L.A.Confidential

No thread about this as far as i can tell. A bloody amazing film looking back wouldn't you say?
The writing on Mad Men reminds me of this film for some reason.

film's pretty decent. not as good as the book and several of the subplots seem shoehorned in. contains the only Kevin Spacey performance I find tolerable.

good weed

An excellent noir, but, like Soderbergh's mainstream filmmaking, apt to get overrated because Hollywood's inability to churn these things out like it used to is chronic.

my sister really likes this movie but i suspect its got much more to do w/ her thinking russell crowe is a dreamboat in it than she would let on.

Russell Crowe has never topped this movie. He's a joke now, but watch him here: he does things with the silent-but-violent stereotype that I've never seen before.

Otm. Pretty much jaw-dropping for his first big-time Hollywood movie.

He has a scene in which he relates the story of how his dad beat his mom to death with a pistol or something. Then he suddenly starts to cry in unexpected places although his voice doesn't rise or fall an octave. Very moving.

yeah, this is a flat out great movie.

i like it more than chinatown tbh

just one more reason to sb you

Shakey... please... is that really necessary...

Chinatown is often as obvious and clunky as L.A. Confidential; I don't think it's a work of inviolate beauty.

see, that's what I'm saying! Plus L.A. Confidential is so much fun. i love james cromwell's 'me foine boyos' schtick. and i really do think the movie does an impressive job of juggling the three character arcs of the detectives and making them all sympathetic characters. that's hard when you're also trying to do an interesting murder mystery thingie at the same time!

Evelyn Mulray is as much a tremulous cipher as Kim Basinger's character (albeit more alluringly played by Dunaway). Robert Towne's script has too many symbolic undertones for my taste (srsly want to kill the next student who writes an essay calling Noah Cross the anti Fisher King or Beelzebub or some such nonsense).

i have seen this movie like a million times it is always on tv

lol forget it soto its chinatown

old-timey where-are-all-the-black-people? hollywood didn't really churn out films like this

Evelyn Mulray is as much a tremulous cipher as Kim Basinger's character (

the difference is that Dunaway's character is actually central to the plot, and Basinger's is not. there's this half-assed love-triangle thing they try to squeeze in (which doesn't make any sense) and otherwise none of her scenes serve any purpose beyond providing Crowe with someone to make out with.

no but she is the lead into the fleur de lis thing and also it is about hollywood and surface and "what lies beneath" and a whore cut to look like lana turner etc etc. i mean yeah she is a cipher but plenty of like *themes* converge around this character so

Yeah, Shakes! Basinger is essential!

eh, iirc Spacey's character is the one who stumbles onto Fleur De Lis, indpendent of Basinger. I dunno, her role always seemed extraneous to me, a fairly heavy-handed LOOK I AM DOING LANA TURNER thing that just irritated me.

she's veronica lake actually

well she is doing veronica lake so u suck at this movie sorry

lol

haha

lana turner is the bit where it is lana turner but obviously it is an actress playing lana turner so what is anything

i remember arguing with a middle-aged woman sitting next to me on a plane when i was 12 years old (the year this came out) that basinger didnt resemble veronica lake at all; she conceded, but said that basinger was more 'sensual' - having no concept of sensuality at that age, i just kind of nodded and went 'hmm'

its weird because they even show these clips of veronica lake in the movie and you're like "well for a start"

I think this movie sucks, surprised so many people like it! =D

i dont even like it that much!

Should have been Rebecca de Mornay. x-posts

I think it is s10cki who pointed out how you can see the ending coming from about halfway through the film. Also Kevin Spacey is terrible imo

You're barking mad.

I walked out of an advanced screening of it because I hated it at the time. Years later I watched it again and realized that I was wrong and that it's actually pretty great.

I can't really separate my feelings on this movie from how much I would like to fuck Ed Exley.

This might be the only Spacey performance that hasn't aged at all: he's sardonic, nasty, and even manages to inject gay subtexts (in his other performances they look unintentional).

I think it is s10cki who pointed out how you can see the ending coming from about halfway through the film.

(1) Don't see how this is a criticism, especially when
(2) Chinatown's ending is equally pat

its funny how this became a different movie whenever i'd revisit it over the years - when it came out i was, y'know, as a kid i was very deferential to authority and kind of a tattletale dorkus, and i thought exley (guy pearce) was the hero and i was mad the whole time at how badly everyone treated him and that he didn't get the girl. then i watch it again in my late teens and im like, wow, this guys such a freakin wiener & russell crowe's such a badass. now when i watch it i just wanna see danny devito talkin like a palooka for 2 hours.

You KNOW Brigid, Gutman, Cairo, and the other villains in The Maltese Falcon are going to get caught. How does that detract from its effectiveness?

yeah this is one of the few spacey perfs i can still stomach

i think spacey is p hot in it :-/

x-post It doesn't because the Maltese Falcon is pretty much perfect.

