HUMMER SCHMUMMER!

I called my local Ford dealer, but they were fresh out...

If my photo-posting program hadn't been on the blink for the past two weeks, I would have had this one up much sooner. But better late than never, I suppose. I saw this parked on the street about a block away from my house one Sunday afternoon while I was out running errands and thought to myself, okay, you're not gonna see THAT on the street just anywhere! I just wish my nieces and I could have pulled up to the Arclight driving this thing when we saw Kung Fu Hustle a few weeks ago! Might have gotten a free popcorn out of it, at least.

THIS IS THE CITY-- LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

Here come those Santa Ana winds yet again. A question, one among 40 I posed in last month’s Spring 2005 Pop Movie Pop Quiz—“What is the Best L.A. Movie?”— inspired a lot of interesting responses, all of which seemed to be movies that focused on the city’s venality, superficiality or corruption. Those responses got me thinking that although there are movies that throw the spotlight on exactly those same aspects of almost every other major U.S. city, there are also lots of movies that spring to mind, like Manhattan, Sleepless in Seattle and Hannah and Her Sisters, that serve as romanticized valentines to their respective metropoli. The question that followed, which I used as the centerpiece to a piece I wrote two weeks ago, was, essentially, Is there a movie that’s in love with Los Angeles? I wrote there:

“My own capacity to be held by any kind of wonder for what this city has to offer has pretty much been whittled down to the view of the San Gabriel Mountains, and the perfectly green cut of the infield, from a seat on the third base side of Dodger Stadium. I’d like to maybe not exactly believe again, but at least see the city through the eyes of someone who still finds room to be amazed and inspired and swept away by the spectacular sprawl of cars and culture clashes that make up this city of no seasons, where almost everything seems somehow effected by viral corporate groupthink or the venality and superficiality of the movie business. Is there a movie that has as its subject the richness, vibrancy and vitality of life and/or love and/or work in Los Angeles, a movie that glorifies life in this city with even a tenth of the romantic intentions of a movie like Manhattan? Or do people, and, more aptly, filmmakers, just not see the city that way?”

I got several thoughtful, vigorous, impassioned responses to the question. My best friend, Blaaagh, now currently residing in the Bay Area, talked about the Los Angeles experience as someone who used to live here upon revisiting the city:

“The last time I was there, in February of this year, I tooled around the downtown area, where I had a meeting, and enjoyed the drive out to Glendale from downtown, especially going through the old tunnels with their faux-Egyptian look, as if DeMille had commissioned them. It was particularly nice because it had started raining (and hadn't started raining hard yet), so it felt a little Raymond Chandler-esque. I'm a glass-half-full person, but I tend to think of the beautiful places there: Griffith Park; that new Getty museum; the Warner Bros. lot with its for-real tour and evocative stucco buildings; the old Will Rogers house and grounds... Really, someone ought to make a movie that loves L.A.”

Thom McGregor, a Los Angeles native who I know particularly well, put forth a theory about why the city doesn’t seem to inspire too much movie love, a theory that I thought was pretty sound:

“I believe a lot of directors/writers come from other cities originally, and once they succeed in Hollywood, they have all these fond memories of their roots, their "peeps," so to speak, and then write/direct their cinematic valentines to their hometowns and people they grew up with. I've lived in L.A. all my life, grown up seeing familiar buildings, streets, backgrounds in almost every movie and TV show I saw (the entire carnival finale of Grease was filmed on my high school gym field), but it is very hard to think of a movie that was openly in love with the city. L.A. itself is so spread out and varied, it's kind of hard to reconcile South Central and Malibu in real life, much less in the movies. How about episodes of Dragnet where Jack Webb starts each episode in voice over, giving the current day, time (to the minute) and weather of Los Angeles—‘This is the city.’ THE city.”

Friend, fellow blogger and Movie Poop Shoot.com columnist Alison Veneto took her answer and turned it into a post of her own, in which she went beyond my suggestion of a Los Angeles movie as being one “shot in Los Angeles whose locales are integral to the plot, or whose thematic text or subtext is some critical aspect of life or work in this city" to consider what it is that really constitutes an L.A. movie:

“Does it have to be a love letter to the city like 'great NY movies'? I don't think so. I think to figure out what the real LA movie is we have to determine what the real LA story is. And the real LA story is dreams -- shattered or realized. (L.A. is) a mecca for the desperate and the hopeful. And it's not just the Hollywood dream. It's the immigrant's dream. So the real LA stories are movies like Boyz 'N The Hood (the brother who's going to get out as a football player, following the dream), El Norte (immigrants who see their dream in Los Angeles) and Singin' In the Rain (realizing the Hollywood dream). While they represent Black people, Latinos and Caucasians repectively, they still represent the feeling of the city. Even if you are just showing one part of LA and one ethnic group, the dreams are what ties everyone in the city together… The 'best' LA movie, in that it really encompasses what LA is about, is any incarnation of A Star Is Born. Because that's LA-- someone's going up, someone's going down... dreams being realized and dreams being shattered.”

