Targets (1968)

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Producer: Roger Corman

Writers: Peter Bogdanovich, Samuell Fuller

Actors: Boris Karloff, Tim O’Kelly, Peter Bogdanovich

Cinematography: László Kovács

Music: Ronald Stein (The Terror)

Rated: R

Running time: 90 mins.

 Terror in the Valley--- Karloff comes to Reseda

       With Targets we have another entry from 1968.The sixties were a decade when America began to take a look at itself, and L.A. got a lot of attention that year. There are a couple more films from that period I intend to write about (e.g Point Blank, andThe Graduate), so stay tuned. This was Peter Bogdanovich’s first feature, and it was a good start.      

        The story is actually an artificial bonding of two different stories: one about an elderly, burnt-out horror actor, Byron Orlok, who wants to retire and return to his native England; the other about a maladjusted young man who cracks one day and begins shooting people at random on the freeway and at a drive-in theater. The bonding, although improbable, surprisingly works. Bogdanovich originally wrote the shooter story based on two then recent notorious incidents of random violence: the 1965 101 Freeway sniper and the Charles Witman (Texas tower) shooter case from 1966. He presented it to Roger Corman, who offered to produce it if Bogdanovich would write Boris Karloff, who owed Corman two days work, into the story. Thus:Targets came to be.

   

   

        This is how the story goes. It opens with footage of a scene from Corman’s The Terror with Boris Karloff and a young Jack Nicholson. When the scene ends and the lights are switched on, we see several people in a viewing room; one of them, Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff), announces that he wishes to retire and is not interested in doing a new film by young director, Sammy Michaels (Peter Bogdanovich). He also plans not to do a pre-scheduled publicity appearance at a Valley drive-in the next day. Michaels, along with Jenny (Nancy Hsueh), his girlfriend and Orlok’s secretary, try to persuade Byron to reconsider.

        Meanwhile right across the street (Sunset Boulevard) from where the movie people are meeting young Bobby Thompson is buying a rifle. Bobby is an apparently average, polite and outwardly happy guy, who with his wife, lives with his middle-class parents in the San Fernando Valley. Bobby’s family life resembles that of the Andersons on the 1950s T.V. show Father Knows Best. But underneath Bobby is a troubled young man with murderous thoughts.

      Sammy Michaels, after an evening visit to Byron’s apartment, finally persuades him at least  to make the publicity appearance at the drive-in in Reseda. Later that day, however, Bobby finally snaps and kills his wife, his mother, and a grocery delivery boy. After neatly tucking the bodies of his wife and mom in bed and moving the delivery boy out of the way, Bobby calmly cleans up, leaves a prominent note telling what he’s done and what he’s about to do, leaves the house, goes to an oil storage tank next to the 405 Freeway in Van Nuys and begins to shoot unsuspecting drivers.

      After killing the lone attendant at the storage facility, and as the police approach, Bobby, to elude them speeds down Sepulveda Boulevard and eventually turns into the Reseda Drive-In--- the same drive-in where Byron Orlok is expected to appear that evening.. He hides behind the screen, and soon after the start of the movie (again Corman’s The Terror) begins to pick off patrons seated in their cars. Some people start to panic and try to escape, but most are unaware that anything is amiss. Byron and Jenny soon arrive and when Byron realizes what’s going on he faces down the young killer, slaps him around, and forthwith deposits him in the hands of the police. That’s the bare bones of this low budget production.

        This movie is really a forgotten gem; if you can, try to see it. First of all it was one of Boris Karloff’s last appearances--- and one of his best; Karloff died a year later. Although he contributed only two days work to the movie, all the great lines are his: my favorite being, “What a lousy town this has become!” said to Jenny while glancing through the window of his limo at the myriad of car dealerships on Van Nuys Boulevard on his way to the drive-in. There is also a “morning after” comic encounter between him and Bogdanovich and some rich banter between him and Jenny, the secretary.

         For a quickly made movie the production quality is rather good.They shot the freeway scenes without any authorization or sound equipment--- the sound was added later. The scenes of people pulling into the drive-in and purchasing refreshments at the candy counter were all shot clandestinely a few days before the actual filming at the drive-in. Indoor scenes of the viewing room, Byron’s apartment, and Bobby’s home were done on the same set--- the furniture was changed and the walls were repainted.

