4TH JANUARY 2022

RECORD 2 EMBRACING LICORICE PIZZA

Now taking business again, I got lucky to book a ticket to see this movie in 35mm. (Been in LA just once on a bus tour in my life, though) in an hour since it went dark in the room, I felt like I knew this city as myself. The magic of the world that Paul Thomas Anderson creates in his movies, whether it’s a pornindustry, city of angels in the 70s or some tangled family involved drama. The story of Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana Kane (Alana Haim, yes! The Haim band. I just love their fashion sense, not to mention the music) take us through strange events at days and nights and remind us of how it is to be young, sincere and present for every single silly and clever idea you have. The writing by Paul Thomas Anderson uses very American impulses and places, but you don’t have to take them in - the author leaves you some room to actually focus on other things and have the US context as a background. Alana is 25, so naturally seeing becoming friends with teenagers makes us think she is a teenager herself at heart and pretty lost as she doesn’t really wanna move forward (seeing her eagerly yelling at most of the people in the movie and running all around Los Angeles). However, there are plenty of moments when she takes care of things and that makes her a bit more real and I guess also complex (since there is another issue behind her being lost in life).


The colours of city lights, as well as the 70s patterns of interior place or blinding sun make you breathlessly follow the story as it has been done filming with tracking shots and  scenes where Gary and Alana are the only two (probably) running all the way for the duration of the movie, and having that scenography being blurred in their background. Every shot seems to be a memory of a moment that could have been yours in memory that you’d usually seize, and as Rose Weissman in Marvelous Mrs. Maisel tells her daughter to do when both happen to be in Paris, look around and understand where you are. Sadly, you seem to forget this feeling ever exists outside movie theatres these days in the constant promises of waiting longer for the much preferred conditions to come and postpone most of your life to god-knows-which-twenty-twenty, even if you are 17. How to be present in your life if you are being asked for a duty to let yourself wake up again when you are 30?

You skip it and you memorize it. I share now the worries my friend has been voicing toward the end of the previous year more and more often, to herself but out loud. The movie, as the director says himself, is based on real life stories heard or happened in a valley. Again, not my words, as Paul Thomas Anderson tells, this is a movie about the place that he loves, San Fernando valley, and that Alana Haim shares too. She has been working with the director before for their band’s music videos and has been neighbouring in the valley.


‘Moments’ is not a rare theme for films to be featured. Wild adventures of Hunter Thompson are both published and made into movies. How about the boring moments in the same place, because you are not fully vaccinated yet or didn’t get your QR-code fixed yet to travel? (So you can't just make a plan like Liz Gilbert - or can you?) You have your community, like in Italian for Beginners (2002), and come up with something that makes your memories every day different. So then in the end you just might end up in a different place too. Although is there a line of danger to stay in the illusion of the cinema? Going through tons of information the past November I realised that fiction and fictional movies were my only island of peace and ability to pull myself together to digest and get rid of all that was driving me mad (which is naturally not part of my harmonious state). I know (perhaps, it is a coincidence) I learnt to cry more when watching movies and appreciating moments in life without being sceptical about the lighting, script or the wardrobe when making this memory. If you remember a strange solution of a depressed character of Mel Gibson in film The Beaver (2011) to get inspired again, I came up with a solution to invent new ways that would accommodate this new flow I am in. 




Coming back to the Haim sisters,

Daniele explaining the song mentioned how sometimes you are not in a state to do things, you are depressed, you are lost, you are not there. So you won’t move anywhere either. But once you are back and ready - you are good, on your path and most importantly, taking your own time in doing so and your own way. But doing, you know.