Welcome to L.A.

It seemed a bit dark in '77, but today it may even cheer you up! It takes at least a half-hour to understand what's going on in this movie so here's a head start:

The guy with the hat and goatee (Carroll) is a song-writer/playboy and son of a millionaire. Watch him because he wants to sleep with most of the women in the movie. The crazy woman in the taxi is married to... is that really Harvey Keitel? Yes. You'll never believe it! He is the employee of the millionaire who is, incidentally, Uncle Jessie from the Dukes of Hazard.

If I were Carroll I would have gone for Sissy Spacek, who likes to clean house topless throughout the movie. But he still makes enough tracks to be considered a hero of the sexual revolution.

The music throughout the movie sounds a little like Dan Hill, but it gets you in a good 70's mood so that you can enjoy the atmosphere this movie creates. Look for Sissy Spacek's pants that match the wallpaper and definitely check out Harvey Keitel's pipe!

Twenty-three years after seeing this movie for the first time, my initial impressions still remain. What really sinks the movie is the TRULY AWFUL vocal delivery of Richard Baskin on the soundtrack. Had to go for the mute button every time. The only reason I even checked it out again was for Sissy, one of our best actresses. She's good, but her next Altman film 3 Women is more provocative. Welcome to L.A. -- Nashville it ain't!

"Welcome To LA" is a dated film involving ten characters whose only shared trait seems to be loneliness. The movie plays like a moody tone poem, and there are no comedic, dramatic, or action-filled sequences... just a bunch of urban sun-bums looking lost and hopelessly mellow.

Keith Carradine redefines the term "slacker" for the Me Generation, as he wanders around LA with a soul patch having intercourse with a score of women while never once changing his expression. He's supposedly an artist, with troubles in his romantic life and familial relationships, but he is so centered, so serene, so placid, that he comes off more as a Buddhist monk or Jedi Knight.

He has occasional flashbacks to his former lover played by Diahnne Abbott, and I have to believe that no man would ever forget this woman. In her wordless seconds of screen time here, just like her tiny roles in "Taxi Driver" and "New York, New York," you can see that this is one of the most gorgeous, sexual women ever to walk the Earth... she's got the jungle in her, and this is the type of woman men kill other men to be with. She was my favorite part of the movie.

Between stories involving the grating Geraldine Chaplin and the sexy Sally Kellerman we keep cutting back to Richard Baskin as a singer/songwriter recording his album in a studio. These songs and the montages cut around them- which were presumably meant to be the heart of the film- are rendered unlistenable by the foul, nails-on-blackboard voice of Baskin. The fact that this man was ever allowed behind a microphone is a crime against the eardrum. Instead of the soulful, contemplative center of the story, we get a talentless drone warbling clichéd lyrics while the leads bemoan their fate. Nothing makes the heart ache like sunshine.

The only other bright spot is Sissy Spacek, a woman of unbelievable beauty and depth, who effortlessly steals the show whenever she's on screen. Ms. Spacek can be a naive little girl one minute, an intellectual adult the next, and a lusty sexpot only seconds later. If you love her like I do check out "Violets Are Blue" in which she plays a woman so irresistible you cannot help but fall in love.

"Welcome To LA" is supposed to show the isolation and loneliness that exists even in the hedonistic, superficial world of La-La Land... the trouble is we wind up with a movie that confirms our worst beliefs about the place: These characters have no right to be this bummed... it's shallow, narcissistic self-pity. But it makes for a great late-night movie.

Grade: C

When Karen Hood (Geraldine Chaplin) tells Carroll Barber (Keith Carradine) "I love Greta Garbo," he responds with the slightly cryptic "Yeah, she's nice when you're by yourself."

Profound, but too offhand to be a predictable rejoinder. It's very striking, one of the most original of the film.

Especially do you get the flavour of the upper-middle-class world-weary young disappointed in Baskin's lyric:

"At first I loved your sweet complexion, your tawny cheeks and lip confections--they photographed you for your style.

your body held me for a while; you could disguise with such beguile

now lying her remembering it better than it used to be is loneliness, but it doesn't really matter now, I never really loved you much, I guess."

That's from the title song.

From "The Best Temptation of all" there is "there's so many bodies and scenes...so many faces and feelings...dreams...wet tasting dreams

when those silky infatuations come, enticin' me...invitin' me..excitin' me.."

The world of "bodies and pleasures" that was Michel Foucault's vision of the future of sexuality in the first volume of THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY was being lived out in L.A. in particular before he even wrote that it would come to this.

At a Malibu party where Carroll and his wealthy father Carl (marvelously played by Denver Pyle) confront each other, Carl's mistress Nona (Lauren Hutton) spends some stylized, posturing time with Carroll up the stairs overlooking the stylized party, the kind of party in stark white stylized modern LA houses where being comfortable must be impossible, and being controlled is an impossible necessity; and he says to her "Do you really care about that old man?" She says, knowing it won't do to say anything "less," "He sure seems to care a lot about me."

Earlier, before Carroll sees Susan (Viveca Lindfors) for the first time since his return, she says on the telephone "don't you want to see me?" and he says "I've seen you." As the older woman, somewhat desperately clinging to an unshared wish, she says "I've seen you too. I liked it."

To the love-and/or sex-starved real estate salesgirl Anne Goode (Sally Kellerman), Susan says, when she makes the arrangements for Carroll's apartment, "I pictured you plump and tiny with curly black hair--AGGRESSIVE. And here you are--soft and blonde and pretty." Anne, always trying to hard to please: "And here you are so beautiful."

Kellerman drives Carradine to his new Silverlake digs.

She says "this is Hollywood. I just love it. I don't know a thing about it, but I love it...(long pause)....does that sound like a line?...I didn't mean it to..I guess everything sounds like a line these days...Shameless, aren't I?...what are you thinking?....

Carradine: "About your shame."

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

"People deceive themselves here, don't you think? Yes. And that's how they fall in love. And then, when everything is over, it's the other person that gets deceived. Am I right? Yeah. Van Nuys Boulevard...(long pause)..I don't need to be loved by anyone...I don't mind waiting...it's how you wait that's important, anyway..I think.. but everyone gets deceived...don't they..."

These are the opening lines of the film, which Chaplin intones in a cab going through L.A., riding all over it as she does every day, all dressed up in fur and pearl earrings and hat all for herself's own formality in the anonymity of a taxi ride.

I knew a number of people like this in 1976 and 1977. They were over-sophisticated and living in the strange limbo between the volatile, but vital 60's and the beginning of the carnage and sterization that began to open its fully tarnished flower with the Reagan era and has escalated to the deafening roar we have only 24 years later.

Bars were full of people who weren't on cellphones all the time.

They weren't ever on cell phones--even the ones you can still see.

This film, Alan Rudolph's first and BEST (along with Choose Me 7 years later) had gotten a bum rap. Some people hate the music of Richard Baskin or think the variety of characters are a pretentious and boring lot. I think just the opposite! Harvey Keitel was never more amusing and pathetic. Sissy Spacek is a doll (in probably her easiest role) and brighter than some would think. Geraldine Chaplin is finally put to good use. Keith Carradine seemed to relax more after his Nashville experience and is very subtle. Sally Kellerman at her most beautiful and hungry. Viveca Lindfors creates a memorable "older" woman and John Considine is hilarious. Denver Pyle supplies stability.

After a while the music grows on you, when you finally actually hear what he's saying. Needless to say, I'm a big Altman fan, and once in a while Rudolph hits the mark as well. A 9 out of 10. Best performance = Sally Kellerman. Worth a visit as L.A. is explored and exposed in a new light!