And finally, good friend, constant supporter and regular reader Virgil Hilts, also a native Los Angeleno, took the opportunity to toss out titles, but also to put forth a spirited defense of the city, its achievements and its day-to-day life, as well as throwing a spotlight on a movie that too few seem to remember:

“No matter what anybody believes, Hollywood, and Los Angeles by extension, taught the rest of the world how to make movies just as Henry Ford and Detroit taught the world how to make cars. Ultimately, the movie valentine to LA are the studios themselves-- as (Blaaagh) noted, the great old buildings on the Warners lot, or the Paramount gate-- and the Chinese Theater and the Walk of Fame and the folks selling maps to stars' homes… Does anybody in New York try to sell you a map so you can stand outside of some star's apartment building? Do any of the stars from Chicago still spend their winters there? We hate the freeways, but at least they don't smell like a century's worth of urine like the subways of NYC do after a good rain. It gets hot in LA, but when it gets hot in Chicago, people die, a lot of people. And have you noticed that it keeps happening when they have those heat/humidity waves in the Midwest, and still they laugh at us for drinking bottled water… Although it might be another movie about about corrupt Los Angeles, Devil in a Blue Dress was every bit as brilliant as L.A. Confidential, and it was set in parts of the city that few people would recognize as Los Angeles-- not just the suburbs, but the suburbs where postwar African-American vets set down roots. Why is Devil so easily forgotten? Could it be that black/white thing again?”

All these were, I thought, excellent, probing responses to a question that I wasn’t sure even had an answer. But the aspect of receiving and reading them that I enjoyed so much was that each and every one of them threw something into relief for me, as the poser of the original question and as a reader, that expanded the original question and made me reconsider my own preconceptions. And they also brought up titles that, either for reasons of my own lazy, nonexistent research or failure of imagination, I’m ashamed to admit never crossed my mind, and one that did.

Thom McGregor was absolutely right to include Dragnet, particularly its 1967-70 TV incarnation, among those works that display a distinct vision of Los Angeles. The vision here, however, springs not from a romanticized vision of social utopia, or anything so Hollywood as the mind of, say, a Quinn Martin, but instead from an officially sanctioned representation of the Los Angeles Police Department—their imprimatur and the names of official department consultants, who sometimes appeared in the shows themselves, were stamped on the end credits of every episode. So was the credit “directed by Jack Webb,” who, as teacher/theorist/director Thom Andersen observed in his recent film Los Angeles Plays Itself (more, much more on this film a bit later), emerged within this series as a formally rigorous stylist— don’t mistake the show’s visual boxiness and robotic dramaturgy as anything but deliberate-- who could stand with Ozu and Bresson in terms of sheer transcendental simplicity.




Webb’s mechanized Detective Joe Friday, curt, paranoid and witheringly superior to those he has been commissioned “to protect and serve,” is the Parker–era L.A.P.D’s idealized image of itself, and each speck of minutiae in each episode (Friday: “It took us 12 minutes to drive up the Hollywood Freeway, exit at Vermont Avenue and arrive at the corner of Franklin Avenue and Commonwealth Street, where Mrs. Freeman stood outside her gray stucco apartment building”) is built for police-report verisimilitude and, despite all the fruitcakes and weirdos that comprise the populace, civic pride. This is, as Thom McG correctly points out, the city, Los Angeles, California, and Webb wastes not a second of the episodes’ 25-minute running time on anything that might distract from his detailed vision of how that city is laid out, how it ought to run, and why it often doesn’t. Webb’s L.A.P.D. is paranoid and distrustful of its public, but what makes Dragnet distinctive is that neither Webb nor the L.A.P.D. positioned these attitudes as drawbacks, but as elements of necessary detachment, and this perception suffuses the actors’ clipped, deader-than-deadpan delivery and the director’s pared-down, claustrophobic, austere mise-en-scene. It also makes Dragnet valuable beyond its camp quality— Webb serves up Nixon-era harsh realities and attitudes, and the attendant indulgence in ridiculous stereotyping of anyone who doesn’t dress and sound like Joe Friday, all captured in celluloid amber. The distance of some 35 years has done nothing to dilute the power of their singlemindedness and righteous disdain for the criminal and crackpot element, not to mention the impatience and condescension left in reserve for the general citizenry. Dragnet may be one of the best documents we have of Los Angeles, both geographically speaking, and in terms of its almost insider’s view of the philosophy of a police department that had not yet scaled the heights of its own paranoia and self-intoxication.

