Los Angeles Plays Itself

source: Los Angeles Plays Itself

Much like the city under analysis, this film school project is without equal in many respects. However, just like Los Angeles, the warts make for less than a perfect experience. My posting is thoroughly biased since I am, like so many of the posters to IMDb, a Los Angeleno who loves this city. We get the joke about Los Angeles. We live it every day. Someone told me that you have to live here for seven years before you begin to peel back the image of the city and actually find there are people living here. Whether seven is the correct number, I can tell you that viewing this movie will speed up the process considerably. With the director's guidance, viewing various movie clips over the years is an enlightening experience. The emphasis is placed on the background of the shot, not the foreground actors. This proves to be liberating and an unexpected pleasure. The insightful voice over convinced me that they had done their homework. Even if you think you know a lot about this city, you will learn more in two hours than you would pouring over history books for a month. Then there is the third hour. Ouch. Feel safe to leave the theater after the intermission. All semblance of historical detachment is thrown out the window and it becomes a personal diatribe against perceived slights and his take on racial politics. I happen to agree with with many of his sentiments, but his language is equal parts preachy, treacle, and bombastic. Also, unfortunately, in many places just plain wrong. Statements are made as fact (without attribution) that are mere opinion. No voice is given to reasonable voices from any other source. It is, of course, the director's right to make a personal film and take any side he wants. Watching it is another thing all together. The other major problem is the video transfer. Many of the clips are clearly lifted from VHS tapes that have been in a library or video store just a little too long. Even the best of the film has a washed out look would probably not be as noticeable on a TV, but on a big screen, the effect will take you back a bit. Oh, did you notice the running time? Obviously one of the filmmakers heroes is Michael Cimino. In the end, the entire experience is well worth your time if you have any interest at all in Los Angeels/Urban America/Big City politics. Just somebody get him an editor. While you are at it, how about a fact checker.

This documentary changed - oh no, not my live, but my looking: at Los Angeles and at movies in general. The City of Angels will never be the same - L.A.. And from now on I will classify the films I see into high and low tourist: Through which stranger's eyes do they present the city they pretend to live in???

Where do people get the idea that movies are supposed to represent some kind of objective truth? That seems to be Andersen's main bug. He faults Hollywood for fictionalizing Los Angeles history. He says that rich white people can't make films about L.A. because they only know the rich white part of the city, and because they might offend their rich white friends. It seems in his view that only people who walk the streets and ride the buses are qualified to depict life in this city, but the clips he shows from a few "neo-realist" films don't feature the city very much, except for a long shot of a guy driving past a closed tire factory. But all movies (even documentaries and those by poor black filmmakers) are constructs. By their nature (meaning meddling by cinematographers, editors, directors, etc.) they can only present a subjective view of the city. So why not embrace that? Things like "creative geography" are inherent to the art form, so why discount them? Ultimately, Andersen has a bug up his hinder about what he considers to be proper film-making, and it flies in the face of a hundred years of cinema history. And this guy is a professor of film studies!

The filmmakers clearly went to a lot of trouble to assemble all these clips of Los Angeles past and present, but the peevish and pretentious narrator, droning nonstop in my ear, soon got in the way. Worse, the focus of his grumpy soliloquizing was often at odds with what was on the screen. For example, while we saw a wild (and obviously painstakingly worked-out) scene from a Buster Keaton comedy in which a cart releases a cascade of beer barrels onto a steeply sloping road, the narrator continued yammering on as if completely oblivious to what was taking place on screen. He was busy pontificating about how (if memory serves) some images can be characteristic of one particular urban locale while others are more generic. Duh. Watching the movie, or trying to, is like sitting in a theater with a depressed grad student seated behind you, muttering a sour, self-referential monologue to himself, without a pause, while you're attempting to concentrate on the film. After a while, you want to turn around and yell SHUT THE F#%& UP ALREADY!!

Terrible, with boring voice over that would be more appropriate for nature documentary or technical tutorial. This film is long, very long and unnecessary depressing in mood and tone. There are way better ways to learn about LA history, people and architecture. This movie is nothing more then a self obsessed and self involved research, that the author didn't even bother to make even remotely watchable. The movie plays like an internal monologue, where the author forgot to keep it intriguing or interesting. The movie selection is also very poorly done, there are way more and way better films to represent LA in it's best and worst ways. The narrative winders around, rolling in and out of the main subject, this meandering both irritating and confusing. Don't waste your time!