          For me the principal plus this movie offers, beside Boris Karloff’s performance, is that it gives the viewer a good look at the San Fernando Valley as it was in 1967. The best Valley vistas since Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). Bogdanovich takes you down some prominent Valley streets like Sherman Way, Sepulveda and Van Nuys Boulevards; and from Bobby’s vantage point on top of the oil storage tank there’s a nice view of the Sepulveda Basin with its dam clearly visible. The storage tank facility, by the way, is still there; and ironically just a block and half south of it on Sepulveda Boulevard there is now a Target department store! But most of all, it is great to see the Reseda Drive-In (long gone) in its heyday.

          Other rather interesting points to be found in this movie are the use of radio and television broadcasts as background in certain scenes. One in particular is when Bobby and his “ideal” family are watching television, you can clearly hear the voice of Joey Bishop (The Joey Bishop Show) speaking to the audience. The family are visible, but Bishop is not. Bogdanovich also uses, of course since it’s Bogdanovich, clips from an early Howard Hawks movie--- a movie I’ve never heard of--- Criminal Code (1931) that Boris Karloff was in.

         With Targets Bogdanovich does a good job of emphasizing the contrast between the movie horror put forth by the likes of Karloff and the real horrors of today’s society--- the apparently innocuous Bobby Thompsons who say grace at dinner and then go out and randomly slaughter innocent people. Who are the real monsters?

           

Zabriskie Point (1970)

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Producer: Carlo Ponti

Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Fred Gardner, SamShepard,

                    Tonino Guerra, Clare Peploe

Cinematographer: Alfio Contini

Actors: Mark Frechette, Daria Halprin, Rod Taylor

Music: Pink Floyd, Jerry Garcia

Rated: R

Running time: 110 mins.

  L.A., metaphor for a desert

        In the late 1960s it looked like the United States was about to implode. Ghetto rage led to riots that were burning down our cities, assassinations were bringing down our social and political leaders, an unwanted war was alienating and radicalizing our youth. The country’s future did not seem promising.

      The nation and Western society in general with it, was facing a serious crisis.   Hollywood, which since the advent of television had its own crisis to deal with, was not blind to what was going down around it; it saw it as an opportunity to become relevant again. Several classic movies of the time dealt with this apparent social breakdown then afflicting America. The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider (1969) and Medium Cool (1970), to mention just three, tackled different aspects of what had been happening here in the years following the assassination of President Kennedy and the arrival of the Beatles: youth lost in a consumeristic, sexually liberated society; the rise of countercultures and the hostility to it; and police brutality and the crushing of dissent.

            Enter leftist Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (L’Avventura (1960), Blowup (1966). Antonioni was enlisted by MGM to contribute his take on the crisis. The result was Zabriskie Point--- a movie that would turn out to be a disaster both for MGM and Antonioni. It would take another several years for him to regain his reputation with The Passenger (1976).

             Zabriskie Point tells a story about a young university suspendee, Mark,who is suspected of shooting a policeman during a student confrontation, steals a plane, and winds up in Death Valley where he meets Daria, a young secretary and possible mistress to a real estate development corporate head, who’s on her way to Phoenix to attend a business conference her boss has set up with some big investors.

             Mark and Daria make love in the desert, and Mark then decides to return the plane to Hawthorne Airport--- after having painted it over with peace slogans and sexually suggestive graffiti. On arriving back in L.A. Mark is shot and killed by the police, and Daria, upon hearing the news on the radio, sabotages her boss’s business deal--- and fantasizes about blowing up his desert hideaway (multiple times!). That’s the story. It’s hard to believe that so many talented people could not create a more fleshed out storyline!

            The real story, however, is the film itself and what it says about Antonioni, 1960s America--- and Los Angeles, the city where half of it takes place. Antonioni was a European leftist, and the anti-capitalist symbolism is very heavy-handedly strewn throughout the film. L.A. is depicted as a city of billboards and freeways, selling everything from pork to condos. Shots of Lee Allen (Rod Taylor), the real estate developer and principal capitalist in the movie, always seem to include a prominent American flag behind him! The people Mark and Daria come in contact with--- police, bar patrons and everyday citizens seem semi-lobotomized or dumb, and there are even two “typical” yokel American tourists types Daria encounters at Zabriskie Point. These were common European stereotypical views of Americans at the time, and I don’t think this view has changed much in the last forty years, except maybe American tourists are little more highly regarded now than then.

