jjrous
This movie is almost three hours long. It is narrated in a dull,flat voice. It uses hundreds of film clips, some for as little time as 5-10 seconds. It ends abruptly, without any sort of wrap-up. Yet..it works beautifully. A good example of how breaking all the rules can sometimes pay off handsomely.
210west
The filmmakers clearly went to a lot of trouble to assemble all these clips of Los Angeles past and present, but the peevish and pretentious narrator, droning nonstop in my ear, soon got in the way. Worse, the focus of his grumpy soliloquizing was often at odds with what was on the screen. For example, while we saw a wild (and obviously painstakingly worked-out) scene from a Buster Keaton comedy in which a cart releases a cascade of beer barrels onto a steeply sloping road, the narrator continued yammering on as if completely oblivious to what was taking place on screen. He was busy pontificating about how (if memory serves) some images can be characteristic of one particular urban locale while others are more generic. Duh. Watching the movie, or trying to, is like sitting in a theater with a depressed grad student seated behind you, muttering a sour, self-referential monologue to himself, without a pause, while you're attempting to concentrate on the film. After a while, you want to turn around and yell SHUT THE F#%& UP ALREADY!!
Dean Reeves
Interesting documentary and well worth the viewing. For movie fanatics it gives the audience a nice connection between the city of Los Angeles and many of the movies filmed in and around the city. The movie could have steered clear of the social commentary and just let the viewer see the comparisons and contrasting perspectives of life versus movies coming out of Hollywood. In the end it isn't any different from any political documentary. It simply gets too heavy and deep when it could be a more light hearted look at films and the connection to Los Angeles. It is a cynical and sadly dark look at the film industry and how it doesn't sync with the writer's view of his city.
weeklygreenplanet
More than a few keen counter-intuitive film critical observations that playoff and against assumptions.But FILLED with hyperbolic, fatuous nonsense -- lots of Mike Davis' Ciy Of Quartz bombast w/o the factual and historical under-girding, the worst Andersen's own. And a reliance on, let's call it, queer theory (formal reversals that 'queer' theory -- a queering that suggests a profound 'subverting' of the 'socially constructed' meanings but is b.s., a spin on a received idea that vanishes if reflected upon.) The commentary on CHINATOWN and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (pathetically qualified) 'exposing' their ultimate "cynicism" is the most egregious: a superficial, sophomoric 'insight' presented as if volumes of serious thought about narrative had never been written and labored to death.While there are hints of self-lampoon, this doc is not LAND WITHOUT BREAD.It's way too long given its visual poverty (endless GLIMMER MAN clips), 3 hours of blurred, butchered video transfers much of it supported by pseudo-contrarian huff-and-puffery.While THE CLOCK needs no narration, LA PLAYS ITSELF is unwatchable without (and, in parts, with) it.Where's the Reyner Banham? for example.It is a film that at this point, 2012, stands as a heroic botch-job, not fixable, not re-doable, a sinkhole/roadblock that stands in the way of doing a true clip epic of LA / Film.
AD