I want to watch it again now. LA, I mean.

i think spacey is p hot in it :-/

I do too.

gross

:-)

spacey's character is like the han solo to exley & white's luke/obi wan

film's pretty decent. not as good as the book and several of the subplots seem shoehorned in

yeah having read it i couldnt help but notice several layers of squalidness missing, for starters, i really should see it again. i didn't think it was bad but it was probably a very distracted first viewing.

people *walked out* of the preview?! i saw the UK preview then saw it twice more before it even came to VHS.
i think there's nowhere near enough James Cromwell. i imagine there's 100s of pages in the book of his character.

Spacey discovering the dead actor in the motel and staring at him, gently shaking his head was at the time one of the best images i'd ever seen at the cinema.

oh Dudley gets a LOT of time in the book. he survives through a couple of the books iirc.

(2) Chinatown's ending is equally pat

Don't get this. A pat ending to me is where everything resolves itself neatly and predictably. That's not Chinatown's ending. And, if you can do the impossible and return to the very first time you saw the film--impossible for me because it was 35 years ago--I'm pretty sure I would have found the ending shocking. (Kael complained about the ending because it departed from Towne's "logical" ending of Dunaway killing Huston. From that I'd infer that she found Polanski's illogical, i.e. anything but predictable.)

I'm defining pat as "trite or glib; superficially complete," and "Fuggetit Jake, it's Chinatown" qualifies.

I still love it despite its inordinate length (5-10 minutes too long) and half-assed symbolism. My favorite bit of Towne business: deciding to include Jake's terrible joke about making love like a Chinaman.

That's such a perfect line, maybe my favourite last line ever...honestly don't see how it's trite or glib, anymore than The Maltese Falcon's "The stuff that dreams are made of" is. Anyway, I won't press the point. Maybe I'll start a thread for "Improving Chinatown's Last Line: Suggest Alternatives." ("C'mon, Jake, tell me the Chinaman joke again--a train passed by the first time and I didn't quite catch the punchline.")

There was a thread a while back that was something to the effect of, "What movie would you bet anyone $50 that they'll like," and this was my answer.

"forget it jake" is pretty easy to roll eyes at now that it's a perennial on AFI'S 100 YEARS, 100 GLIB REMARKS or whatever, but the first time you see it, after the horn tone that Goes On Too Long and the screaming and the blood and john huston's "katherine, i'm your grandfather, your grandfather" fish-lips and jack nicholson's face, it is a pretty devastating line.

does chinatown have "symbolism"? i must have missed it. thank goodness.

this thread is making me wanna watch l.a. confidential which i haven't seen since high school, WHY IS IT NOT ON NETFLIX INSTANT WATCH

"forget it jake" is pretty easy to roll eyes at now that it's a perennial on AFI'S 100 YEARS, 100 GLIB REMARKS or whatever, but the first time you see it, after the horn tone that Goes On Too Long and the screaming and the blood and john huston's "katherine, i'm your grandfather, your grandfather" fish-lips and jack nicholson's face, it is a pretty devastating line.

^this

It's a pretty devastating movie.

Chinatown, that is. LA Confidential doesn't leave you feeling hopeless.

i think this is a really good movie with my only criticisms being that there are some inexplicable and unnecessary scenes and character motivations, and kim basinger's character seems to inherently nice from the get-go so there are no surprises involved. she'd have been better played as a potentially deadly femme fatale or a nice girl who actually has a heart of coal or whatever.

I have no idea what symbolism Alfred's referring to either, beyond maybe the stuff about the spectacles being buried in the water

xp

xp Yeah, "hooker with a heart of gold" isn't exactly the most original character, but damn does she nail it.

gah I think she's awful, I guess it's just me

i don't really think she's awful but i think the conception of the character is off. there's not enough danger to her, and there should be imo. and i don't believe she's incapable of that sort of performance.

I have no idea what symbolism Alfred's referring to either, beyond maybe the stuff about the spectacles being buried in the water

Noah Cross as anti-Fisher King depriving poor Mexicans of water; Chinatown as State of Mind, signified by Jake's eyes crossing over as soon as Lou, Evelyn, or anybody alludes to what he did in Chinatown. It's not awful but it's an imposed Literary Device.

"forget it jake" is pretty easy to roll eyes at now that it's a perennial on AFI'S 100 YEARS, 100 GLIB REMARKS or whatever, but the first time you see it, after the horn tone that Goes On Too Long and the screaming and the blood and john huston's "katherine, i'm your grandfather, your grandfather" fish-lips and jack nicholson's face, it is a pretty devastating line.

No it's not -- and I wrote a paper for a terrible "cinema" class in my junior year of college pointing out how pat it was to my ears even then. Different strokes, etc.