Now on to the titles of which, shockingly, I had to be reminded. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) has to be considered one of the premier Los Angeles movies, not only for its reflection of a specifically Southern California high school milieu that, as it turned out, was a hell of a lot more generally recognizable everywhere else in the country than could have been anticipated, but because it itself perpetuated fashion trends (the popularity of Vans tennis shoes), other movies (Valley Girl, The Wild Life) and even music (Frank Zappa’s satirical top-40 hit "Valley Girl") that would help to define a dominant strain of pop culture of the ‘80s.




There’s even a certain amount of romanticism for the teen mall culture in director Amy Heckerling’s approach, mixed in with a clear-eyed view of teenage sexuality and fumbling romantic mores, that is as evocative in its details as that of cruising the streets of 1963 Modesto in George Lucas’ American Graffiti.

And Quentin Tarantino’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, which the director rechristened Jackie Brown (1997), is in one aspect another geographically brilliant mall movie—the movie’s last third is an elaborate con staged at the Del Amo Fashion Center seen in its entirety from three separate points of view, thus highlighting not only different aspects of the job, but also different aspects of what, to a casual observer, might appear to be just a typical, overly recognizable shopping space.




But Tarantino’s movie (his finest, in my estimation) shows the same sensitivity to all of its locales, largely those situated in the city’s South Bay area, a flat, arguably nondescript section of Los Angeles that is neither expensive beachfront or Hollywood Hills familiar, nor populated with gleaming skyscrapers of the kind frequently documented in the Los Angeles downtown cityscape (the wild car chase in the original Gone in 60 Seconds served as a virtual tour of this same area, circa 1974).

Another part of the city that has been largely ignored by the movies, either as location or history, is the vital and bustling Central Street of Walter Moseley’s Easy Rawlins novels, vividly brought to the screen in Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). The set designers recreated the jazz clubs of this downtown district, an area vibrating with promise for African-American veterans of World War II, and the neighborhoods just south of downtown where these vets could find affordable, good-quality housing when they returned from service, in a completely believable, lived-in fashion.




The movie, in addition to being a crackling good noir yarn, as Virgil suggests, on the order of L.A. Confidential, serves as a reminder, or perhaps a fresh bulletin to those who only perceive those neighborhoods now as urban war zones (a perception reinforced with plenty of help from local and nationwide media, and, of course, the movies). South Central Los Angeles was once a place where the reigning feeling was hope for the future, a part of the city that may have evolved for African-Americans essentially segregated from the dominant, white socioeconomic and geographical culture and substructures, but a place nonetheless where happiness could be pursued and life could be lived. That bleak undercurrents of desperation exist for Moseley’s Rawlins, as depicted by director Franklin and star Denzel Washington, does nothing to dampen the spirit by which Devil in a Blue Dress has been cinematically realized; those undercurrents are magnified by the dimension of reality brought forth by the film’s characters, which, in turn, the realistically elaborate sets help to expand to fuller expression, for once, rather than to serve merely as an inadvertent means of smothering fertile performers amidst all the pretty sights.

Three other visions of a romantized Los Angeles of the past are just as interesting, and evocative, in their own way. Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (1975), set in Beverly Hills in the days just before Richard Nixon was first elected to the presidency in 1968, is a precise and deeply felt comedy of vacuity and swinging sexuality as the State of the City.




But it cuts far deeper than might a shallow parade of stereotypes masquerading as tribute (L.A. Story) because it allows for a vision of characters, and by extension the city, teetering on the brink of disillusionment, about to enter an era where the party could only go on by acknowledgment, however fleeting, of the existence of a much bleaker social landscape beyond the swaying palms.

The decaying milieu of Hollywood’s underbelly circa 1955-- desperate characters with plenty of zeal but little talent and the ghastly movies they made-- is highlighted in Tim Burton’s delightfully cracked “biopic” of the man commonly thought to be the worst film director ever, Ed Wood (1994).




The movie isn’t much interested in whether there’s any truth to this conventional wisdom— Burton obviously recognizes that Wood’s “vision” is definitely on a par with his fumbling ability to realize it, but I’d bet he could think of several directors who could be considered worse; I know I can. But I think this movie might have to be included on a list of great Los Angeles movies simply because of its nonjudgmental and, yes, romanticized view of Wood and his stock company of friends and assorted show business cast-offs, and their own pie-eyed infatuation with their personal vision of Hollywood, bitter realities, shimmering fantasies and all. Any movie that could make me pine for companionship with the kinds of marginalized, cluelessly enthusiastic tinseltown characters that Ed Wood celebrates must understand something profound about survival and desire, and friendship, in the movie business, and by the extension the city for which that business is so central.

