Los Angeles Plays Itself

You may have noticed other comments here saying that the film is long, boring and has a droning voice over. While it is 3 hours long and has a narrator with a voice like a sedated Billy Bob Thornton, Los Angeles Plays Itself is one of the most fascinating film-crit documentaries ever made.

The director assumes that the viewer has a certain level of understanding of film theory, and that would probably help when the narrator starts citing David Thomson, Pauline Kael, Dziga Veryov and Ozu, but it's not entirely necessary to enoy the film either. All you really need is an understanding that a real place - the city of Los Angeles - is also a fictional place - the LA of the movies. The documentary is like an extended home movie made up of clips from films and interspersed with sections created by the director.

What holds it all together is an examination of Los Angeles as a place in films (locations, buildings), as a stand in for other places (Africa, Switzerland), as a record of places lost (buildings, neighborhoods, people, cultures), as focus for nightmares and dreams (SF like Blade Runner and Independence Day) and more.

While the voice over could have been paced a little better and be bit more "up", this film really rewards viewers who are willing to accept the documentary on its own terms. I found I just couldn't stop thinking about it and now, when watching movies shot in LA, I keep remembering moments from Los Angeles Plays Itself.

This is one of the most interesting projects about cinema (as the filmed frame) that I know of. It is about the city as background, as character and subject. They were making as far back as the 1920's films as hymns to the cityscape and what life in it, 'city symphonies' they called them, but here it is about the most photographed city in the world. A place that was nothing more than a small town when the dream factories rolled in and shaped it into a myth that sustains itself. And it's entirely in terms of cinematic history, entirely cobbled together from other peoples' vision of that place.

So the essay is about the history of a city as reflected in cinema and shaped by it, about Hollywood's idea of Los Angeles overlapping with the actual place where real people live. The filmmaker has compiled clips from a large array of films; from silents and noir to 80's action and modern blockbusters. The idea is that we're looking at the background of these shots, at the actual reality and place over which is superimposed the movie fantasy.

Various insights here, ranging from the stridently interprative to the intuitively discerning. It amuses the narrator for example, how modernist architectural houses built to signify transparence are turned by movies into the dens of iniquity of shady characters simply because they look weird from the outside. How the same building could substitute as a hotel, a police station, and a newspaper office depending on the movie. How the disappearance of entire neighborhoods can be actually traced in the footage of movies filmed there. Bunker Hill was a busy, homely district where pensioners and poor immigrants lived in the late 50's, but in '84 it substitutes well as a desolate urban wasteland in Night of the Comet.

And a more interesting one. How cinema imagined in Chinatown or Who Framed Roger Rabbit, perhaps reflecting public opinion, devious schemes by shady groups of plutocrats to usurp control of the water or public transport, while the actual reality was banal; these things happened, or efforts towards them, but in the public eye and with its support.

Criticisms are valid, but this film is not entertainment...in the popular sense of movies today. That said, I was riveted for three hours, without an intermission. I just couldn't leave, and risk missing something! I've been secretly admiring Los Angeles for years. I love driving its main boulevards for miles and experiencing the pan-cultural ethic a single street. Western, Sepulveda, Slausen, Sunset, Van Owen. Here is a film that I always wanted to see, and encourages me to see more films about Los Angeles. I've always felt that Los Angeles was a city in its late adolescence/teen age years: pimples, raging hormones, lack of history and eternally looking to the future. Andersons take on the city, it's image in film as a personality, place and thing are very juicy indeed. Best seen at multiple sessions! Can't wait for the DVD.

Thom Andersen uses hundreds of scenes from a multitude of movies throughout the past century, to express his opinions about the true Los Angeles in this cinematic essay. He takes the common opinion that Los Angeles has no discernible culture, and presents two basic reasons why this opinion is so prevalent.

1. Los Angeles used to be a culture rich city until the richer, more affluent, citizens decided that it's more profitable to have apartment complexes, high rises, and strip malls.

2. There is quite a bit of culture remaining in Los Angeles, but because everyone is too busy driving themselves from point A to point B as fast as possible, they don't see it.

Whether you agree with his opinions or not, the film is worth a look (although nearly three hours long) to see all of the footage of Los Angeles over the years, and how it portrayed LA at the time.

For a three hour documentary about a town that houses 10 million and looks dusty and dirty even when it's at its pristine and pretentious best, this is some compelling stuff. The droll voice of the narrator (Encke King- please tell me that's a pseudonym for the documentary's creator, Thom Anderson) expounds the essay like a cynical alcoholic history professor might talk about the Arapahoe during a Friday night session in which you were hoping to deal with no more important topics than whose breasts look best on GoT or what's up with Jets QB situation. And you'll listen to him because what he says makes sense. Yes, Hollywood is full of overprivileged white guys who pretend the city they live in doesn't exist outside of their fortress-like movie studios and bougie Bel-Air penthouses. I myself lived in Los Angeles for a year, and Hollywood is more of an odor than a thing. You get a faint whiff of it from time to time, but for the most part, Los Angeles is a place where underprivileged multi-ethnic people scrape out a living and pay too much for it. Every single Asian country is represented there (China, Japan, Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, the Phillipines, all of 'em), and of course a good 1/3 of it is Mexican (and you can't forget how many black people live there...). It's a melting pot.

Anderson includes a history of Los Angeles by showing how the filmed history got everything wrong and he expounds on the cops and how they're portrayed. His essay sounds like what it is: a tenured film professor being overly critical and at times pseudo-intelligent about an industry borne of immigrants when at its best... which is hilarious given how kind he is to anyone obviously not born in America, as though their portrayal of Los Angeles is more honest because they don't pretend to know anything about it (or probably care all that much-- I lived there, and I never found a reason to care about it. It was a just a place with a lot of people and not a particularly inviting one). This would probably be labeled communist propaganda if it came out during the 50s with how much it seems to disdain anyone who isn't working class or below. Which would be more admirable if the filmmaker was just some guy who watched a lot of movies while he scraped out a living repairing motorcycles in Simi Valley and not some coddled condescending liberal who's been sucking at the film school teat since the 60s.

And yet, I give it an 8. The guy does know his stuff.