My quick rating - 6,9/10. Popping on number 7 of the #Oscars2022 best pic nominees. Quick comment. This movie stars Alana Haim playing a sexual predator...or as they are calling it, young adult, traversing their first loves in San Fernando Valley, 1973. She is 25, and the first guy or kid she interacts with is 15, played by Cooper Hoffman. It took minutes before I was wondering how wrong this story is from the get-go. I doubt casting a 30-year-old woman as the star that could easily pass for 14 wasn't an accident. Hoffman plays a hustler who does a great job in being smug and youthfully ignorant. But he does it in such a believable way it works very well. Haim on the other hand is a strange character. I don't know if I should be vilifying her, or hoping she can get help for a mental disability. But that is something I noticed throughout this whole movie. The quirkiness of the characters is taken so far to the extreme that aside from Hoffman, I didn't find any of them believable. Then again, his 15-year-old hustling also goes way past what could be accomplished so I am having this dialogue with myself as I type LOL. Paul Thomas Anderson isn't a stranger to Oscar season and has again brought us a tale that feels more like short vignettes tied together into a story, than a start to finish flick. Makes sense though due to his ties to shorts and music videos. I noticed at the end that the entire family in the movie is played by actors with the last name of Haim, so looking into it briefly, apparently, that family has some close ties to PTA and are in a band which he has directed music videos for. I was completely in the dark about all of that until the film ended in exactly what you are expecting. Supposedly this is a somewhat true memoir of what PTA grew up with but being he is 3 years older than I, there is a ton of embellishment to that portion of the story. There are tons of nostalgic tidbits sprinkled throughout and quite a few characters that are clearly based on similar people from the time which leads to the realism of the flick. I found parts of this quite amusing but in the 133 minutes of it, I never got past the outlying issue of it just being about a sexual predator. Once you do get past that, you may enjoy this one. Not my pick for the gold statue this year though.
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