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Houston, we have a problem with the getting-on Bradley Cooper playing a significantly younger Jon Peters in Licorice Pizza. Cooper’s performance as the street-hardened Peters, who had a turbulent upbringing, is amusingly manic and overbearing but physically he’s too old.

Licorice Pizza is highly detailed and exacting about the way stuff looked in the early ‘70s. Wardrobe, cop cars, store signs, hair stylings — it gets damn near everything right.

And yet Peters, born in June ‘45 and therefore 28 during the gas crisis of ‘73, is played by an actor who was born in January ‘75. Filming happened between August and November of 2020, when Cooper was 45 or 17 years older than Peters was at the time. Cooper probably takes care of himself better than 90% of your typical mid-40somethings out there, but during shooting he didn’t look especially younger than his years.

There’s no shame in the handsome Cooper not having the face of a late 20something. It’s just a fact. The casting might have worked if Cooper had been the 30something Silver Linings Playbook guy, but that was a decade ago.

Are you telling me that Cooper’s dark-haired Prince Valiant wig doesn’t emphasize those stern, filled-out, no-longer-young facial features?

PTA obviously believed that Cooper could have fun with the excessive Peters machismo thing (and he did) and presumably wanted a name-brand actor with a strong personality in the role, but the simple physical reality jettisons the illusion.

Three months after catching it on a huge Westwood screen, I re-watched Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Licorice Pizza on a subtitled DVD screener. From the comfort of my living room…me and the cats.

It played a little better this time. I’ve been kicking it around and thinking it through all these weeks, and I still say that the finale in which Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman finally embrace like they mean it…this is still the best scene.

Yes, Pizza is still episodic and meandering, but that’s the idea and I get that now. And I still respect the courage that Anderson showed when he included those two scenes involving John Michael Higgins‘ Jerry Frick and his two (i.e., successive) Japanese wives. The courage, I mean, to say “presentism can blow me…the ’70s were the ’70s, and I’m going to stay true to how things were back then.”

But I have to say that the whole Jon Peters sequence rubbed me the wrong way…again.

If Hoffman’s “Gary Valentine” is one thing besides a good actor, he’s an ambitious businessman (water beds, pinball machines). He knows that a business owner has to keep it together and respect the rules of commerce and keep things at par with his customers. And yet while installing a water bed at the home of a semi-famous guy who’s dating Barbara Streisand, Gary decides that Peters’ bullying manner and asshole personality is bad news and that he has to be somehow flipped off. And so, despite Peters having said there’ll be hell to pay if Gary messes his house up, Gary pulls the watering hose out of the bed and tosses it on the floor, and then he and Alana blow out of Peters’ home and jump into the big truck.

What does Gary think will happen as a result? That the hyper-aggressive Peters will just forget about it? He knows that Peters will hunt him down and turn his life into a raging sea. It’s therefore a completely idiotic scene, and one that completely undermines Gary’s character, and yet Anderson makes it almost entirely about everyone being short of gas.

That aside, Pizza seemed a slightly better film than when I saw it at the Village Westwood on Saturday, November 6th. It’s a much more interesting and humanistic and life-like film than The Power of the Dog.

Created by DK Global’s Panish Shea and Boyle Ravipudi (or is it Panish Boyle and Shea Ravipudi?), this is a digital reenactment of the tragic shooting of the late Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust on 10.21.21. It illustrates a 2.15.22 TMZ story about Baldwin named as a defendant in a wrongful death lawsuit filed by Hutchins’ family. We see an Alec Baldwin-resembling video-game character pull a pistol out of a left-shoulder holster, aim it in the direction of Hutchins and BLAM! Baldwin has claimed he never pulled the trigger — that it went off on its own.

[Footnote: No, I don’t understand why the coding insists on those large white spaces between the video frames.]

Windfall is a Netflix original that will begin streaming on 3.18. Written, semi-significantly, by Se7en‘s Andrew Kevin Walker, it’s apparently a three-hander — Lily Collins, Jason Segel and Power of the Dog‘s Jesse Plemons. My immediate suspicion is that Windfall is most likely a problem. (Maybe I’m wrong.) I’m posting this because the recently rotund Plemons clearly dropped a few pounds to play an arrogant billionaire (“You think being a rich white guy is easy? It sucks!”). Directed and written by Charlie (son of Malcolm) McDowell.

