I almost left this film after its first two hours. I expected the final hour would be more of what had gone before - a succession of brief clips, mostly from little-known fifties and sixties movies, with a somewhat flat voice-over narrative explaining how little relationship the "L.A." scenes in the movies have to the realities of Los Angeles and American life. For a while, seeing all the old images was fun and the narration was intelligent, but, I thought, enough was enough.
I'm really glad I stayed 'til the end. The final hour pulled it all together and made me understand why the initial two hours were needed. The second part began with the "low tourism" of Annie Hall (still using the city as a backdrop), went on to the "high tourism" of Chinatown and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (dealing with real historical events involving water and transportation but in a fictional context), and ended with with films by independent black directors, including Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, that show the lives of real people in a hard, difficult, vibrant city in which not everyone owns a car.
Los Angeles Plays Itself is an intensely political documentary for which the primary influence may ultimately be Bertolt Brecht. It doesn't seek to make the viewer identify with any of the characters, even the sympathetic characters, in its movie extracts. Rather, it uses the extracts to argue for a radical view of a potentially beautiful city, one in which economic and social decency come to the fore and public transportation is readily available.
I write this a week before a Los Angeles mayoral election in which Antonio Villaraigosa is the likely winner. I hope he has a chance to see Los Angeles Plays Itself.
I'm really glad I stayed 'til the end. The final hour pulled it all together and made me understand why the initial two hours were needed. The second part began with the "low tourism" of Annie Hall (still using the city as a backdrop), went on to the "high tourism" of Chinatown and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (dealing with real historical events involving water and transportation but in a fictional context), and ended with with films by independent black directors, including Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, that show the lives of real people in a hard, difficult, vibrant city in which not everyone owns a car.
Los Angeles Plays Itself is an intensely political documentary for which the primary influence may ultimately be Bertolt Brecht. It doesn't seek to make the viewer identify with any of the characters, even the sympathetic characters, in its movie extracts. Rather, it uses the extracts to argue for a radical view of a potentially beautiful city, one in which economic and social decency come to the fore and public transportation is readily available.
I write this a week before a Los Angeles mayoral election in which Antonio Villaraigosa is the likely winner. I hope he has a chance to see Los Angeles Plays Itself.