LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF (Anderson, 2003) - I was feeling a bit meh on Saturday, and couldn’t get enthused about watching anything, really, so I picked this three hour documentary I’d had on my list for ages. It was a good choice, because the narrator was often so grumpy I realized just how tiresome I was being, and cheered up quite a bit. Sure, it’s silly that sometimes movies cheat geographically, jumping several miles in the blink of an eye, even mockworthy, but is it worth getting annoyed over? Is shortening Los Angeles to L.A. really so bad? And really, can housing villains in modernist apartments really be seen as an indictment of the style?
Still, it’s a fun documentary, full of fragments of films old and new. Noir gets a big chunk (DOUBLE INDEMNITY and KISS ME DEADLY especially), and so does neo-noir (CHINATOWN, BLADE RUNNER, L.A. CONFIDENTAL), but there are also unexpected mentions, such as CLUELESS, EARTHQUAKE and THE OMEGA MAN. It’s fairly wide-ranging and digressive, but I’m not exactly in a position to criticize that - in fact, I rather enjoyed the meandering nature of the film. It gave me at least half a dozen titles to add to my watch list. And I can’t dislike a film that opens with the first scene of THE CRIMSON KIMONO (or any other Fuller film).