When it comes to handing out Oscars, the dumbest tendency among Academy voters is to honor the “most acting” — shouting, weeping, ranting, hair-pulling, howling. The second dumbest is a tendency to favor performances that involve heavy makeup and/or weight alteration.

Southern friendo to HE: 14 times the winners of makeup Oscars have won because they altered the appearance of a nominated actor (lead or supporting).  Eight of those wins correlated with the actor winning. I’m going back to the 80s. But in terms of recent history, it’s five out of seven.

HE to Southern Friendo: What are the recents again?

Southern friendo to HE: The five are La Vie en Rose, Iron Lady, Les Miserables, Dallas Buyers Club and Darkest Hour. All I’m saying is that if Eyes of Tammy Faye wins makeup, Jessica Chastain has a damn good shot at winning Best Actress,

HE to Southern Friendo: That’s ridiculous!

Southern friendo to HE: Nevertheless.

HE to Southern Friendo: Matthew McConaughey lost weight for Dallas Buyers Club. No makeup.

Southern Friendo to HE: A friend did the makeup on Jared Leto and he won. Doesn’t matter about the weight. it’s a statistic, plain and simple. Like Film Editing nominations correlating with Best Pic winners.

HE to Southern Friendo: My God, the stupidity! Not you — the stupid Academy members who vote for makeup acting.

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Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone is actually predicting (or half-predicting by way of an intuitive feeling) that Spencer‘s Kristen Stewart might be…well, a slightly more likely winner of the Best Actress Oscar race than some of us are supposing. Or so she suspects. Nobody knows anything, of course.

HE reaction: Olivia Colman won’t happen because (a) she recently won and (b) the stolen doll. Nobody’s really knocked out by Nicole Kidman’s decent performance as Lucille Ball — she’s fine but calm down. Jessica Chastain‘s Tammy Faye Bakker is…I actually don’t have any particular feeling for this good-enough performance, one way or the other. But I’m sensing meh. As for Stewart, she does a good job of playing a mad, haunted princess but Spencer itself is AWFUL.

That leaves Penelope Cruz and ONLY Penelope Cruz as the winner.

The Stewart comeback narrative (snubbed by SAG) is, I’ll admit, a narrative that the others don’t have. Also she’s youngish, hottish and gay. If she wins this would be stunning, staggering, unprecedented.

Friendo to HE: “Cruz is not winning. Zero shot. It’s between Kidman, Chastain and Stewart.”

HE to friendo: “If Cruz doesn’t win it’ll be because of sheer sloth of the part of Academy members. Too fucking lazy to pop the screener in and simply watch Parallel Mothers. Dilletantes!”

The jokes, material and general pizazz factor may be engaging and even hilarious come March 27th, but we all understand the reasons why Amy Schumer, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes have been hired to co-host this year’s Academy Awards ceremony.

One, the wokeness factor — three women, two BIPOCS, the right kind of progressive attitude. (Don”t even dispute this.). And two, Film Twitter will leave them alone while any dude (or dudes) who might have been chosen would have been picked apart and savaged for this or that past misdeed, one way or the other.

“Every choice Hollywood makes, whether it’s hosting a show or casting a movie, is done out of fear — fear of bad headlines, fear of Twitter, fear of that wave of hysteria that made them get rid of their host in the first place.” — Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, just a few minutes ago.

After the surprise Best Picture victory by 2016’s Moonlight (an identity-politics win that suffered from an inconclusive and strangely cast third act), progressive Academy members told themselves “no more Best Picture wins by white-guy directors!….the worm has turned!”

The following year Guillermo del Toro‘s The Shape of Water took the prize…a sexy monster flick about a homely and isolated woman’s sexuality, and created by the Mexican Orson Welles, an enormously well-liked fellow.

Eureka! We’re on a whole new path! The world transformed!

