Licorice Pizza
Fine, a good director deserves a break from brilliance, this is like an inside joke for particular people in the audience (or himself). Like the protagonist does, and then nobody laughs, not even the object of that joke. Just stunned silence.
Similar to A Serious Man, but the protagonist was at least an audience surrogate. Here, both protagonist are kinda weird, there’s not anyone else to properly follow. And the jokes are not as good either, there is no “Culture Clash” here.
The “Strei-sand” bit from the trailers is there, just as a bizarre bit. Like most of the film, really, a series of bizarre bits, like uncommented diary fragments released to the public.
There’s a bit part for Sean Penn as Brad Pitt in Babylon. Tom Waits just weirds it out, as one does, doing a Sam Peckinpah. Bennie Safdie plays a closeted Harvey Milk. DiCaprio’s dad plays himself (!), a groovy hippie. The male protagonist is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s kid. The female protagonist is played by someone called the same as her character, and so is her whole family. Apparently, she’s in a band named after her too. There’s a thanks to Robert Downey Senior in the end. Just weirdness all around.
The male protagonist’s mom is the Waitress, from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia! The only one that doesn’t make me enraged on the spot, she could have used a nicer, chunkier character.
Both protagonists are hustlers, that’s why they stay together in the end. This is technically paedophilia, but since the dude is mature for his age, and the girl behaves like a teenager, they seem equally unprepared for commitment. It’s not exploitative for either party.
Not sure what’s the Heretic connection, maybe it’s a coincidence?
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.