             In the sharp contrast between the barren blight of the city and barren beauty of  Death Valley, Antonioni tries to emphasize the corruption of corporate America versus the pristine innocence of the desert. The bizarre sexual fantasy scene at Zabriskie Point with multiple hippie couples copulating at the same time is definitely interesting to view (and quite artistically shot), but adds nothing to the story and only seems like an attention grabber for the audience. The message Antonioni was trying to make was probably a valid one then, as it is now, but it could have been presented a little more subtly to be effective. The Graduate, Easy Rider, and Medium Cool did a better job of it.

             To give it credit, Zabriskie Point is a beautifully filmed movie. The cinematography, especially the desert sequences, is superb; as is the music score, with names like Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, Roy Orbison among others contributing. But the storyline is weak and un-engaging, and the acting is flat and unemotional. Antonioni cast non-actors in the principal roles, and (with a few exceptions e.g. Rod

Taylor) throughout the film. This weak script, bad acting, and bumptious symbolism is what turned off the critics--- and the public with them.

             Compare this movie with Jacques Demy’s Model Shop made at the same time and dealing with similar subject matter--- the L.A. youth scene--- and you see how  two European filmmakers of genius looked at Los Angeles in 1968 and came away with two diametrically opposed views. I wonder what they would say today!

Double Indemnity (1944)

 Director: Billy Wilder

 Producer: Joseph Sistrom

 Writers: Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder (from a novella by James M. Cain)

 Actors: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G, Robinson

 Cinematography: John F. Seitz

 Music: Miklos Rozsa

 Rated: N/A

 Running time: 106 mins.

Classic L.A. Noir

         A car races through the dark, hazy streets of downtown Los Angeles. It stops in front of an office building on Olive Street, a man gets out, staggers into the lobby, gets into an elevator, gets out, enters an office, sits down at a dictaphone, and begins to record a sordid story about lust, adultery, greed, and murder--- as blood slowly seeps through his shirt. So begins Double Indemnity.

           The plot goes something like this: in 1938 L.A. Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), an insurance salesman, becomes infatuated with Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), the wife of an oil company executive, and the two of them plot and eventually carry out the murder of her husband in order to cash in on the double indemnity clause of his insurance policy--- a policy he’s not even aware he has. The two lovers almost get away with it, but Neff’s associate, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), the insurance claims manager, suspects murder as the cause of death, but is unaware of Neff’s part in it.. He soon unknowingly tips Neff off to the fact that Mrs. Dietrichson has been two-timing him and just used him as a means to get rid of her unwanted husband.

            Walter and Phyllis confront each other at her house, she shoots and wounds him, he shoots and kills her. The movie ends with Neff lying in the doorway of his office building incapacitated by his bullet wound awaiting the police with Keyes, his friend and mentor, standing over him and lamenting his disappointment in Neff’s end.

             This Billy Wilder movie from 1944 has all the earmarks of the classic noir film. It proved to be the standard for all the dark crime movies that came after in the period known as classic noir: the late 40s and 50s. The screenplay is based on a James M. Cain novella from 1935, and was written (not without conflict) by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder. In 1992 the film was deemed worthy of preservation by the National Film Registry, and in 2007 was ranked 29th on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 best American films of the twentieth century.

          Double Indemnity opened doors as to what could be depicted on an American movie screen. Murder for sex and money was, of course, nothing new in 1944, the tabloids had been thriving on it for years; but it was new to see it so glaringly portrayed on the screen. This movie pushed the envelope when it came to just what the Taft Office (film censors) would allow. Wilder took it as far as he could--- and got most of what he wanted. The original ending with Neff in the San Quentin gas chamber as Keyes looks on was, however, considered too gruesome and was cut. 

             This movie, to my knowledge, was the first film noir to feature Los Angeles as a prominent background for the narrative. There would in years to come be many more. L.A. would become, and has remained, the premier noir city. Wilder used L.A. extensively for exterior shots: the Dietrichson’s Spanish colonial house in Los Feliz (which still looks as it did then), Jerry’s Market on Melrose Avenue (now gone), the Hollywood Bowl, Olvera Street, Glendale Station, and the intersection of Hollywood and Western serve as backdrops to key scenes. The viewer gets an interesting glance at life in mid-40s L.A. Angelenos, then as now, attended concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, dined in Mexican restaurants on Olvera Street, went to lectures at UCLA, but quite amazingly--- could buy a beer in a drive-in restaurant and drink it in their car!              

