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Posted: |
Jan 2, 2013 - 3:37 PM
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By: |
joan hue
(Member)
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I just finished watching, once again, L.A. Confidential. I love that movie, and I can’t help but wonder
if Los Angeles hasn’t been used as a metaphor for abstract ideas in several movies. The famous
cry to “Go West Young Man,” kind of ends in L.A. And what do we find when we reach our furthest
west point? In L.A. Confidential we see a city full of racism and corruption, but there are a few
heroes. Note the following quotation from the director.
“She is as fitting a metaphor for the city as anything ever hatched by Hollywood: Kim Basinger's high-class call girl Lynn Bracken in the neo-noir potboiler "L.A. Confidential." Tragic yet glamorous, she's a cipher for intense desire and empty idol worship (dolled-up to resemble '40s ingénue Veronica Lake),
a classic femme fatale director Curtis Hanson calls "the emotional center of the film."
"The character represents how I feel about Los Angeles and what I want people to feel about L.A.," Hanson said. "She's a natural beauty with a phony image, a disguise that's all about selling it to the suckers. But when you go beyond the image, as when you go beyond L.A. as the city of manufactured illusion, the character is not only beautiful but totally self-aware. Underneath, she knows the truth about who she is. Everybody else is struggling to figure it out."
Then we have Chinatown. Again the theme of micro and macro corruption is explored in this amazing
film. The city is morally corrupt as are the one to one relationships. (Literal and government incest.)
A few years ago Crash came along. Once again the racist mistrust of various races and cultures
in this melting pot city and the city’s systemic corruption are both explored.
Hollywood is a big lure for people, and it has been explored in movies like Sunset Boulevard, The
Bad And The Beautiful and The Player.
Gangster Squad will soon be released. Since it deals with Mickey Cohen, it seems like a prequel
to L.A. Confidential.
I’m sure other movies have used cities as metaphors. Certainly New York City and Las Vegas
have been portrayed in interesting ways.
Feel free to add to my few L.A. movies or movies that use a city as a character.
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Posted: |
Jan 2, 2013 - 3:54 PM
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By: |
Jim Phelps
(Member)
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POINT BLANK (1967)
I posted someone's view of the film and the era[the title is my own, however] on the FSM CD thread. Maybe not quite what you're looking for Joan, but interesting nonetheless.
http://filmscoremonthly.com/board/posts.cfm?pageID=2&forumID=1&threadID=61402&archive=0
POINT BLANK: The 'Lost' 1967
"POINT BLANK is one of the best cinematic representations of that stark, sunbleached, urban mood which dominated the mid-to-late-1960s but rarely gets referred to--- people talk about "protest" and "tumult" but almost never about this (just as people rarely refer to the autumnal-wintry melancholy of the 1970s when that was the mood that virtually defined that era, which THE ICE STORM, flawed as it was, later attempted to capture).
But regarding POINT BLANK:
The atonal score; the "echo-y" resonance of the thing; the claw-your-neck, angsty atmoshpere; the diffused lighting; that window-screen camera trick; the jazz bar; the aloof neon lights at night; even that car lot.... it's all just sooooo very, very 1966 and beyond...
It's just like the name of the film: in-your-face ("POINT") yet oddly hollow ("BLANK").
Anyway, for any younger person looking to see what the cities tended to feel like at that time, POINT BLANK is one of the better movie examples of the period you can point to.
...Also, the DVD has two brief extras (both entitled "The Rock") which focus on Alcatraz Pison and also convey the same lost, disillusioned flavor of time which was so captivating yet confounding.
Walter Cronkite once observed that the '60s was "a slum of a decade". And one has to understand what that means. Yes, the sunstreaked-field/Woodstock image existed, but to miss the juxtaposition of that with the grimy, dank, hollow quality of the '60s is to miss the decade entirely.
The truth is always more complicated -- and infinitely more interesting -- than the pre-chewed view of history, even recent cultural history, that we tend to get.
When one mixes POINT BLANK with those urban montage scenes in MIDNIGHT COWBOY and, say, Antonioni's BLOW UP, with a dash of the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, you're getting a more accurate sense of the mood of the late-'60s (albeit cinematically) and how they actually kinda felt and why they haunted that generation so much and so long then you will from the media's simplistic spin on the era today.
