A-List: Five Best Movies About Los Angeles
By J. Don Birnam
June 4, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I’ve discussed the best movies about the Big Apple, but Los Angeles is not far behind in terms of captivating moviemakers with its endless sun, crowded freeways, and ruthless endeavors to make it big. Recently, disaster movies like 2012 and San Andreas have shifted their destructive focus to Los Angeles. No surprise, given that the romanticism of strolls down the streets of Manhattan, evoked, for example, in Woody Allen films, is matched by the idyllic, sun-soaked rides along a Los Angeles pier or beach. And the cutthroat, lifeless solitary of New York’s concrete and steel meets its match in the superficial, glamour-filled adoration of youth and beauty that defines iconic Tinseltown.
Today, then, I explore some of the best movies set in or about Los Angeles.
I’ll use the same criteria I used for last year’s list about New York: if the movie makes notable use of Los Angeles landmarks on more than passing occasion, or, alternately, if it explores the relationships of people vis-à-vis the Los Angeles environments in which they are set, then it is eligible. It is not enough that a movie be merely set in whole or in part in Los Angeles (many movies are), it has to actually have something to say about the interaction between the city and its characters. Movies that explore Hollywood are the core of what I mean: Hollywood is where diverse characters embark upon self-discovery or fulfillment.
Making this list was no easier than making the list about New York movies because the options are plenty and worthy. But in perusing the candidates, a few themes emerged, all of which lead to a long list of honorable mentions.
The first is that romances, comedies, and rom-coms about Los Angeles are few and far between, believe it or not. Perhaps it’s harder to have impossibly trite chase scenes in the crowded L.A. freeways than in the busy Manhattan sidewalks, or that Angelinos are simply not as romantic as their silly New York brethren, but Los Angeles apparently does not inspire love in moviemakers.
Another noticeable trend is that the 1990s seemed to have been the apogee of movies about Los Angeles. Moreover, these films’ motifs tended to revolve around anxieties about crime and the vicissitudes of Hollywood (granted, a theme that is perennial when it comes to L.A. movies). Thus, classics from Pulp Fiction to Magnolia to The Big Lebowski to Boogie Nights and Training Day and Drive (both 2000s releases) are worthy mentions as movies about Los Angeles. The big houses, the heat, the swimming pools, the sexy women, endless scenes of driving from place to place, crime, and bizarre characters all make appearances and faithfully represent at least a part of the spirit of Los Angeles.
The 1980s are not far behind in terms of Los Angeles crime movies, of course. I’ve already expressed admiration for To Live and Die in L.A. in the column about best car chase scenes. And any list about L.A. movies would be incomplete without remembering Die Hard. Back then, it seems, having Germans as the main antagonists in a non-war movie was still a thing - a thing that I had not seen since the 1980s until the creators of Pitch Perfect 2 decided to go that route in the movie released last month.
There are two other guilty pleasures I should mention: Volcano, a ridiculous movie about a volcano emerging in the middle of the La Brea tar pits, and where Tommy Lee Jones brilliantly directs the lava into the Pacific Ocean; and Clueless, the 1990s cult classic about life in Beverly Hills, also stands out. When Alicia Silverstone declared that Ren and Stimpy were “way existential,” she cemented the stereotype many of us have of Beverly Hills and the opulence of the City of Angels.
Finally, I would be remiss without mentioning Crash. Now infamous for its upset of Brokeback Mountain at the Oscars (in a twist that only an L.A. producer could concoct), when viewed as a movie about race relations and urban demographic problems in Los Angeles, Crash is pretty solid. The melting pot of the Big Orange boils to a breaking point as the challenges of urban living in the harsh environment of a megalopolis affect rich and poor, black and white, women and men.
On to the final five, at long last.
5. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1989)
Sexy women, crime, and Hollywood collide in the 1980s cartoon meets real-life hit, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Featuring a memorable and rare villainous turn by Christopher Lloyd, Roger Rabbit embodies in an accessible and crowd-pleasing way a lot of what we like about Los Angeles movies. The film noir references, the critical but indulgent self-analysis of the Hollywood creators, and the thankless and somewhat ambiguous ending for at least some of the heroes. It’s a rare movie about Los Angeles that also provides comedic value while furthering an actually gripping plot. The genre spanned a number of unfortunate spinoffs (think Kim Basinger’s Cool World disaster), but that, of course, is exactly what Hollywood is all about.
4. L.A. Confidential (1997)
Cool World didn’t derail her in the 1990s, though. Basinger would have her redemption still. In the 1997 critically acclaimed L.A. Confidential, Basinger is one cog in a wheel (a complex web, really) of crime, love, deception, and murder. The film noir themes are overt here, the acting is superb, and the settings are impeccable, beautifully colored, and correctly melancholic.