            The dialogues, especially those between Walter and Phyllis, emphasize the fact that this story is taking place in So. California and would not be the same if it occurred anywhere else. For writers like Chandler and Cain, and filmmakers like Wilder L.A. symbolized the American dream gone sour. It was not only a place where people came to get away from restraint and seek their fortunes, but also where lust and murder lurked beneath the stately palm trees and above the neatly mowed lawns--- a place where a mundane thing like an insurance policy could be deadly.

             Double Indemnity  came at a critical moment both for the country and the city. In 1944 the United States was entering the last and bloodiest year of World War II. The war was changing America--- and America’s perception of itself. Film noir highlights this change in perception. Los Angeles at that time was a city full of servicemen on leave, drifters, war workers, and opportunists who came to get what they could, while they could. Tensions were at the breaking point. This was a year after the Zoot Suit riots, and the Sleepy Lagoon murder case; and that very autumn two unspeakably gruesome murders took place at the Barclay and Joyce Hotels downtown. L.A. was a city on the edge. All this is subtly presented as subtext in this classic tale of middle-class corruption, greed and deceit in the City of the Angels.

The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

Director: Josef Rusnak

Producer: Roland Emmerich, Ute Emmerich, Marco Weber

Writers: Josef Rusnak; Ravel Centeno-Rodriguez

Actors: Craig Bierko; Gretchen Mol; Vincent D’Onofrio; Dennis Haysbert; Armin Mueller-   Stahl

Cinematography: Wendigo von Schultzendorff

Music: Harald Kloser

Rated: R (violence and language)

Running time: 100 mins.

L.A. on a wire

     Los Angeles: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This tech-noir movie opens in the past (1937), jumps quickly to the present (1999), and ends in the future (2024). But how much of it is reality? 

     We learn early on that the 1937 L.A. is actually a virtual simulation created by Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl), head of a multi-billion dollar computer enterprise in present-day Los Angeles. The simulation is a first step attempt to create a virtual world---- a sophisticated video game using computer generated people possessing self-awareness. Fuller chose 1937 because it was the era of his childhood. 

       We also learn that Fuller has been using the system to “jack in”, or transfer consciousness with one of the 1937 characters (called units in the movie) in order to have sex with several young women working at a high-end hotel on Wilshire Boulevard (the Ambassador). During one of his virtual visits he leaves a letter with Ashton (Vincent D’Onofrio), the hotel bartender, and asks him to give it to a certain Douglas Hall, who Fuller expected would be asking for it. In the letter was shocking information Fuller had recently discovered.

        Upon his return to the present, Fuller is brutally murdered in an alley downtown; and Douglas Hall (Craig Bierko), who it turns out is Fuller’s associate and second-in-command, is suspected of the killing. Soon a woman claiming to be Fuller’s daughter Jane (Gretchen Moll) shows up intending to close down the company. She and Hall feel an affinity for each other and soon become romantically involved. But everything points to Hall as the murderer, and the detective on the case, McBain (Dennis Haysbert), persists in pursuing him.

         Soon Hall begins to suspect himself; and after finding out about Fuller’s trips into virtuality, he decides to do the same in order to find out if Fuller left any clues that might clear him of murder. What he does find “shakes the very foundation of his being”.

          The Thirteenth Floor is a German production loosely based on the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye, and the movie Welt im Draht (World on a Wire)(1973) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In 2000 it was nominated for the Saturn Award for best science fiction film, but lost out to The Matrix. It opens with Descartes famous quote, “I think, therefore I am”, and asks the questions: what is reality, and what makes us human? Why Roland Emmerich, the producer, chose Los Angeles as the setting for this sci-fi noir is speculative, but for a century L.A. has been famed for being the center of unreality and fantasy. The movies made here are renowned for creating virtual worlds and times and for making fantasy appear as reality. What better place to explore the whole concept of reality. 

         The CGI in this late 90s movie is very artistic. For the 1937 simulation the technicians took photos of present-day Broadway and Wilshire Boulevard and cancelled out the modern buildings, leaving in those from pre-World War II. They then filled in the blank spaces using actual photos from the the 30s. The Red Cars on Wilshire have a genuine look to them as do the autos and extras depicted in the streets. Both the Ambassador and Biltmore Hotels, called the Wilshire Grand Hotel in the film, were used for the important nightclub scenes as was the Queen Mary. It’s a last look at the old Ambassador still in its original art deco glory just before it was renovated and defaced to make way for a school. These club scenes are so well done you expect to see Cary Grant and Jean Harlow walk in at any minute, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers appear in a dance number. The brief future scenes, set in 2024, are effective, but not as noteworthy.

