Tatiana has just told me she doesn’t want to attend this evening’s Licorice Pizza screening because the romantic couple in question, played by 29 year-old Alana Haim and 18 year-old Cooper Hoffman, isn’t attractive enough. They don’t have that swoony sexy-romantic charisma thing going on, she said.

“At least one of them should be attractive,” she emphasized, “but both of them unattractive? Oh no…”

Los Angeles Friendo: “This is like the reverse of Frankie and Johnny, that 1991 relationship drama with Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. Everyone said it was totally unbelievable that drop-dead beautiful Pfeiffer would be cast as a plain-Jane waitress…it didn’t wash.”

Back-east Friendo said a similar thing earlier today. Licorice Pizza, he said, “sounds like Paul Thomas Anderson‘s version of Moonrise Kingdom.” HE to Back-east Friendo: “Yeah. With two zero-charisma leads. One pushing 30, the other in his late teens.”

Back-east Friendo: “That’s the Moonrise formula! Two young lead characters that no one in his right mind could give less of a fuck about.”

Does anyone remember a 1945 film called The Enchanted Cottage? Robert Young played a disfigured war veteran and Dorothy Maguire was a very plain and (it is suggested) homely woman. They fall in love with each other, and gradually they become more and more attractive because we’re seeing their features through their eyes.

Another unlikely pair came along in Robert Altman‘s A Perfect Couple (’79). Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin as a vaguely dorky-looking couple, age-separated by 20 years.

Can anyone recall other funny-looking twosomes in noteworthy films?