Finally, I’m thankful to Virgil for mentioning a movie I most certainly should have thought to highlight, a movie that has a spot on my list of all-time favorites, a movie that ended up influencing my own bejewelled fantasies of Los Angeles in the days before I ever set eyes on the city myself. Steven Spielberg’s unjustly maligned 1941 (1979) is a comedy which makes fun of American paranoia and hysteria in the early days of our involvement in World War II, and it does so in a manner which many of its detractors decided was itself hysterical, and bloated and sloppy and undisciplined. I humbly submit my disagreement.




There are set pieces within this gigantic movie that can stand with the director’s funniest, most nimble work-- I’m thinking here of the entirety of Jaws and Duel, as well as parts of E.T. and the stunning musical number/action sequence that opens the otherwise shrill and overwrought Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. And the whole of 1941, despite the broad pitch of most of its humor, is far more graceful and expansive than its reputation suggests. Its overwhelming night vistas of a sprawling Los Angeles, as seen from the hills over which passes a fighter plane (piloted by John Belushi’s Wild Bill Kelso) on its way to a date with destruction along Hollywood Boulevard, belie a fascination with the cityscape that informs the film’s every falsified depiction of famous Los Angeles locales. These vistas, despite actually being only miniature model layouts of the city, capture the optimistic infatuation of Americans for their homeland during this wartime, and they are vibrant and alive. They give truth to Roman Polanski’s famous assertion that there is no more beautiful city in the world than Los Angeles, provided it’s seen at night and from a distance. But even up close, in 1941, the city lives up to the glittering promise of those city lights. The views of a partially blacked-out Santa Monica, from off the coast as well as from inside an abandoned amusement park, are velvety and rich and funny, as is the brilliantly reconstructed Hollywood Boulevard that serves as the site for the movie’s spectacular dogfight sequence. But I’m also thinking about scenes like the sensual, eerie stillness (which, naturally, erupts into mayhem) in which Spielberg stages Wild Bill’s moonlit meeting with a crazed general (Warren Oates) who has stationed himself and his remaining troops somewhere in the fields outside of Pomona, awaiting an imagined Japanese air attack. Scenes like these, and the dogfight, and almost every other sequence in the picture, have nothing of “reality” to represent as far as the existing city—they are exclusively the creations of brilliant technicians working for a director who became convinced that his movie was careening out of control. But the resultant imagery, rooted in fantasy though it may be, serves to construct an alternate vision of Los Angeles’s past that may have nothing to do with geographical and architectural reality, but that is every bit as evocative and intricately detailed as MGM’s Oz— it comes together in your head (or at least mine) as a uniform realization of how Los Angeles might have been, a city population every bit as off their nut as the hippies and freaks of Jack Webb’s Dragnet, sans all that gaseous condescension, placed amidst settings as fantastical and idealized as Webb’s were unadorned and matter-of-fact. 1941 directs its barbs at the lunacy of Americans overreacting to misperceived threats (usually unwittingly generated by their own populace) and obliviously underreacting (with the exception of Ned Beatty’s character, of course) to the real Japanese sub floating just off the Santa Monica shore. But it has nothing but love and spectacular eyes for Los Angeles.

All this, and I’m really only at the halfway point of where I wanted to be for this post. I’ll have to leave part two for tomorrow night. But before I stop, I just want to go back to what I wrote in my previous entry. Coming from a place of my own disillusionment with everyday life in this city-- its struggles, its frustrations, its inordinate expenses, its hostilities, its detachment— I wrote:

“I’d like to maybe not exactly believe again, but at least see the city through the eyes of someone who still finds room to be amazed and inspired and swept away by the spectacular sprawl of cars and culture clashes that make up this city of no seasons, where almost everything seems somehow effected by viral corporate groupthink or the venality and superficiality of the movie business.”

Of course what I had in mind was a narrative film that might encompass such a wide-ranging vision, but what became quickly apparent was that there probably was no one such beast. To stitch together a vision of what Los Angeles means, how all its many cultures survive together and bash up against one another, you would have to look at a broad range of films, as broad as the city’s geography and the origins of its multiethnic populace, and try to see the city the way the movies have seen it. And no sooner than I realized what I was really talking about, I opened up last week’s Los Angeles Times “Weekend” section and saw that Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2002) would be screening at the American Cinematheque Egyptian Theater through Tuesday, May 10. Andersen’s movie, a spectacular attempt to grapple with nearly 100 years of film history as it pertains to images and perceptions of Los Angeles in films, had screened almost everywhere BUT Los Angeles before this past weekend, and every impulse told me this was an opportunity I really couldn’t afford to pass up, especially given the back and forth on this blog over the last month or so.