            In typical noir style, most of the scenes, particularly the present-day ones, take place at night and are centered downtown and in the San Pedro-Wilmington harbor area. The Ennis-Brown House in Los Feliz was used for Doug Hall’s apartment, as it was for Rick Deckard’s in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner seventeen years before. Hall like Deckard is another Angeleno who winds up doubting his reality.

            This Emmerich/Rusnak look at Los Angeles is another one coming from a non-American perspective. Unlike others that deal solely with the contemporary city at a particular time--- Model Shop and Zabriskie Point--- this one is more well-rounded; it shows a city with a past, a present, and a future: a glamorous past, an inventive pioneering present, and a technologically advanced future. The questions it poses regarding the nature of reality and the essence of humanity are not answered, but are left for the viewer to figure out.  Even the reality of the future L.A. depicted at the end of the film is put in doubt, for the movie does not end--- it shuts off. 

            

Model Shop (1969)

Director: Jacques Demy

Producer: Jacques Demy

Writer: Jacques Demy

Starring: Anouk Aimeé; Gary Lockwood; Alexandra Hall

Cinematography: Michel Hugo

Music: Spirit

Rated: M

Running time: 97 mins.

  Los Angeles, 1968.

    George Matthews (Gary Lockwood), a rather shiftless twenty-six year old out of work architect, who is trying to make sense out of his life and decide what he wants to do, wanders around Los Angeles in his MG trying to borrow one hundred dollars in order to save his car from being repossessed. In his travels he encounters Lola (Anouk Aimeé), a French Model Shop girl, who is trying to earn enough money to get back home to her young son in France. In the course of a twenty-four hour period George, through the events of the day, his various conversations with friends and Lola, and ultimately spending the night with her, decides to turn his life around and try to start over.

    The plot of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop is very simple, very new wave French and resembles the format used by Agnès Varda (Demy’s wife) in Cléo from 9 to 7 (1962). The script was written by Demy in French and then translated into English causing the dialogues to seem a bit unnatural at times. But there is a certain honest quality in this film that is hard to discern at first. You have to watch it more than once. What appeals right away is that it presents a picture of Los Angeles, and, by extension, of our country, at a particular and crucial time, the late 1960s. The cinematography is stunning. Demy makes excellent use of natural light, deep focus shots and sharp close-ups, and bathes his scenes in soft pastel colors that make even George and his girlfriend Gloria’s rundown bungalow at the beach and the tacky model shop on Santa Monica Boulevard look warm and inviting.

     The film gives a view of a place and a time that really does not exist anymore. George and Gloria (Alexandra Hay) live in a sparsely populated section of Venice next to an oil well derrick right on Dockweiler Beach (amazingly the house is still there), an area that is now part of the Marina, where expensive condos and townhouses cover every inch of space. The Sunset Strip, now overdeveloped and crowded, is dotted with empty spaces visible when George in his wanderings turns on to Sunset Plaza Drive. Long gone Icons of the past like Carolina Pines, Dino’s, SantaFair Pharmacy, Cascade Car Wash and the Playboy Club appear as he rides down Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards; and we get a good look at Santa Monica Boulevard in all its pre-gentrification grittiness. The film has been aptly called “a moment in time caught in amber”.

     Like Varda’s character Cléo in Cléo from 9 to 7 George’s travels during the day bring him into contact with a mixed assortment of people: a hitchhiking teenage girl who gives him a joint, a psychedelic rock band Spirit, workers on an underground newspaper, gogo girl cashiers in a tacky model shop, a creepy camera store attendant, a full service gas station attendant (an uncredited Fred Willard), who could have been his double, pool players in a smokey coffee shop/pool hall (a hamburger and coffee 65 cents!), an exotic dancer, and sympathetic repo men who want to repossess his little green MG. The Vietnam War also intrudes on George’s day, for during the course of the day he learns that he has been drafted and must report in a few days.

     George is representative of the young people of that time, who were living through a social revolution and had trouble knowing which way the wind was blowing. The movie will have a definite appeal to those who lived through those times, especially those who were young men to whom the world had just opened up and was allowing them to experience a freedom their parents never had, but who had a military draft and an unwanted war hanging over their heads. George in his MG trying to sort out his existential crisis is a sort of “Sisyphus in a sports car”. It’s easy to empathize with George.

     Lola too is a character who invites sympathy, if not empathy. She is a divorced woman without legal status stranded in a foreign country forced to do rather menial and degrading work to earn her plane fare home to France. George finds love in Lola, and Lola encounters generosity and honesty in George. They both gain something from their brief encounter and that makes their parting less sad.