Noah Cross as anti-Fisher King depriving poor Mexicans of water; Chinatown as State of Mind, signified by Jake's eyes crossing over as soon as Lou, Evelyn, or anybody alludes to what he did in Chinatown. It's not awful but it's an imposed Literary Device.

can't say either of these ever occurred to me. I'm not sure the latter one even qualifies as symbolism but whatever... finding the decisive clue in an artificially maintained body of water, THAT'S symbolism

omar OTM about Kim Basinger (who of course won the Oscar).

i'm actually always impressed by how underplayed the chinatown stuff is--a lot of movies would have flashed back to some specific and extremely dramatic Failure that Drove Him From The Police Force. (even the hallowed vertigo does this--opens with it, no less--with hermann sawing away.) in this movie it's never actually explained: it's mentioned like twice, vaguely, and only when people ask him about it.

the line i wince at is when he gives escobar the address and escobar is like "chinatown!" and jake is like "chinatown." that's really the only place i feel like it pokes into DO U SEE.

and the ending.

and Jake drifting away when Evelyn asks him about it.

well he would drift away! he has a lot on his mind!

Redeemed, by the way, when Evelyn says, "You must have looked CUTE in BLUE."

He's got nothing on his mind except that he was fucked like a Chinaman.

thought this was a pissweak and thin adaptation, never rewatched it

Kael complained about the ending because it departed from Towne's "logical" ending of Dunaway killing Huston. From that I'd infer that she found Polanski's illogical, i.e. anything but predictable.

i never really understood the argument that one of these endings was somehow more 'logical' than the other. if anything the towne ending seems like the more pat, predictable ending.

I have never seen Chinatown!

its only ok

prob only the 3rd or 4th best polanski but still one of the best films of the '70s.

For LA Confidential I love the dangling out of the window bit. The 'you can predict the ending from halfway through' doesn't necessarily have to stop you from taking pleasure watching it.

The last line I always think as a kind of miracle -- on a page I'd imagine as totally ridiculous. But in that film, given what happened and what everyone has gone through it manages to be much more.

Noah Cross as anti-Fisher King depriving poor Mexicans of water; Chinatown as State of Mind, signified by Jake's eyes crossing over as soon as Lou, Evelyn, or anybody alludes to what he did in Chinatown. It's not awful but it's an imposed Literary Device.

'imposed'? 'literary'? can't remember which films you actually like.

never thought of the fisher king. still less the anti-fisher kind. not sure this counts as 'half-assed symbolism'.

It's not awful but it's an imposed Literary Device.

Yes--a literary device has been imposed.

it's oedipus in 1930s LA... not sure if that's literary or just 'one of the founding stories of western civilization'

I love them both!

Extremely entertaining movie. For a while there, Hanson was one of the most dependable, unpredictable neo-genre directors, until that "In Her Shoes" chick flick killed his career (though "In Her Shoes" ain't bad!). I saw "LAC" a couple of times in the theater, the first for fun, the second just to hear the gasp when the twist comes.

Per "Chinatown," I'm one of those folks that think it's perfect in every way. It's like the ultimate film noir that even the code-flouting noirs could never make, yet doesn't go too far in that direction, either. Obv. it could only have been made when it was, but it somehow doesn't feel uniquely dated to the '70s in either look and mentality.

"LAC" does a similarly neat job balancing this sort of contemporary take on something retro, keeping an element of period gee-whiz even as it goes modern-day dark. Maybe not a coincidence that Hanson cut his teeth on Sam Fuller.

When I do come across this movie now and again, it always strikes me similar to (the otherwise totally dissimilar) "Heat" in the number of familiar character actors popping up in the margins.

Yeah. David Straithairn, James Cromwell, Ron Rifkin, and Graham Beckel are all terrific. For a few years I thought James Franco played the James Dean wannabe.

Was reading an Ellroy interview in an old Paris Review the other day and there's a moment where he gets asked about other authors, who he likes that's contemporaneous, and he says something like "I picked up a Cormac McCarthy book and thought 'why doesn't this cocksucker use quotation marks?' Then I tried another one and I saw there were 6 or 7 consecutive pages of Spanish. I don't speak Spanish, so I quit trying. My name isn't Juan Ellroy, you know what I mean?"

Interviewer's next question is "Some critics have called you racially insensitive. Why do you think that is?"

My name isn't Juan Ellroy, you know what I mean?"

'why doesn't this cocksucker use quotation marks?'

good fucking question

i like what i've seen of hanson a lot, yeah. wonder boys is top five movies of the decade.

(i don't know which decade it's in but either way)

He lost his knack for making trashy thrillers.

My name isn't Juan Ellroy, you know what I mean?"

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, March 19, 2011 6:15 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah it kinda made my skin crawl

soto you talking about hanson or ellroy?

i probably would've had the same reaction to a bunch of spanish pages, if that story is true

yeah tbh. my name isn't enrique.

soto you talking about hanson or ellroy?

Hanson. Haven't read any Ellroy.

my name isn't enrique.

― "biggest asshole on ILX" (history mayne), Saturday, March 19, 2011 6:42 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

man you just shatter my illusions like i'm payin you to do it

it's a clever play on my government name like, oh, can't think of an example

haha

"Forget it, Joachim...it's Spanishtown"

Good movie. Not a patch on "Chinatown". U crazy if you think this is even in the same league.