Well, against all odds, I managed to get a ticket, and Tuesday night, the last night of its brief run, I made my way to the Egyptian, and for three hours I was enthralled. Los Angeles Plays Itself turned out to be the answer I was looking for, the most compelling and entertaining and masterful piece of documentary film criticism I can ever remember seeing, and I’ll take some time to detail more about the movie and my experience with it in my next post-- it’s getting much too late to start writing about it, because I wouldn’t be able to even begin to do it justice before the sands of sleep started interfering with my ability to hit the proper keys on my laptop. Tune in tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel.

One thing that I do want to make you aware of, though, is that apparently the Cinematheque’s presentation of Los Angeles Plays Itself was so successful in terms of patronage that this past Tuesday night was, in fact, NOT the end of the movie’s engagement here in Los Angeles. The Cinematheque has extended the movie’s run. A quick click to their web site will give you all the information you need to know about upcoming weekend screenings on May 14, 15, 20, 21 and 22. Before I say another word about this film, just know that if you have a love for movies, Los Angeles, or both, it is worth any and all effort it will take from you, outside of something really absurd like purchasing plane fare, to arrive at the Egyptian Theater for one of these screenings. No DVD release has yet been announced, and the movie’s low-tech usage of film clips, sans the requisite clearances, may be too big a hurdle for it to clear in order to make it to your home theater, so this extended engagement may be the only chance for Los Angeles residents to see this remarkable work. At the risk of sounding a bit too Siskelian, I can’t imagine seeing a more fascinating, stimulating film all year, and I look forward to talking about it next time. Is there a movie that is in love with Los Angeles? Yes. That movie is Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself.

MIDNIGHT, AND THE KITTIES ARE SLEEPING... On Beyond Mother's Day

Well, Patty and I managed to make some time for ourselves this Mother’s Day weekend. Our oldest daughter (she's five) went for her first sleepover— we dropped her off at 2:00 p.m., but she only made it till about 9:30 p.m. before we got the rescue call. But during those seven or so hours we did manage to smuggle some sandwiches in and see The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Patty, the bigger Douglas Adams fan (she’s read all five books), thought the movie did a good job of capturing what she suspected might be largely uncaptureable about the books— she gave director Garth Jennings and company a 65% success rating. I felt it worked even better than that, so the two of us had a very enjoyable afternoon at the movies indeed. Now, if only the sandwiches— Vietnamese roast pork and Filino adobo-- had been a little easier to eat in the dark…

Mother’s Day itself was very low-key. The girls jumped into bed with us around 8:00 a.m., watched Patty open her Mother's Day gift, and then jumped on top of her and tickled and hugged her into submission until she had no choice but to understand just how much they loved her. (Given my size, relative to all the rest of the living beings in my house, I chose a subtler tack and showered her with iTunes gift cards.) Our day culminated with a happy dinner for us all at a very welcoming favorite British steakhouse in Pasadena. I had halibut in a delightful lobster sauce, and I couldn’t help thinking, as we passed the hostess on our way out, “So long, and thanks for all the fish”…

I even managed to catch up on some DVDs that have been lurking around the house for a while, on loan from very generous friends who are easily as lenient with their return policies as Netflix. Sunday night Patty started reacquainting herself with a certain space opera in preparation for this coming Memorial Day, while I sat back and relaxed with Anthony Mann’s The Far Country and Dziga Vertov’s Man With the Movie Camera. The Vertov was every bit as invigorating and exciting as I recall from my college days— the conceit of this silent film is to create a visual symphony of a day in a Russian city in 1929, without use of title cards, based on the observations of a Man with a Movie Camera, who we frequently see ostensibly recording the images we're seeing. I’m amazed at the editing techniques on display in this movie, with not an Avid in sight (not for 60+ years or so), as well as its playful visual imagination-- it's a fascinating 68-minute trip that I recommend to anyone who loves the movies, and the life they can capture, preserve and shape.

But I must admit a slight disappointment in the Mann western. Don’t get me wrong— it was perfectly well-made and compelling, but set against the other psychological westerns he directed with Jimmy Stewart— Winchester ’73, The Man from Laramie and especially The Naked Spur and the flat-out brilliant Bend of the River, I felt a bit of a let-down with this one. I was expecting a further dimension from the characters that I didn’t get-- too many of these men and women seemed delivered direct from the Folksy Stock Department, and the plot was, I felt, a little on the routine side. That said, it still stacks up better than most westerns of its period, and I loved the sexual chemistry between Jimmy Stewart and good/bad girl Ruth Roman, who was almost always better than her roles,Strangers on a Train notwithstanding. It's just next to these other Mann offerings that it pales.