The theme is once more police corruption, with great performances by Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, and James Cromwell weaving the complicated if accessible story. Curtis Hanson is a brilliant director (with a remarkable history that includes other pieces like 8 Mile) but it is his award-winning L.A. Confidential that will surely be remembered as his masterpiece to date, as unforgiving and heartless as any of the best movies about L.A. ever made. The city is a character more than in any of the other movies in this list - unforgiving, tough, sexy, beautiful, and dirty. Above all, however, it is dark. The sun rarely rises in this film, a telling symbol for the creators’ view of their title metropolis. Falling for the city’s temptations, like falling for Basinger’s, is one’s own undoing.
The sexual temptation theme as a part of Los Angele’s identity was also explored in depth in the next movie on the list…
3. Mulholland Drive (2001)
Landing the third spot is a movie that showcases another thing that films about La La Land seem to feature that you don’t really see in New York movies: street or neighborhood titles in their names. The roadways are, of course, a key part about what makes Los Angeles. And in the eponymous Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s psycho-sexual thriller that introduced Naomi Watts to the world, the twists and hallucinations are seconded only by the subtle yet undeniable analogies to the city itself.
Mulholland Drive was part of a mini-wave of new American cinema in the early 2000s that featured other dark entries about the abyss that is the human mind (think Memento and Requiem for a Dream). It tells the eerie story of two women caught in a confusing web, apparently fueled by amnesia. The movie itself is subject to countless interpretative theories: is it all a dream? Is it the figment of one of the women’s imagination? Are both of them real? Is the movie told in an endless loop, like time itself?
Regardless of whether one can reach for an answer to these questions, all can agree (for the director said so himself) that this is a movie about broken dreams in Hollywood and the horrid (yes, horrid) nature of those dreams. Mulholland Drive towers over the City as a beacon of tragedy, confusion, and pain itself. Lynch deftly portrays the evil he perceives in the Hollywood machine through the evil of the characters in this already-landmark film. In the end, Mulholland Drive, like all great L.A. movies, leaves you both horrified at Los Angeles, and, in some sickly perversion, affirmatively wanting more. Indeed, as with L.A. Confidential, this movie makes one thing very clear: falling for the seductive power of sex is falling for Los Angeles’ seductive power, and in that weakness of the flesh lies your undoing.
2. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
With all respect to Mr. Lynch, however, it is clear as day that he took his cues from Billy Wilder’s masterpiece (and that’s saying a lot), Sunset Boulevard, which today takes the number two spot (and gives Mr. Wilder two entries in each of the last two A-List columns).
Again deftly named for a key roadway in Los Angeles, Sunset Boulevard is perhaps the great-granddaddy of many if not all of the movies I’ve listed here. Readers paying attention would have guessed, given the opening line of this column, that this movie would make an appearance on the list. Deservedly so, because it captures perfectly the Los Angeles of its day and the timelessness of its spirit. Even noted gossip columnist of the time, Hedda Hopper, makes an appearance in this film that cynically portrays the cold nature of Hollywood, the cruel process by which it discards aging stars, thus killing the very dreams they’ve helped create in others. Of course, those others, the audience, themselves care little about aging stars, becoming unwitting accomplices of this dastardly cycle of success and fame followed by obscurity and oblivion.
That year, another angst-filled movie wowed critics and juries alike, as All About Eve took Hollywood by storm. Perhaps the Academy could not fathom to reward a film that skewered its own livelihood, and opted to instead recognize one that skewered New York’s (the theater), but the themes of the two are so interconnected (and Sunset arguably the better movie) as to make this the actual winner in my eyes. Few movies illustrate the hope and eventual disillusionment, and the (at times shocking, disturbing, but like reality TV today, alluring and fascinating) tragedy that Los Angeles can entail.
In any event, few movies capture the spirit of Los Angeles, and a true Los Angeles movie, as Sunset Boulevard does, except perhaps for…
1. Chinatown (1974)
In the top spot, in a squeaker, has to be Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. By now, it should be clear that the overarching style of Los Angeles movies is film noir, and the overarching themes are sex, corruption, crime, and murder. And this movie has it in droves.
As disturbing and frigid as some of the scenes are in many of the movies I have listed here, they are twice over in Chinatown. Jack Nicholson plays a disaffected cop on the trail of a political corruption scandal involving the county’s water supplies. Faye Dunaway is the wife of the man Nicholson was originally hired to investigate, and she is seductive, mysterious, and seemingly dangerous (of course).
The story weaves complexly in and out of Los Angeles landmarks and characters and, like the others, features shocking and cruel twists and surprises, including disturbing imagery involving Dunaway’s character’s past, and her denouement.
Chinatown is, bar none, a brilliant movie. It represents the pinnacle of American moviemaking in the golden decade of the 1970s. It features timeless performances and unforgettable revelations. It captures the loneliness of the time, and of its city. And it delivers, swiftly, a clear message: by the end of the movie, it becomes horrifically clear, as in the end of all the movies on this list, that for all its radiant beauty, its endless sun, and its beautiful peoples, Los Angeles is viewed, at least by those who control its primary industry, as a sinister, unforgiving, and even dangerous place. It sounds like New York, but it’s not.
It’s Chinatown, Jake.