age of 15 he quite established himself.

The woman is played by Alana Haim alongside her entire family as her family in the movie. Like literally, her sisters in the movie are played by Alana's actual sisters. And her mother and father are played by her actual mother and father. Which I thought to be interesting. Also her father does speak some actual Hebrew in the movie, because they are all supposed to be Jewish, who lived in Israel before that. And that is also true about her real family.

So that Alana character ( who in the movie is also Alana ) is working in the local school. Hugh...

That is until our protagonist decides to ask her out for a date. And weirdly enough she agrees after giving a lengthy protest. She then proceeds to pretend that they are not dating. And instead gets hired by him in his company which sells water-beds. Because he is 15 and she is 25 and that means that they are not dating, he is kind of free to try out with other girls. She kind of even encourages him to do so. But then at one point he meets this girl played by Isabelle Kusman who you may know from Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans. And our Alana grows full of jealousy. Even though they aren't dating or anything.

Speaking of Spielberg. Paul Thomas Anderson used two Spielberg's daughters in small roles for this movie. We have Sasha Spielberg ( known also as Buzzy Lee ) at the start of the film. She is kind of seen at the background, sitting at a table. And then later, we have a full on scene with dialogue and everything, with another girl played by Destry Spielberg. What is this obsession with young Jewish girls, Paul?

Destry, being not too much younger than Alana, through her scene, implies that our 15 year old protagonist had pleasure with more than just Alana, as his adult lady. It is heavily implied that she gave him a hand-job at some point. I wonder how cringe that movie is to watch to Steven Spielberg. Even if the conspiracy theory I outlined in my review of The BFG is true.

The movie treats the multitude of child actors in the film with absolute respect. A lot of them are minor characters ( pun intended ) but the camera will treat them as major characters. We get cool ass dolly shots on them. We get cool ass suspense building moments with them. And the end credits includes a montage of their faces, with the appropriate actor names, mixed in with some major stars and Destry Spielberg. Though the montage didn't include Sasha Spielberg. PTA WTF?

The movie pulls off a Hollywood ( slightly sanitized ) version of the legally dangerous stunt that Sivan Levy pulls off in a Israeli film S#x Acts. Alana shows her tits to the 15 year old. In this movie, it is shot from behind. So we don't see that they weren't somehow covered. In the Israeli film there was no hiding anything. And the kid was even younger. He was 13. I bet Alana Haim knew Sivan Levy somehow. Both appear to be Hebrew speakers.

On the other side, we get a scene where Alana is tired and appears sleeping. And our 15 year old protagonist is getting turned on. He reaches for her tit, but stops his hand 1.5 cm away from it. He didn't touch her, so it's not child-porn, lol. PTA knows what he is doing. But on that note, PTA had more balls than even Luc Besson. Because in the end, the two have a genuine french kiss. And the movie ends on them becoming an official couple, so to speak. As in, it end on them in love and stuff...

Can we say that Paul Thomas Anderson deserves the title of the best audience corrupter so far? Or he needs to outdo Luca Guadagnino first?

Happy Hacking!!!

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c:0 @Troler
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  Troler c:0



Here I am watching "Summer of '42" and seeing the same exact thing!


From Urban dictionary:
1. Very hot girls.
2. Very smart girls.
3. Very cheap girls.
4. Girls from Israel
5. Girls whose Mother is a Jewish girl.


Aren't L. Guadagnino movies "visceral emotional roller-coasters that are not afraid to be sincere"?

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