And finally, the friendly folks at Netflix made available to me Vera Drake for my Saturday evening’s entertainment. Let me tell you, that Mike Leigh is a corker! This one was every bit as frothy and feel-good as I expected! Seriously, Imelda Staunton is very, very good in what I felt was a very convincingly lived-in, yet at the same time somewhat frustrating movie. Leigh’s refusal to contextualize Vera’s deeds much beyond a slight hint at her past, and the character’s own refusal to speak up for herself or rail even slightly against the situation in which she ultimately finds herself, makes the movie feel simultaneously alive and constricted. The experience of viewing it is uncomfortable, but not always in the way I suspect the director intended. It is, however, very much worth seeing, as a showcase for some very good actors in a series of sharply observed, non-ostentatious settings and scenes, and as an example of how to make a political film that is, for all intents and purposes, deceptively disguised as an simple period character study.

Okay, so that was the weekend. I left the blog alone because I couldn’t get my picture-sharing program to work and because, frankly, my arms and fingers and back are sore from typing and I wanted a bit of a break. Now that I’ve had it, I’m looking at a potentially big week for posts on this site, and I’m hoping I can stick to my schedule and bring them to you in a timely manner. It’s going to be time to revisit The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou soon (the Criterion DVD comes out today), and I wanted to talk briefly about Oldboy, which I finally saw last weekend, before no one cares to hear anything more about it. But more importantly, this week should see light on an article I’ve been ruminating on for a few weeks now regarding baseball movies, as well as some thoughts and projections about upcoming summer releases. And I did manage to score a ticket to see the last screening of Los Angeles Plays Itself at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood tonight, so I hope to be able to report on that extensively and tie it in with some final comments about the whole Movies About Los Angeles discussion. That’s a pretty full plate, but it’s all stuff I’ve been champing at the bit to get finished for a while now, so I’m hoping that my ambitions don’t overwhelm my stamina and/or the time I have available to write this week. (I’m also hoping that by mentioning my ambitions out loud I might more easily be able to see them through.) I’ve had a few days off, refreshed by family, fun and films, and now I’m ready to go! Let’s see what happens…

LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF

Alison Veneto adds her comments to the discussion on the question, “Is There a Movie That’s In Love with Los Angeles?” over at her blog Electric Shadow, and I’ll hope to have a few more words to say on the subject too, as some of you have had some really great comments that should be highlighted and addressed. I posed the question, but I was too foggy to come up with even a decent start on an answer myself. Virgil Hilts, Thom McGregor and Blaaagh, however, wrote such thoughtful words (V.H. & T.McG are lifelong Angelenos) that they really kick-started my own thought processes and shamed me a little bit in the process with their sharp and incisive observations. Add Alison’s post, and we’ve got ourselves a pretty interesting roundtable going here, which I hope will continue.

In that light, synergy just happens, sometimes, it seems…

Alison notes that this whole discussion, though it was never intended in this way, seems to be a long lead-up to the release of Paul Haggis’ look at L.A. culture clashes entitled Crash. The movie is a sprawling character mosaic, in an Altman-esque scope, if perhaps not in style, and it’s been getting some pretty polarized reviews. David Denby in the New Yorker called Crash the strongest American movie since Mystic River, and Ella Taylor in today’s L.A. Weekly says it’s “not just one of the best Hollywood movies about race, but, along with Collateral, one of the finest portrayals of contemporary Los Angeles life, period.” (Sounds pretty appropo to our discussion here, eh?) Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice is less impressed, as I’m sure other reviewers will be when the film opens tomorrow. Such is the nature of a movie that takes on this kind of subject matter— it’s not going to please everyone. Whatever one ends up thinking about Crash, it’s nice to know that there are still movies being made and released that don’t feel that pleasing everyone is their job.

And continuing the synergistic angle, this weekend the American Cinematheque here in Los Angeles will be featuring Thom Andersen’s acclaimed documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, which examines the ways in which the city has been portrayed throughout cinema history. Kenneth Turan writes extensively about the movie in today’s Los Angeles Times (the link requires a subscription to the print version of the paper, but for 50 cents you can get your fingers inky and read it the old-fashioned way). There’s still no information about a DVD release, though in his piece Turan suggests that one of the roadblocks to the documentary securing a wide theatrical release involves clearance for the 200+ film clips employed in the text of the film, so it's conceivable that such concerns might hang up an eventual digital release as well. For now, the Cinematheque is your best shot, if you’re here in L.A., and it’s only playing through Tuesday. Check out their schedule here to see if there’s any way you can get there and see it. If you do, I hope you check in here and tell us all about it!

HOW TO AVOID THE "PRE-SHOW ENTERTAINMENT"

As reported on IMDb today, the Loews Cineplex exhibition chain is going the European route, after much angry prompting, and posting the actual start times for movies, as opposed to times when the trailers and ads start:

"Responding to complaints from moviegoers -- and the threat of legislation -- Loews Cineplex Entertainment said that beginning next week, ads listing the times for the movies being shown in its theaters will also carry a note reading, "The feature presentation starts 10 to 15 minutes after the posted show time." The note will first appear in ads for theaters in Connecticut, then two weeks later in the rest of the country. John McCauley, head of marketing for the theater chain, told today's (Wednesday) New York Times that it was only coincidence that the initial test will be held in Connecticut, where a state representative has sponsored a bill requiring real-time listings."

