DVD Chronicle

Abstract

DVD Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) DVD Chronicle: Los Angeles Plays Itself, directed by Thom Andersen (Cinema Guild, 2014) Gone in 60 Seconds, directed by H. B. Halicki (Mill Creek Entertainment, 2017) Falling Down, directed by Joel Schumacher (Warner Brothers, 2010); Once upon a Time … in Hollywood, directed by Quentin Tarantino (Sony Pictures, 2019) Swingers, directed by Doug Liman (Miramax Lionsgate, 2011) Killer of Sheep, directed by Charles Burnett (The Charles Burnett Collection, New Yorker Video and Milestone Cinematheque, 2007) Devil in a Blue Dress, directed by Carl Franklin (Leading Men, Sony Pictures, 2013) Bosch, seasons 1–6, directed by Jim McKay and others (Amazon Prime streaming). NB: all these films except Killer of Sheep are available for streaming from Amazon Prime Bosch is available only via streaming. What are the films that best show Los Angeles? Show the city in all its guises, old and new, fabulated and actual, unimaginably rich and desperately poor, alternately sun-stunned and (as Raymond Chandler wrote in The Big Sleep) having "the look of hard wet rain in the foothills"? During a recent stay of a few months in Los Angeles these seemed apt questions to ponder, especially when the Chandlerian rain persisted through much of a wet spring. On drizzly days I stayed inside our Koreatown apartment to watch Los Angeles films—the movie-viewing analogue, I suppose, to the locavore dining fashionable among hip Angelenos—mostly via DVDs borrowed from the media collection at the Los Angeles Central Public Library. I remark in passing that this building is certainly the most handsome in Southern California, and one of the most handsome public buildings anywhere. I do not know of any documentary film addressing the architecture of the Central Library or its complicated history (it suffered a disastrous arson fire in 1986). There should be such a film, something to match in interest and intelligence of approach Susan Orlean's recent volume The Library Book, which reports on the fire and much else besides. There is an excellent documentary—more accurately, a film essay—about Los Angeles architecture, especially domestic architecture: Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). A useful starting point for anyone interested in cinematic depictions of the city's buildings and locales, it gathers clips from a wide variety of movies, then links the clips together with smart, information-filled, and opinionated commentary from Andersen, who knows what he likes (screen work observing the city in all its multifariousness) and what he does not like (Los Angeles reduced to its [End Page 449] wealthiest neighborhoods in the hills or at the beach, with the hundreds of square miles of the city down in the flats completely left out of the picture). As a native Angeleno, Andersen also notices and deplores a lot of locational inaccuracies, streets placed in the wrong neighborhoods and the like. "Silly geography makes for silly movies," he says, persuasively enough. Less persuasively, Andersen argues that Hollywood has regularly communicated its disdain for Modernist architecture in Los Angeles by installing drug lords or other villains in showplace avant-garde homes—for example, the white-walled Lovell house designed in the late 1920s by Richard Neutra and nestled into a superb hillside site in Los Feliz. In Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential this becomes the swank lair of the society pimp Pierce Patchett, and according to Andersen it is thereby devalued. The guilt-by-criminality argument, repeated often in Los Angeles Plays Itself, especially in the documentary's last hour or so, does not become more convincing on repetition. Andersen in general is not very attuned to irony or nuance in the cinema. With regard to Annie Hall, he takes Alvy Singer's diatribe against Los Angeles in that film seriously, as an earnest critique of the city from Woody Allen, rather than as a comic riff from a character we recognize as a New York City obsessive. Andersen is on surer ground when he simply shows and comments affectionately on the great icons of cinematographic presentation in Los Angeles—Bunker Hill and its obliquely climbing Angels Flight funicular; the late-19th-century Bradbury Building's filigree ironwork stairs and handsome atrium, the setting for...