Licorice Pizza feels like a collection of scenes from different movies featuring the same shaggy characters that form an impeccable snapshot of a certain period in time at a certain place. It’s at its best when it moves away from the sketchy/lightly cringe teen fantasy movie scenes and focuses on the “loser” characters’ escapades and attempts to make something of themselves, even if they don’t know what that something is because they’re too young, too lazy, too apathetic, or any combination of the three.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “It is worth seeing for Bradley Cooper’s cameo scenes alone. His are pulled from a comedy of errors featuring these characters and he captures the coked up energy and manic drive of what I conjure in my mind palace when I think 70s producer.”
“I promise I will never become a supervillain and try to kill you.”
Spider-Man: No Way Home is the realization of a fever dream/premonition I had the night before seeing the first Spider-Man movie in theaters all those years ago.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “I want to sit down and explain this movie to 11 year old me, watch the brains drip out of their nose and ears, then cease to exist.”
It’s the same ol West Side Story, just more authentically realized on film and lavish than ever before. With Spielberg’s command of the camera, dynamic choreography, and a hefty budget to craft a 1950s NYC, the show is injected with a mix of vibrancy and a classic Hollywood mobility that keeps it thriving and alive.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “It’s been a while since I’ve seen a version of West Side Story, but the Jets are so totally the obvious villains by the end of the show and no amount of slick attitude or jazzy snaps can change that. A pox on both these street gangs? Nah, a pox on the Jets and the Jets alone.”
A real-time examination of grief and forgiveness between four award-worthy actors. It is capital-D Dramatic like the ending scene of a Twilight Zone episode or just, you know, a serious Off-Broadway play, but it works so well. Watching masterful performances, each of them flitting through a suite of emotions (with melancholic as the base) over the short runtime left me bummed, a little bit dead inside, and hopeful. These are good things.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “Yes, you can watch this drama that’s played completely straight with Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass and make all kinds of connections if you want. Literally no one can stop you. You are unstoppable.”
A gruesome, bonkers throwback to (or parody of?) old giallo films and, like, early 2000s tv movies caught with the juicy cinematic eye of James Wan. Or we could just call it James Wan’s Evil Dead 2. Or both! Or everything. It’s everything. It’s my everything. It’s a part of me now.
The plethora of ridiculous ideas, ripped directly from the dreams I have while experiencing sleep paralysis, vary in tone, genre, and even film in which it seemingly has any right to exist in. It is truly a raging psychokinetic romp that didn’t let Hollywood take that away from it, which I cannot help but respect (worship?). I hated adored this thing.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “Is this camp? Schlock? Camp Schlock? A John Wick horror curiosity? Comedy of the year? An exercise in trolling from the director of The Conjuring? It is all those things and nothing less.”
Card gambling and casinos function as a sort of purgatory for a man with “moral weight” in this darker and more timely than expected character study. A safe prison of his choosing, in which he can exist away from the cycles of reality like revenge and hate. Those cycles are just outside, though, scratching at the door. I’m trying very hard to write like Paul Schrader and I think I probably failed. Good movie, though.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “I learned a lot about card counting, blackjack, poker, torture, casino culture, and Abu Ghraib.”
A bloody, messy blast of a comic book movie that peppers in substantial emotional beats for these cannon fodder oddballs amidst all the carnage, chaos and wit. It feels like it’s pure James Gunn in a way that Guardians of the Galaxy can’t really approach. Both, however, share a common, simple thesis statement: the outcasts, the downtrodden, the misunderstood rats and the weasel things that have killed 27 children all have purpose and worth.
One thing I really appreciated, surprisingly, is the treatment of a character from the original Suicide Squad movie: Rick Flag, y’all!! Harley is always sort of core (and amazing) Harley from one movie to another, but Rick Flag gets to show an evolution of character from the 2016 film to this one. From wooden soldier to big damn hero who seems to have found a place among the outcasts he leads. While I went into the movie not caring about Flag living or dying, that changed substantially through the course of events. Beyond him, we are made to care about most of these these ‘losers’ that make it past the 20 minute mark, from Polka Dot Man to Ratcatcher 2, to even cosmic gumbo Starro the Conqueror.
My spoiler-filled VHS cover pull-quote:
“They killed my mate Captain Boomerang and, like a boomerang, I can only hope he comes back around somehow. I salute his noble severed arm, holding his boomerang high. All names are letters, dickhead!”
Time is a flat circle. Here we are, twenty-five years later, saying similar things about Lebron’s Space Jam that the critics did about Jordan’s: uninspired, stupid, not enough Marvin the Martian, who is the best Looney Tune. But we were young back then. Children wearing those 90s “street” Looney Tunes shirts who enjoyed “stupid,” “uninspired” things. And now, we have a fondness for Space Jam.
Perhaps we have become the very thing we swore to destroy: old people with opinions.
The added corporate synergy is the real outlying negative in A New Legacy, as Warner Bros. just dumped cameos from every one of their owned properties into this thing because branding. But, like this year’s Mortal Kombat reboot, this is very much the exact same movie they made in 1996 just made in 2021. If Space Jam were never made before now, this is still the movie we would have gotten today. The trend of trading in nostalgia that’s been so successful this past decade, applied to an idea about the most famous basketball player of our time playing basketball with the Looney Tunes, can only end with a product like this in 2021. We have brought this on ourselves, and that’s okay. It doesn’t really matter what I think, though. How the children remember A New Legacy 25 years from now will truly determine the movie’s, uh oh, legacy and worth.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “Pennywise the Clown could have used a bit more screentime and development. Like, he probably wants to tear LeBron’s son Dom’s arm off, drag him into the sewer and eat him, of course, but that’s not really explored here so why even have him in the crowd at the basketball game?”
Edgar Wright brings his brand of humor to the documentary format by exploring the infinite career hills and valleys of the iconic, weird, and long-running pop duo Sparks, a band I had no idea existed until seeing this movie at a special film fest showing near me. Which is wild because the talking heads in this documentary are members of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Duran Duran, New Order, The Go-Gos, Beck, and actors, comedians, and writers like Neil Gaiman (no actual Talking Heads, though). These successful artists knew about them, so now I feel have to pretend that I, too, always knew about these two quirky brother musicians who were more popular in Europe so I can lord it over people who don’t even know who they are.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “Oh my rock and roll christ, you don’t know Sparks? Then you don’t know music! They have influenced literally every pop musician since the early 1970s. I can’t believe you haven’t listened to Sparks. They’re all about the ART, man! Don’t even speak to me until you’ve at least streamed Kimono My House and Propaganda. Get some education.”
Disclaimer: One of Sparks’ songs is featured in the 1986 movie Rad, which I did somehow see when I was young in the early 00s. I just didn’t have the musical permanence to correctly retain that song amidst all the sick BMX style bike tricks breeding in my brain.
Dark, big screen band-aids for my depression that sometimes smell a little weird but I love anyway. They’ve been away for a while, but I see them now in their empty parking lots, popping corn and pressing the button that releases cheese onto the nachos and into your heart.
The people talking during the most important part have been successfully shushed, though we have chosen the squeakiest seats. Someone spilled their popcorn, kernels tumbling towards the screen. They’ll pick them up after. No doubt they’ll do it again next time. Always. It’s expected.
We are flickering with the screen, now. Still during the quiet parts.
My VHS cover pull-quote, scrawled on the weird and frightening backside of the theater, where those direct exits are that disorient you and put you outside who knows how far from your car:
“The earliest movie ticket I still have from my youth is for a showing of Shrek in 2001, which I feel has dictated my life up to this point and far beyond. To the grave. Even beyond that.”
Nick Perilli 