Watch Los Angeles Plays Itself For Free

That was an excellent one.

One of my all time favorites.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

I have never been to Los Angeles--let's get that out of the way first. I have been watching movies set in the city for most of my life. It was great to see excerpts from Kiss Me Deadly, Sunset Boulevard, Rebel Without a Cause, Double Indemnity and many other films both great and terrible shown here. If some films are missing from the compilation (I missed Boogie Nights and Shampoo) many are there and testify most eloquently to the power of the city.I've had Reyner Banham's book LOS ANGELES THE ARCHITECTURE OF FOUR ECOLOGIES for forty years and have been waiting for the documentarist who would give me the Bradbury building on film, who knows the importance of these buildings to architectural tradition. Richard Neutra and John Lautner must be pleased, if the film is playing in Heaven, to see their work so lovingly presented.

What I found most interesting about this movie is how starkly it showed that we all live in different worlds. I loved the movie, the way it was structured, what it focused on. But at the end of the day, the director's LA is not my LA (starting from trivial things like his assertion that the term LA is an insult). For example: his LA says nothing about trees, whereas one of the things I try to point out to visitors is how many trees we have, all over the city, vastly more than you'd expect, of great variety. My LA extends eastward almost to Palmdale, his runs from the coast to about highway 110. My LA is fascinated by man's accomplishments, from the cluster of antennas (and the observatory) on Mount Wilson, to the traps in the San Gabriel mountains preventing landslides, to the fact that the freeways work as well as they do, to the massive water projects keeping us all going. His LA is uninterested in the control of nature. My LA loves the fact that material items are so cheap, whether you're looking at any of the masses of malls, or buying second hand in any of the masses of Goodwill stores. He doesn't see the cheap material items, rather the expensive no-materials (rent, medical, education, etc). My LA is interested in how many educational establishments we have, of such variety; his LA does not even mention these institutions. This is not to criticize him or the movie --- the world is huge and none of us can know more than a tiny part of it. It is simply to point out that LA is likewise huge, and the perspectives he gives, while part of the story are far from the whole story, from the whole undiscussed issue of teenager movies and the portrayal of LA high schools, to the complete lack of reference to the LA Arboretum or Huntington Gardens (both locations used in so many movies).(Yeah yeah, you can argue that he is talking about Los Angeles city, not LA metro, but come on. That's like snobbish New Yorkers insisting that Manhattan is the whole of NYC. It's a blinkered, empty way to live your life.)If you're not a local, come visit and see for yourself. The good things he says about it are true --- there is so much beauty in the whole metro --- and many of the bad things from police to racism have (touch wood) been resolved or at least improved and are improving.

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.

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.