      Demy was a romantic as was evident from his earlier works The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). He liked L.A. and was sympathetic to the youth culture that was centered here; this affection is apparent in the cinematography and dialogue--- especially in the conversations George has with his young friends. Los Angeles is definitely a character in this movie. His original title for the movie was Los Angeles-1968. Demy admired the geometry of the city; for him, it was a city of cars, parking lots, gas stations, and shabby stores, but nevertheless a vibrant place with a subtle appeal, a place of “pure poetry” and “baroque harmony”, a place where even brief encounters can alter lives. 

Note: Compare this look at L.A. with my future overview of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), also dealing with the 60s L.A. youth culture, and made at the same time by another gifted European filmmaker--- but miles away in intent and style.

Greenberg (2010)

Director: Noah Baumbach

Producers:Jennifer Jason Leigh, Scott Rudin

Writer: Noah Baumbach; Jennifer Jason Leigh

Actors: Ben Stiller; Greta Gerwig; Rhys Ifans; Jennifer Jason Leigh

Music: James Murphy

Cinematography: Harris Savides

Rated: R (strong sexuality, drug use and language)

Running time: 107 mins.

East meets West.

       The United States is a primarily two-coast country: the East Coast and the West Coast. The Gulf Coast doesn’t count since it’s really just an extension of the East Coast--- and Alaska’s north shore on the Arctic Ocean--- well, that’s a later addition to our geography and hasn’t developed a personality and attitude of its own yet. East coasters face the Atlantic and generally look towards Europe and Africa, while West coasters face the Pacific and tend to glance towards Asia and Australia. The two coasts generally never see eye to eye (except maybe in national elections). The rest of the country, those in between, try not to look in either direction and like to pretend that the country ends at the Appalachians and the Sierra Nevada.

         The East Coast is symbolized by the great city of New York--- it’s highly urban, frenetic, crowded, cold, and challenging; whereas the West Coast is represented by Los Angeles: spread-out, layback, sunny, and somewhat artificial and frivolous. Take a neurotic New Yorker and place him in artificial L.A. and you have the basic plot of Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg.

           Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), a 40-something former Angeleno who has been living in New York for the last fifteen years and who recently suffered a nervous breakdown, is house sitting in L.A. for his brother Phillip (Chris Messina), sister-in-law Carol (Susan Traylor) and their kids while they’re on an extended visit to Vietnam. Knowing Roger’s medical history, the family have asked Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig), the family’s assistant, to look in on Roger to see if he needs anything. Roger and Florence, for some unexplained reason, are attracted to each other and soon develop a relationship that’s stormy to say the least. Roger’s neurotic, erratic behavior and inability to make up his mind and Florence’s insecurities and defensiveness doom them both to an on-again, off-again relationship filled with fights, insensitive remarks (on Roger’s part), apologies (again on Roger’s part) followed by more misunderstandings. I won’t add any more plot details--- I don’t think they’re necessary to understand what this movie is really about. Just know that this is a character driven story set in a city known to be a refuge for oddballs and social pariahs. See the film to find out what happens.

            Roger and Florence are two different coasts separated by thousands of miles and looking in different directions. I’m not saying that Baumbach views New Yorkers as neurotic and Angelenos as insecure--- he’s aware that both cities have their share of both types. He’s simply saying that Roger’s neurotic borderline schizophrenia is only intensified in a place like Los Angeles, and Florence’s insecurities can only be magnified  in a relationship with a person like Roger. The attraction is there, but any closeness brings pain.

            In car crazy L.A. Roger does not drive; he stays indoors while most Angelenos are out driving, biking, and running. When he does go out, he walks or calls Florence or his former rock musician friend, Ivan (Rhys Ifans), to drive him. He’s a constant complainer and spends a lot of his time writing complaint letters to public officials. L.A.’s loose social scene is poison to him. He alienates everyone he comes in contact with: his one-time girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh), about whom he’s created a past fantasy, cuts him off immediately, his ex-band members want nothing to do with him, and even patient Ivan, who tries to get through, eventually is driven away by Roger’s insensitivity and abusiveness. Roger is plainly a jerk and a totally unsympathetic character. 