Or from those dreadful, revisionistic '80s films which tried to exploit it and reshape it to fit a Reagan era sensibility which bore no resemblance to it.
There is always tumult and cultural change, and there's always tragedy. But what made the 1960s seem so dramatic, so resonant, was how it felt. Which is always a tough thing to describe or to capture.
The 11 years between JFK's instantly-legendary, bottomlessly macabre assassination (such that we refuse to deal with it even today other than thru platitudes) in 1963, and Nixon's resignation in 1974 under the Watergate scandal -- and all the lies told in between about that eternal, turgid mire that was Vietnam -- created and reflected a startling shift in the culture which was unusual in its speed and severity and starkness. And, yes, that story is so much more compelling than flower-power images of bellbottomed jeans and Volkswagons and posters of Che Guevara.
If only we had a better way to capture the zeitgeist of a period, or a decade, so that it could be sniffed like a cologne and the air of the time breathed in. So people could appreciate what it actually felt like to be alive in that particular period.
All the modern hippie references just make it seem boring. And silly.
How could a decade which went from the doomed, sacred, frozen-in-time eeriness of The Twilight Zone and Mayberry and The Bates Motel of the early-'60s and then jarringly metamorphosed into the post-apocalyptic tension of POINT BLANK and and the psychedelic intravenous journeys of FANTASTIC VOYAGE and THE YELLOW SUBMARINE and the forlorn, arid wastelands of PLANET OF THE APES and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY from the late-'60s, and then subsided into the deeply melancholy, bittersweet disillusion caught vividly by that ice-skating/snow-angels scene in LOVE STORY (just that one scene, as the whole movie is pretty rank) of the early-'70s possibly be boring??
I use those free-association/stream-of-consciousness movie references because they're so much more memorable (and oddly precise) than "Entertainment Tonight" or recent years' pop culture efforts at '60s nostalgia can seem to communicate.
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"the grimy, dank, hollow quality of the '60s"
Apparently I missed that aspect of the 60's... quite thankfully.
I remember well the various tragic events, but was also very cognizant of the benefits of the time... case in point = the remarkable renaissance in popular music.
Sure glad I was there with my eyes open. Wouldn't have had it any other way! 
Weepy Jim just can't get over the fact that.he.missed it.
Literally and figuratively.
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Posted: |
Aug 2, 2019 - 11:25 AM
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By: |
Jim Phelps
(Member)
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Weepy Jim just can't get over the fact that.he.missed it.
Literally and figuratively.
I don't relish being 20 years older than I am now, so any pop cultural interest--and that's all I have for the '60s--I "missed out on" chronologically is a "misfortune" I can deal with.
I also don't buy it for a second that you yourself were old enough to be aware of those (awful) days. Joan Hue was actually there, and she, to her credit, isn't so smitten with the decade.
As for "figuratively" missing the '60s, do enlighten the world as to how that is so. What specifically have I "missed" regarding that era?
Go ahead, enlighten us. You won't, because you have never, in all the years you have polluted this forum, ever posted anything of substance.
I await your glib, empty response.
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Weepy Jim just can't get over the fact that.he.missed it.
Literally and figuratively.
I don't relish being 20 years older than I am now, so any pop cultural interest--and that's all I have in the '60s--I "missed out on" chronologically is a "misfortune" I can deal with.
I also don't buy it for a second that you yourself were old enough to be aware of those (awful) days. Joan Hue was actually there, and she, to her credit, isn't so smitten with the decade.
As for "figuratively" missing the '60s, do enlighten the world as to how that is so. What specifically have I "missed" regarding that era.
Go ahead, enlighten us. You won't, because you have never, in all the years you have polluted this forum, ever posted anything of substance.
I await your glib, empty response.
TAKE A NUMBER IN FAVE POSTS
NUFF SAID
BC
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Can't believe none of us mentioned HEAT, its many sunsets and night sequences mirroring the downfall of the Pacino character.
Downfall of Pacino's cop? Despite his domestic grief, he wins doesnt he?
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