I'm not holding my breath for the possibility of an actual courtesy flush on the "pre-show entertainment" here. And most theaters don't provide reserved seating, so if you're expecting to be able to walk into a screening of, oh, say, Star Wars Episode II: Revenge of the Sith two minutes before the actual feature starts in order to avoid the asinine Coca-Cola and Juicy Fruit ads, as well as trailers for The Fantastic Four, well, you may find yourself without a place to park your arse. But it is encouraging that one of these corporations has finally started to bend a little bit to incessant complaints from its customers about being subjected to advertising after having paid $10 or more for the privilege of the theatrical experience, which is, after all, supposed to be substantially different from watching television. Theater chains always counter that the pre-show "entertainment" helps them defray the high cost of the movie exhibition business, while always failing to mention that the real culprit here may just be their own overzealous construction of too many movie theaters in which to exhibit a very limited amount of mainstream Hollywood blockbuster fare. And really, by telling you that Star Wars Episode III really starts at 7:15, and not the advertised 7:00, they're not exactly telling you something you couldn't have figured out by employing your handy Texas Instruments calculator to do a few fancy goezintas. It's a minor concession to complaints, that's all, but if the complaints keep pouring in, maybe the concessions will start to become a little more meaningful.

TCM ALERT: ORSON WELLES AND CINE MEXICANO

It’s been a while since I’ve sung the praises of Turner Classic Movies, but their May schedule is worthy of some praise-singing. The TCM Star of the Month is Orson Welles, which means every Wednesday (starting today) you’ll see a month-long, 20-film festival of Welles’ work, including five films new to the TCM rotation. Today’s schedule includes Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil— but it’s the following Wednesdays that reveal some relatively rare treats for Welles fans and neophytes alike.

May 11 highlights Welles the actor with Tomorrow is Forever (Irving Pichel, 1946), Man in the Shadow (Jack Arnold, 1957), The Tartars (Richard Thorpe, 1961) and Is Paris Burning? (1966, Rene Clement), as well as the 2004 documentary Shadowing The Third Man."

Come May 18, it’s Welles the director in the spotlight again, with his provocative take on Othello (1952), Mr. Arkadin (1955), The Immortal Story (1968), The Trial (1963) and, most notably, F for Fake (1976), which was recently released on DVD from Criterion.

And on May 25 TCM’s Welles menu begins with Norman Foster’s Journey Into Fear (1942) starring Welles, Joseph Cotten and Dolores Del Rio, followed by Welles’ The Stranger (1946), the bloated Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967), The V.I.P.s (Anthony Asquith, 1963), and two which offer only Welles’ mellifluous vocal talents, Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946) and King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, 1961). Too bad they forgot his wonderful narration bits in Bud Yorkin’s Start the Revolution Without Me and Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part I...

But even more of a treat than the Welles collection is TCM’s Cine Mexicano: The Golden Age, a 17-film salute to the rich heritage of Mexican cinema, which starts out on May 5 with a day-long tribute to Luis Bunuel, featuring Los Olvidados (1950), Nazarin (1959), Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962) and Simon of the Desert(1965). Also, on May 12, is a program of films directed by Emilio Fernandez, a reputable director who is probably more well known to Americans from his role as General Mapache in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Fernandez’s adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Pearl (La Perla) (1947) is the standout here, with two others, Maria Candelaria (1944) and Enamorada (1946) also featured.

Stock up on the blank DVDs or videotapes and enjoy!

HERE COME THOSE SANTA ANA WINDS AGAIN: Is There A Movie That's In Love With Los Angeles?

“Drive west on Sunset to the sea
Turn that jungle music down
Just until we’re out of town
This is no one-night stand
It’s a real occasion
Close your eyes and you’ll be there
It’s everything they say
The end of a perfect day
Distant lights from across the bay
Babylon sisters shake it

Here come those Santa Ana winds again..."

-Steely Dan, “Babylon Sisters”

**********************************

Chicago is the Windy City, a picturesque metropolis on the shores of Lake Michigan that wears its points of pride— Michael Jordan, the blues scene, deep-dish pizza, Mike Ditka, uh, Roger Ebert— like a badge of honor, and being a citizen, especially a native, is something many Chicagoans, particularly celebrities like John Cusack, Bonnie Hunt, Dan Akroyd (a Canadian, but a Chicagoan by way of the Blues Brothers), routinely brag on. The same can most definitely be said of New York City, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta and many other major American cities.