            So then, why see this movie? My answer is that it’s a well-acted, well-written, and well-thought out piece of work. Characters like Roger and Florence can be found in any city or town in America--- or anywhere in the world for that matter, but they seem to fit in more in a place like L.A. The city is a perfect backdrop for an off center romance. And Baumbach, a New York based filmmaker, gives a  pretty even-handed view of everyday life in the city. There are no East Coast put downs, or stereotypical depictions here--- no axes to grind. Roger’s brother’s house and neighborhood are rather typical but maybe just slightly a bit too upper middle class (but I imagine there’s a mortgage on the house). The bar where Greta sometimes sings is typical of any you’d find in Silver Lake or Los Feliz. The art party Florence attends in Echo Park is quite similar to some that I’ve been to myself. And, well, the scene in Musso & Frank’s (the best in the film in my estimation) lets you know that L.A. has not destroyed all the icons of its glamorous past. It still has some of its history left. 

             Greenberg is an East versus West movie, but done with subtlety and softness. Like Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967), Roger Greenberg comes home to an alien Los Angeles in which he really never belonged, and never realizes that his problem is not in the society (city) around him--- but in himself.

            

Killer of Sheep (1977)

Director: Charles Burnett

Producer:Charles Burnett

Writer: Charles Burnett

Actors: Henry G, Sanders; Kaycee Moore; Angela Burnett

Cinematography: Charles Burnett

Music: Excellent

Rated: PG-13

Running time: 81 mins.

Watts after the rage.

         Killer of Sheep is a film written, directed, and produced by Charles Burnett in the early 1970s. Burnett finished work on it in 1979, but it was never released until 2007 owing to a dispute over the rights to the music Burnett used as background. In 1990 it was declared a national treasure when it was selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registry--- although few people had ever seen it.

           This movie is a piece of life film about a lower middle class African-American family trying to survive and maintain their dignity and integrity in the Watts district of South Central L.A a few years after the devastating Watts Riots of 1965. The environment they live in is a hostile one and life is a daily struggle for Stan (Henry G. Sanders), his wife (Kaycee Moore), their son (Jack Drummond) and daughter (Angela Burnett). 

           Stan works in a slaughter house, and his job is having the same effect on him as it has on the sheep he deals with and cleans up after--- it’s killing him. His wife (her name is never mentioned) is a housewife who feels deeply the draining stress her husband is going through in order to support his family and suffers from the lack of gentle affection that Stan is not able give her. His teenage son is becoming a lost cause and is being drawn evermore deeply into the crime culture rife in the community; his precocious little daughter, however, is wisdom personified who takes it all in and endures.

             Killer of Sheep is shot in a drama documentary style, similar to the neorealism  films of Rossellini and De Sica that came out of Italy after World War Two. There’s no discernible plot; it simply depicts a day in the life of people who, although Angelenos, are far from the glitter of Sunset Boulevard and the shining steel and glass of the Wilshire Corridor. The people portrayed are immigrants from a mostly rural Southern culture who for economic reasons and to escape an oppressive life find themselves in an alienating urban environment that seems to be stacked against them. 

             The story line, if you can call it that, involves the repair of a car, and Burnett  uses it as a metaphor for the endurance and simple determination of a people trying to survive and live a meaningful life. He inserts little scenes of warm humanity as when Stan and his wife in a tender moment slow dance to Dinah Washington’s This Bitter Earth in front of a shaded window, and when his wife adjusts her make-up and gazes at herself using a sauce pan as a mirror shortly before Stan comes home from work. He also gives a view of what Stan is up against in his attempt to keep his family together: when two local criminals try to enlist him in a job they’re planning, his wife has to chase them off; his kids play in a squalid landscape of destroyed buildings and vacant lots that resemble Berlin in the aftermath of World War Two; a local White merchant woman subtly propositions him when he comes into her store; and his friends seem to be stuck in a malaise as to doing anything to improve the situation--- pessimism and resignation dominate their lives. The simple act of going to the race track to spend a day away from their environment fails for Stan and his neighbors when the car (the same one they’ve been trying to repair) gets a flat on the way to Santa Anita, emphasizing the fact that no matter how they try they just can’t get out.

         In Killer of Sheep Burnett gives us a glimpse of the pessimism and despair of life in the post-riots Watts of the early seventies, which sadly would trigger worse riots twenty years later. But, more importantly, he also shows us the humanity and enduring spirit of a people who have gone through worse and have not given up on the American dream.    

Collateral (2004)

Director: Michael Mann

Producer: Michael Mann, Julie Richardson

Writer: Stuart Beattie

Actors: Tom Cruise; Jamie Foxx; Jada Pinckett Smith; Mark Ruffalo

Music: James Newton Howard

Cinematography: Dion Beebe; Paul Cameron

Rated: R

Running time: 120 mins.

