Odelecol
Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.
Catangro
After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Nayan Gough
A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
whitesheik
I read with some amusement the reviews on this film, ranging from boring to brilliant. So, first things first - brilliant it's not. Good it's not. Boring? Sometimes, but that's not the point. Thom Anderson wasn't born here. He doesn't bother to tell us when he moved here. From his rambling, pretentious, pedantic and horribly written narration, spoken by a horrible narrator, he presents himself as a native, as someone who knows Los Angeles intimately. I don't think so, frankly.There's an interesting idea here - the Los Angeles of film, and the Los Angeles of now. But Mr. Anderson is so in love with himself and the sound of his own voice (and his narrator's) that what we end up with is a smarmy, not very smart documentary about - what? That's the problem. I don't think he has a clue as to what his own movie is ultimately about. His points are occasionally so obtuse that you sit there scratching your head as to what he's trying to say. He puts clips from two Hitchcock films that were shot in San Francisco. Really? And one in Paris? Really? I'm sure he thinks he's being deep and profound, but in both regards he'd be wrong. There are some decent clips here, and happily they've been cleaned up for the Blu-ray and taken from other Blu-ray hi-def sources, so they look much better than what was screened at the Egyptian (I was there). The final forty minutes or so, where he blathers on about completely unknown and obscure films that he's obviously in love with (given that he's a teacher of film theory, I'm sure he revels in such outré material), just devolves this film into complete and utter pointlessness. Worth it for some good clips, and a handful of interesting bits of information. It's okay to want to make a film all about yourself, but don't call it Los Angeles Plays Itself, call it Three Hours of How I Personally Feel About Los Angeles with Sidetracks to Other Pointless Topics. Then we know what we're getting.I cannot give it more than one star because it is such a missed opportunity for those of us who a) were born and raised here, b) know this city well, and c) love this city, especially its past, when it was one of the most unique cities in the world.
djdima77
Terrible, with boring voice over that would be more appropriate for nature documentary or technical tutorial. This film is long, very long and unnecessary depressing in mood and tone. There are way better ways to learn about LA history, people and architecture. This movie is nothing more then a self obsessed and self involved research, that the author didn't even bother to make even remotely watchable. The movie plays like an internal monologue, where the author forgot to keep it intriguing or interesting. The movie selection is also very poorly done, there are way more and way better films to represent LA in it's best and worst ways. The narrative winders around, rolling in and out of the main subject, this meandering both irritating and confusing.Don't waste your time!
mjcfoxx
For a three hour documentary about a town that houses 10 million and looks dusty and dirty even when it's at its pristine and pretentious best, this is some compelling stuff. The droll voice of the narrator (Encke King- please tell me that's a pseudonym for the documentary's creator, Thom Anderson) expounds the essay like a cynical alcoholic history professor might talk about the Arapahoe during a Friday night session in which you were hoping to deal with no more important topics than whose breasts look best on GoT or what's up with Jets QB situation. And you'll listen to him because what he says makes sense. Yes, Hollywood is full of overprivileged white guys who pretend the city they live in doesn't exist outside of their fortress-like movie studios and bougie Bel-Air penthouses. I myself lived in Los Angeles for a year, and Hollywood is more of an odor than a thing. You get a faint whiff of it from time to time, but for the most part, Los Angeles is a place where underprivileged multi-ethnic people scrape out a living and pay too much for it. Every single Asian country is represented there (China, Japan, Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, the Phillipines, all of 'em), and of course a good 1/3 of it is Mexican (and you can't forget how many black people live there...). It's a melting pot.Anderson includes a history of Los Angeles by showing how the filmed history got everything wrong and he expounds on the cops and how they're portrayed. His essay sounds like what it is: a tenured film professor being overly critical and at times pseudo-intelligent about an industry borne of immigrants when at its best... which is hilarious given how kind he is to anyone obviously not born in America, as though their portrayal of Los Angeles is more honest because they don't pretend to know anything about it (or probably care all that much-- I lived there, and I never found a reason to care about it. It was a just a place with a lot of people and not a particularly inviting one). This would probably be labeled communist propaganda if it came out during the 50s with how much it seems to disdain anyone who isn't working class or below. Which would be more admirable if the filmmaker was just some guy who watched a lot of movies while he scraped out a living repairing motorcycles in Simi Valley and not some coddled condescending liberal who's been sucking at the film school teat since the 60s.And yet, I give it an 8. The guy does know his stuff.
Howard Schumann
Los Angeles Plays Itself asks the question - should we expect films to represent the truth or is anything acceptable in the name of entertainment? Director Thom Andersen is mostly concerned about how his city, the City of Los Angeles, has been represented in the movies. In an abrasive and brilliant three-hour cinematic essay, he wants us to know that the history, locations, and social makeup of Los Angeles bears little resemblance to how it has been depicted on screen over the years. According to Andersen, "Los Angeles is where reality and representation get muddled," he says. The public conception of Los Angeles (he despises calling it LA) he says is of discontinuity, nonexistent addresses, phony telephone numbers, rich and corrupt individuals who live in modernist houses in the hills, and ethnic minorities who live next to oil refineries if they live at all.Containing clips from literally hundreds of films, Los Angeles Plays Itself is divided into three parts plus a very welcome intermission. Encke King narrates but the text is from Andersen, a Professor of Film Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and a resident of Los Angeles since age seven. The first part, The City as Background, looks at how real sites have been misleadingly portrayed in a cinematic history of buildings and houses turned into something far from their intended purpose. Using clips from such diverse films as The White Cliffs of Dover and DOA, he shows how the massive sky-lit Bradbury Building was turned into a British hospital, a Burmese hotel, and a police headquarters. In The City as Character, he shows the deterioration of the residential downtown area known as Bunker Hill that went from an upscale neighborhood to one of seedy rooming houses until it was finally leveled for redevelopment and commercial high rises.Accessible by a railcar known as Angel's Flight, Bunker Hill in the movies became a setting for adultery and murder in film noirs such as Kiss me Deadly and Double Indemnity and eventually a futuristic dreamscape in Blade Runner. These are contrasted with the documentary The Exiles by Kent Mackenzie that shows the reality of the cultural dislocation of a subculture of Arizona Indians living in loneliness on the hill. Andersen discusses landmarks that no longer exist such as the Pan Pacific Auditorium and laments the passing of the drive-in restaurant and drive-in movies. He has little good to say about films such as Altman's Short Cuts, Steve Martin's L.A. Story, and Woody Allen's Annie Hall that, he says, repeat tired clichés about his city. He also takes umbrage at films like War of the Worlds, Predator 2, and Independence Daythat blow his city to smithereens to satisfy the audience's need for destruction.The final part is called The City as Subject and here Andersen exposes the lies of films such as Chinatown and L.A. Confidential that tell only part of history, delving into the real scandals in L.A. history that reached far deeper than that shown in the movies. He even dissects good old Joe Friday in Dragnet, showing it as a TV series that mirrored the LAPDs contempt for the ordinary citizen. The essay ends with a look at some rare independent films that portray a part of ethnic Los Angeles overlooked in big studio productions. These are Bush Mama, Killer of Sheep, and Bless Their Little Hearts, a film about the tribulations of an aging unemployed black man in South Central Los Angeles.Los Angeles Plays Itself is a fascinating excursion into the history of cinema and Andersen's commentary is hard hitting, insightful, and revealing. He invites us to reawaken our senses and view movies consciously, not simply accept uncritically what is presented on the screen. Whether you agree or disagree with his point of view, I guarantee you will never look at films in quite the same way again.