So when I was finishing up compiling the responses to Mr. Hand’s Spring 2005 Pop Movie Pop Quiz last week and came across the answers to the question, “What is the best Los Angeles movie?” (meaning a movie shot in Los Angeles whose locales are integral to the plot, or whose thematic text or subtext is some critical aspect of life or work in this city), I was struck not by the lack of answers— they were plenty and varied— but by another angle on those answers that was thrown into relief by a comment set forth by commenter Alison. She abstained from submitting an answer because “there’s nothing good about L.A.”

At first I just kind of chuckled at the sweeping generality of Alison’s statement. But as I continued to think about it in the context of the question, I came to realize that, although I tended to agree with her in terms of how grueling and demanding and expensive and maddening day-to-day life in this city can be, I felt that at least one would have to say that, considering the films listed under this category, Los Angeles had to be good for something, namely that these films came either directly from the city or as a response to it themselves.

But then, a quick look at the titles-- To Live and Die in L.A., Sunset Boulevard, L.A. Confidential, The Long Goodbye, Mulholland Dr. and Chinatown— seemed to suggest pretty definitively that at the same time they are all, to one degree or another, brilliant films, they are also pretty uniform in their view of Los Angeles as a singularly curdled, corrupt and decadent place.

For whatever reason, there is not, as far as I can tell, a whole lot of bragging going on about being an Los Angeleno. The city demands an inordinate amount of attention from government at the state level, thanks to its size and, more recently, the movie-star governor. Likewise, so much media attention, statewide and nationwide, is paid to L.A. that those from the northern part of the state, as well as all points south (if the recent debate over the ex-Anaheim Angels' association with the city at the expense of their allegiance, legal and otherwise, to the citizenry of Orange County is any indication), are routinely and often severely unimpressed by anyone traveling to their regions and crowing about Los Angeles and its cultural contributions. As Oregonians view Californians who migrate to the state and, by implication, bring their corrupt value system along with them, so does the rest of the country, and probably the world, view Los Angeles as ground zero for the cultural manifest destiny that is invading and homogenizing civilization worldwide. It’s not all Los Angeles’ fault, of course— folks on Madison Avenue and Wall Street have a little something to do with the fact that there will probably one day be a McDonald’s on top of Mount Everest-- but “Hollywood”’s pervasive influence is as metaphorically demonic and widely accepted an umbrella with which to cover the world’s ills as there is in operation today.

It’s not too difficult to find a movie that glorifies or romanticizes, say, a city as picturesque as San Francisco. Even a bleak psychological portrait like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo doesn’t presume to hold the beautiful geography of the Bay Area responsible for Scottie Ferguson’s dementia— that geography may lend the film an often eerie quality, but we’re never to believe that there's a specifically San Franciscan malaise seeping through the film. Genuflections toward the wonders, beauty and implied hip qualities of Chicago can be found in The Blues Brothers, Grosse Pointe Blank, Continental Divide, and the entire oeuvre of John Hughes, as well as other films that may be even more pertinent. And though there are likely many more cinematic examples of the seediness and desperation of life in New York City than of its splendors, one need look no further than Woody Allen’s Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters to view its official enshrinement as The Greatest City In The World.

The question that rings in my mind after all of this is: Is there a movie that romanticizes or glorifies life in Los Angeles in a roughly equivalent manner to any one of these films that depict these other American cities? I’ll admit, I’ve done no research at all on this, but I figured if there were one or two that they would eventually come floating to the surface of the tar pit that passes for my mind. But so far, I’ve come up with nothing. I rejected L.A. Story, which was submitted as an answer to the question, because it’s not a love poem like Manhattan (to which it has been insufficiently compared), but instead a somewhat softheaded satire of the excesses of Los Angeles life.

And that’s as far as I’ve been able to get. So I’m putting it out there. I’d love to know about a movie or movies with these qualifications, not only for my own curiosity, but because my own capacity to be held by any kind of wonder for what this city has to offer has pretty much been whittled down to the view of the San Gabriel Mountains, and the perfectly green cut of the infield, from a seat on the third base side of Dodger Stadium. I’d like to maybe not exactly believe again, but at least see the city through the eyes of someone who still finds room to be amazed and inspired and swept away by the spectacular sprawl of cars and culture clashes that make up this city of no seasons, where almost everything seems somehow effected by viral corporate groupthink or the venality and superficiality of the movie business. Is there a movie that has as its subject the richness, vibrancy and vitality of life and/or love and/or work in Los Angeles, a movie that glorifies life in this city with even a tenth of the romantic intentions of a movie like Manhattan? Or do people, and, more aptly, filmmakers, just not see the city that way?

Babylon Sisters, shake it…

UPDATE 5/4/05: I'll be ready to tackle this subject again in a few days, but until then, Alison checks in with her own observations on the quintessential L.A. movie on her blog Electric Shadow.