You probably have your top 10 firmly in mind, but before I mention mine, lemme ask you: What makes it a must-see film about Los Angeles - Brilliant dialogue? Unflinching views of L.A. life? Grand spectacle?
Hellifiknow. I can't even whittle my list down to 10, I'm obsessed with noir and probably have too many blockbusters and recent movies on my mind. But here are my top 15 L.A. movies, in no certain order - and I'm probably forgetting some ...
Repo Man: Alex Cox's 1984 weirdball punk/sci-fi melange has contributed much to our culture. My two favorite bits of dialogue?
Debbi: Duke, let's go do some crimes.
Duke: Yeah. Let's go get sushi ... and not pay!
and
Kevin: There's fuckin' room to move as a fry cook. I could be manager in two years. King. God.
You liked it too? Plate o' shrimp!
Blade Runner: A 10-ton cake layered with metaphor, visuals, character quirks and future archaeology so dense it's always been possible to believe L.A. could look like that in the future. Seek out the director's cut - minus the awful voice-over and plus a more ambiguous end and some additional scenes - which is considerably superior to the studio's version. Bonus points for spotting L.A. landmarks other than the oft-used Bradbury building, Hollyhock House, Ennis-Brown house and the 2nd Street tunnel.
Sunset Boulevard: Brilliant, brittle sui generis noir. The revelation that Max the butler was once Norma Desmond's director and is helping her maintain her illusion of continued stardom is a wicked twist of the knife. Unstoppable performances by Erich von Stroheim, Gloria Swanson Joan Crawford and William Holden. Special cameo by another personal favorite, Buster Keaton.
L.A. Confidential: The gold standard for modern noir, and a brilliant movie-movie to boot. Great usage of Schindler houses, period costume (Kevin Spacey's wardrobe alone!) and James Ellroy's dialogue. If they'd put every sticky slab of Ellroy's ugliness on the screen, it could have been almost unwatchably gripping. As it was, the movie tore the ceiling off what's possible for movies.
Heat: Okay, so I'm a fan of noir. This movie played like opera, with Naomi Judd delivering its most bittersweet aria. Slam-bang, goddamn. Nice use of downtown streets in the climactic scene, too, though you'd never see 'em that empty.
Memento: Another paradigm-smashing noir. Friends and family of mine either loved it or loathed it - there was no middle ground. Once you get past the tortuous stunt scripting (the entire movie is unspooled, scene-by-scene, backwards) it still delivers the goods in the story of a man who's forgotten he's a killer.
Double Indemnity: Arguably the greatest film noir ever made. Billy Wilder's screenplay from James M. Cain's potboiling novel cast the incendiary Barbara Stanwyck against lovable-cuddly Fred McMurray in a ruthless game of who-do-you-trust that still blows my hair back every time I see it. Bonus casting of Edward G. Robinson as the foil.
Chinatown: Gripping, twisted, gorgeous, ugly - Roman Polanski wrung brilliant performances from Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and his entire cast, including the great John Huston. This set the standard for L.A. Confidential, which barely succeeded in topping it for a rich period portrait of L.A. and a map of the lines of power that underlaid the chaotic lives of the little people caught in its web.
Boyz n the Hood: No picture of street-level Los Angeles been done so movingly and intelligently before and arguably - with the exception of Mi Vida Loca, nothing has been done nearly so well since. John Singleton's later films never quite lived up to sharp, smart and heartfelt picture of South Central. Terrific actors - Ice Cube, Laurence Fishburne, Cuba Gooding Jr. - made this a standout.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High: This came out in '82, eight years before I moved to L.A., and completely captivated me: Look - Los Angeles has beautiful, fucked-up weirdo high school kids too. Plus palm trees! The movie summed up stumbling-of-age in the era of pre-AIDS, bonehead, horndog loser hedonism - and sold it as fun. For some reason the image that always sticks in my mind is Jeff Spiccoli tumbling out of a van full of bong smoke, getting on the payphone and pounding his skull with one of his checkered Vans: Did you hear that? That was my head!
Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Before CG monsters, before latex-drooling alien fangs, before slash-and-cackle Jason and Freddy - before anything that now pales by comparison, Don Siegel made the single creepiest movie of all time. Bonus - the plot was a bald-faced allegory to the anti-Communist witch-hunts that had begun to unravel in the McCarthy hearings a few years earlier.
The Navigator: Okay, so only part of Buster Keaton's silent slapstick masterpiece is set in Los Angeles. But one scene alone is worth the price of admission and a metaphor for L.A. life that still holds true: spoiled-rich Buster Keaton strides down the front steps of his mansion to visit his girlfriend and steps into his massive chauffeured Duesenberg (?), which promptly pulls a tight U-turn and parks at her house - directly across the street.
Training Day: Snappy dialogue and gut-wrenching plot twists aside, this LAPD policer is a no-holds-barred cage match between two brilliant actors doing some of the best work of their careers to date. It's hard to say whether Denzel Washington or Ethan Hawke is the victor.
Volcano: "The Coast is Toast!" This was a wilfully goddamn stupid movie and an orgiastically guilty pleasure to boot. An earthquake fault opens a vent to the earth's molten core. Police cars melt. Don Cheadle wears a beret. The Beverly Center gets imploded. Magma grows a personality. Tommy Lee Jones chews the scenery like an industrial woodchipper. The heroes use Jersey barriers to divert geysers of molten lava into Ballona Creek. God, I loved this stupid, stupid, stupid movie.
1941: This movie tanked like a torpedoed sub upon its 1979 release. What the hell is Spielberg doing? everyone wondered. This isn't the brilliance of "Close Encounters," or the warm-and-cuddliness of "E.T." or the riveting horror of "Jaws" - this is shitty nonsense! And so it was - a knock-down, drag-out mess of a cinematic pulp comic book, complete with racist stereotypes, nearly-incoherent plot and unfunnily brutal slapstick. But it's full of all these great scenes: Ned Beatty ineptly destroying his house with a coastal-defense cannon. Bobby diCicco's cute, hapless zoot-suiter trying to dodge the overly-amorous Wendy Jo Sperber's zaftig love attack. Eddie Deezen riding the suddenly-unmounted Santa Monica ferris-wheel into the Pacific. And sweet, blessed, unhinged John Belushi's manic turn as pilot Capt. Wiild Bill Kelso, diving down the hatch of the Japanese sub. Another guilty pleasure for which I feel no guilt.
Okay, so what do YOU think are the 10 greatest movies set in Los Angeles? What did I miss?
Posted by: Mack_Reed on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - 11:14 AM