Los Angeles Plays Itself asks the question - should we expect films to represent the truth or is anything acceptable in the name of entertainment? Director Thom Andersen is mostly concerned about how his city, the City of Los Angeles, has been represented in the movies. In an abrasive and brilliant three-hour cinematic essay, he wants us to know that the history, locations, and social makeup of Los Angeles bears little resemblance to how it has been depicted on screen over the years. According to Andersen, "Los Angeles is where reality and representation get muddled," he says. The public conception of Los Angeles (he despises calling it LA) he says is of discontinuity, nonexistent addresses, phony telephone numbers, rich and corrupt individuals who live in modernist houses in the hills, and ethnic minorities who live next to oil refineries if they live at all. Containing clips from literally hundreds of films, Los Angeles Plays Itself is divided into three parts plus a very welcome intermission. Encke King narrates but the text is from Andersen, a Professor of Film Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and a resident of Los Angeles since age seven. The first part, The City as Background, looks at how real sites have been misleadingly portrayed in a cinematic history of buildings and houses turned into something far from their intended purpose. Using clips from such diverse films as The White Cliffs of Dover and DOA, he shows how the massive sky-lit Bradbury Building was turned into a British hospital, a Burmese hotel, and a police headquarters. In The City as Character, he shows the deterioration of the residential downtown area known as Bunker Hill that went from an upscale neighborhood to one of seedy rooming houses until it was finally leveled for redevelopment and commercial high rises. Accessible by a railcar known as Angel's Flight, Bunker Hill in the movies became a setting for adultery and murder in film noirs such as Kiss me Deadly and Double Indemnity and eventually a futuristic dreamscape in Blade Runner. These are contrasted with the documentary The Exiles by Kent Mackenzie that shows the reality of the cultural dislocation of a subculture of Arizona Indians living in loneliness on the hill. Andersen discusses landmarks that no longer exist such as the Pan Pacific Auditorium and laments the passing of the drive-in restaurant and drive-in movies. He has little good to say about films such as Altman's Short Cuts, Steve Martin's L.A. Story, and Woody Allen's Annie Hall that, he says, repeat tired clichés about his city. He also takes umbrage at films like War of the Worlds, Predator 2, and Independence Daythat blow his city to smithereens to satisfy the audience's need for destruction. The final part is called The City as Subject and here Andersen exposes the lies of films such as Chinatown and L.A. Confidential that tell only part of history, delving into the real scandals in L.A. history that reached far deeper than that shown in the movies. He even dissects good old Joe Friday in Dragnet, showing it as a TV series that mirrored the LAPDs contempt for the ordinary citizen. The essay ends with a look at some rare independent films that portray a part of ethnic Los Angeles overlooked in big studio productions. These are Bush Mama, Killer of Sheep, and Bless Their Little Hearts, a film about the tribulations of an aging unemployed black man in South Central Los Angeles. Los Angeles Plays Itself is a fascinating excursion into the history of cinema and Andersen's commentary is hard hitting, insightful, and revealing. He invites us to reawaken our senses and view movies consciously, not simply accept uncritically what is presented on the screen. Whether you agree or disagree with his point of view, I guarantee you will never look at films in quite the same way again.

Trenchant and epic in size is Thom Andersen's "Los Angeles Plays Itself" – a doc that analyzes representation as much as it analyzes representation of Los Angeles itself. How I adored the narrator's (Encke King) voice! It was at once sardonic and annoyed – a reflection of Andersen's emotional regard toward the whole matter, no doubt. What we hear are critical observations of the film clips that we see – there are quite literally dozens and dozens of clips here. This may seem disorienting and exhausting (to the interest level) but it's not. So struck with the compelling argument that Andersen presents to us do the hours fly by like minutes (not vice versa as Addison DeWitt said in "All About Eve"). Funny/interesting it is how this doc is set up like a conventional narrative film that Hollywood is guilty of routinely (and cloyingly) pushing on to the consumer - first we laugh and then we cry. The only difference here (and it's a big one) is that we're looking at actual subjects that existed or still exist. We cry for Los Angeles, you ask? Well, I'm not at liberty to discuss the poignancy that's present – it must be experienced firsthand in order to attain those surprise tears that are greatly missing in our movies.

A fantastic film covering all of the bases of the way in which Los Angeles is seen through the eyes of Hollywood. Full of wonderful insights, this film is an in depth study more than it is a crowd-pleaser. Also a great source of information for film-buffs...a plethora of little-known facts and behind-the-scenes information. Some of the movies are blockbusters, others you may not have ever heard of, but each film that Thom Anderson studies and quotes proves to be a unique take on the subject. If you love DVD special features, you will love this movie. If you love Los Angeles, you will love this movie. If you HATE Los Angeles, you will love this movie. If you don't know yet, or know nothing about LA, get your hands on a copy of this movie. It will make it easier to decide.

It ever a movie illustrated the concept of "falling down", this is it. It started out with great promise, especially for me and my wife as native Los Angeles residents. We were interested in learning about what the locations were and possibly how they've changed. For the first hour or so, it was exciting to see period scenes from many common and obscure films, particularly from midcentury, when the city had so much more architectural integrity. The narration then gradually became more of a diatribe, since the author couldn't wait to enlighten the audience with his superficial left-wing take on everything. You've heard it all already, especially if you went through college in the 70s like we did. He even took offense at the use of the nickname "L.A." and took it to prove self-loathing! And that was early on. The narrator's sneering tone fit Andersen's text perfectly, a world-weary, disdainful drone that made us lose our will to live! The clips got worse, too -- less interesting, and much less scene-oriented than in the beginning. Wasn't that supposed to be the point of the film, from its title? As it progressed, it became basically a collection of climax cuts featuring special effects and violence. For example, if we hadn't already seen "LA Confidential", the few violent scenes he showed would have pretty much ruined any future viewing of the movie for us. Those scenes had nothing to do with Los Angeles playing itself. The movie completely loses its focus, and becomes unwatchable after the intermission. We, too, left early -- and angry at becoming the recipients of a sophomoric diatribe by what Sam Spade might have called a pocket-edition political desperado. If the Egyptian Theater had reflected some of this dominant quality of the film in their promotional literature, we would not have felt as betrayed by the unfortunate turn of this film. Rating for the first hour: a 9. After that: 1.