And then Green Book won the following year, and your extreme wokesters and BIPOCs totally freaked out…”Eeeeee!” A period flick (1962) about racial rapprochment between a thuggish Italian racist and an elegant gay pianist (essentially a parent-child road movie) was adored by Hollywood Elsewhere and tens of thousands of average sane people throughout the industry and the country but widely condemned by Film Twitter. To Spike Lee and many others on his side of the divide, the Green Book white-guy factor was intolerable…and yet it won! Wheeeeee! Wokesters can go fuck themselves!

But that was it. Older white guy movies were henceforth unofficially banned from serious consideration. Hence the dismissal of Martin Scorsese‘s brilliant The Irishman and the triumph of Parasite, despite the drunken scammers nonsensically letting the fired maid into the house during a rainstorm.

This was followed by last year’s triumph of Chloe Zhao‘s Nomadland — proper gender focus, ethnically correct, white guy characters strictly marginalized.

It follows that Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog, a movie that average viewers are mostly (almost entirely?) dismissive of, will win for Best Picture and Best Director. Not because anyone “out there” cares about this grim, tortured, glacially-paced melodrama about closeted gayness on the open range, but because of the “Campion rules!” factor.

From Sasha Stone‘s recent Awards Daily assessment…

Adrien Lyne’s Deep Water (Hulu, 3.18) may be an intriguing sexual thriller, but it seems like an odd yesteryear thing — filmed before almost anyone on the planet had even heard of Covid ‘19, and a full year before Donald Trump decisively lost to Joe Biden in the election of early November 2020. And of course, the Ben Affleck-Ana de Armas affair was just kicking into gear, and Bennifer II was far beyond the horizon.

Due respect and sincere condolences upon the passing of producer-director Ivan Reitman, who was 75. This is a huge boomer death — one that will make a lot of people feel anxious and shaken, and prompt them to take a deep breath and wonder what might be around the corner.

Reitman’s hottest period was between the late ’70s and the late ’90s, and his biggest film, of course, was the original Ghostbusters (’84), which most of the world adored and which I hated from the get-go. And I really, really hated Ghostbusters II.

Reitman made his first big mark as the producer of National Lampoon’s Animal House (’78), which exploded all over — it was the first time the SNL brand (and particularly John Belushi) connected massively in movie theatres.

Reitman was first, last and always a director and producer of mainstream popular entertainments. He always sought to please, his stuff was always audience-friendly, and his instincts were not absurdly anti-highbrow but they were certainly tidy and middle-class. He was a smooth operator (especially from the mid ’80s on) and he knew how to coax and encourage good comic performances, but he never, ever went over any audience member’s head.

Which Reitman-directed films do I think were exceptionally fine or which I at least really liked (i.e., laughed with) and went “wow, that was really pleasurable and a profound home run”? Answer: None.

But early on Reitman made two dopey, infectious comedies of immaturity, Meatballs (’79) and Stripes (’81)…films that had a cool Bill Murray spirit…a stoner feeling, a fuck-it vibe. I was also satisfied by the three Arnold Schwarzenegger films — Twins, Kindergarten Cop and Junior. And I was half-okay with Dave, Father’s Day and Draft Day.

Can anyone name a line of dialogue from a Reitman film that has lived on for decades? I’ve just thought of one from Stripes — Warren Oates saying “lighten up, Francis.”

Reitman knew exactly how to make successful “Ivan Reitman films” but he never directed or produced a truly brilliant or profound knockout, or an emotional powerhouse in the vein of, say, Heaven Can Wait or Groundhog Day or Planes, Trains & Automobiles or As Good as It Gets or Broadcast News.

Okay, I take that back — Up In The Air (’09), which his director-writer son Jason did an excellent job with and which Reitman Sr. produced, was in that elite fraternity.

Reitman’s instincts were kind of Ron Howard-ish, only a bit more anarchic or semi-experimental or stir-fried. He wasn’t really a “heart” guy (not like Howard or Jim Brooks or even John Hughes) except in the case of Junior, a comedy about a guy who gets pregnant.

I’ll say more tomorrow and I’m sure I’ll modify what I’ve just written later this evening. I’m very sorry about Reitman’s passing; 75 isn’t that old.

#RIPIvanReitman https://t.co/fCg4umrYJN

— Erik Childress (@EriktheMovieman) February 14, 2022