  L.A. noir--- the city at night.

     Whenever I come into Los Angeles at night, especially after being away for a while, the first thing I notice are the millions of lights, a beaming, blinking blanket of luminescence spread out like stars in an upside down sky. It’s a marvelous and breathtaking sight; it always thrills me--- the utter beauty of it. L.A. is a city often touted for its sunshine and mild clime, but it’s the cool darkness of an L.A. night that casts a spell and possesses a beauty not found elsewhere --but a dangerous dark beauty. Things happen at night.

       Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004) brings this home in spades. For me, it’s the quintessential L.A. at night movie. The Los Angeles Times writers and editors have voted it the 9th best movie set in L.A. in the last 25 years. Mann captures the exquisiteness of PM Los Angeles: the clubs, bars, and trendy night spots, along with the silhouetted night skyline--- and, yes, those lights, those mesmerizing lights. But he also presents the darkness behind the lights: the drugs, the stakeouts, the empty streets, the violence, and the blood stained alley.

        Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) drives a cab. He works at night driving people who are usually in a hurry and so wrapped up in their own lives that Max goes mostly unnoticed and ignored. One night in January he picks up a federal prosecutor at LAX and takes her to her office downtown. They hit it off, and she tells him she’s working on an important case and is a little uneasy about the outcome. She also takes a liking to Max and he to her. She gives him her card. 

         Not long after that Max picks up a man who calls himself Vincent (Tom Cruise) claiming to be in town to clinch a real estate deal. He offers to pay Max $600 to drive him to five locations and wait while he gets the signatures he needs. Max agrees, and what follows is one rough ride. After the first stop and a corpse comes flying out an apartment window onto his cab, Max finds out that Vincent is an out-of-town hit man hired by a drug boss to eliminate five witnesses in a case against him. From then on Max belongs to Vincent for the rest of the of the night and is forced to accompany him on his murder spree. 

            In the course of their ride together the men talk and a strange bonding develops between them.  Max is a good man, an Angeleno who loves his city and cares about  the people who live in it. Vincent, the assassin and the outsider, has a low opinion of L. A.; murder is his business and Los Angeles with its anonymity and apparently self-absorbed populace is a perfect place to operate.

           Finally, with all but one of Vincent’s targets having been finished off, and with the police and the F.B.I. in pursuit, Max learns that Annie (Jada Pinckett Smith), the prosecutor he met earlier that night, is to be Vincent’s last victim. He purposely wrecks the cab, but Vincent runs off to  finish his mission. When a cop arrives, Max steals his gun and races to warn Annie, who is working late at her office. All three come together in Annie’s office building, and a  chase ensues in which Vincent pursues Max and Annie into the Seventh Street Metro station where they jump into a Blue Line train headed for Long Beach. It ends with Vincent shot by Max and dying in the empty Metro train, and Max and Annie exiting into the dawn of a new day.

               As is evident from his previous work, e.g. Miami Vice, Thief, and Heat, Michael Mann loves the city. Cities play a big part in his most visceral movies. And using L.A., as he did in Heat, as backdrop for this story was not just a matter of convenience or budget.  He definitely had a statement to make. Right from the very first scene and continuing through the film Mann hits on something important that makes this town both typical and at the same time different from other cities of its size and stature. Vincent’s murderous mission through night-time Los Angeles takes him and Max to a classic jazz club in Leimert Park, a high-end apartment house in Hollywood, a Latino night club in Pico Rivera (the song Destino de Abril stays with you long after you’ve heard it), and a Korean dance club on Sixth Street. They also stop at a hospital for a bit of comic relief. From this we get a wide view of the multiculturalism and vastness of the city. Anglos, Latinos, Blacks, and Asians all sharing the same urban environment. Besides the murders and mayhem, we also see dedicated police officers and F.B.I. agents who risk and on occasion lose their lives in the course of their job; a jazz club owner/musician who only wants to be allowed to relive past glories but pays the ultimate price for a past association; a lonely elderly woman in a hospital craving attention--- plus a gas station attendant; a morgue medic, and a scavenger coyote crossing a deserted street--- all Angelenos trying to make it through the night. 

                  Mann’s message here is that this is a city that’s not perfect (what city is?), yet it’s a place that continues to change and reinvent itself but has never ceased to lose its potential and excite the imagination--- as long as those lights keep shining.