LA Confidential: Very hush-hush

 

★★★★—One of my favorite films from the 1990s. Saw it in the theater my freshman year of high school with a girl I was trying to get with. She was not impressed. I wouldn’t shut up about it. I knew we wouldn’t work out. 

 

Still not as good as the book as a lot of the plot gets boiled down and some things don’t make a lot of sense as a result. The whole Exley sleeping with Lynn thing is confusing, there is no mention of any child killings at all (though that is like half the book), and heroine is more or less just MacGuffin in the movie. James Ellroy has a legit beef for what the film did to his novel, but I don’t think what he wanted would have been possible for a normal length feature film. Also, calling it a “turkey of the highest order” is a lot of hyperbole. 

Ger

The Johnny Stompanato stuff is extremely lame. It feels like we are going and meeting him in a video game. “Choose your own adventure. A. Good cop. B. Bad cop. C. Lean on him.” Everyone chooses option C. Lot of tooling on world famous thug Johnny Stompanato. Bud calls him a “wop cocksucker,” which he uncharacteristically lets slide. Exley calls his girlfriend, Lana Turner, the movie star, a whore. This also doesn’t get him killed, though Turner throws a drink in his face. 

Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, and Guy Pearce are all excellent and memorable. At the time, I was most impressed with Crowe, but now I’d unfortunately call Spacey the best of the bunch, but he’s an asshole. Supporting cast is great, too, especially James Cromwell, one of my favorite vegans. David Strathairn, Ron Rifkin, Graham Beckel (who always plays a cop), all good. Danny DeVito, Kim Basinger, they are okay. Basinger is hella fine though. 

Has an authentic 1950s vibe I am a total sucker for. This led to many noir flicks for me in the late 90s. It holds its own with the best of them, weaving together crime, corruption, and Hollywood glamour. 

Though I don’t think it is a truly great film—too confusing, not focused enough—it is one of my favorites, and one I’ve watched many, many times. Hell, the DVD was the first thing I ever bought on Amazon, this also being my first DVD… 

 

Something funny, once I fell asleep watching it. The home screen is DeVito saying “Off the record. On the QT. And very Hush-Hush.” I had a friend staying with me and he couldn’t figure out how to turn off the DVD player. He now hates this movie. 

Memento - Christopher Nolan - 2000

★★★★★-"We all lie to ourselves to be happy." Wow. Still fucking genius. Maybe more so than I remember. Holds the fuck up, I tell you. Christopher Nolan is perhaps my third favorite living director, depending on the day. This is the film that put him on the map. Rightfully so. 

Gist is a dude with anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new memories), can't remember anything short-term after 15 minutes. He got this way from an injury resulting from an attack on him/his wife, who was raped and murdered. Having developed a system where he uses Polaroids and tattoos to track information, he is tracking down his wife's killer. 

The film is told through two sequences. The ones in color tell the story backwards in little chunklets. Basically, the audience sees shit the way he does, in these short increments with no idea how we got here until we get to the next chunk of time. The black-and-white scenes show what is happening chronologically. These sequences meet at the end of the film, producing the complete narrative. It is clever as fuck. 

Stars Guy Pearce as Lenny, the guy with the condition. I bought a shit ton of Guy Pearce stock after LA Confidential. Really paid off here. Some really good that guys in this film--you get Ned Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky) and Lieutenant Dangle (Thomas Lennon). Plus, total that guy Mark Boone Junior (most memorable part, for me, is as the pizza stealing FBI guy in Se7en). Jorja Fox, whom you might recognize from ER or CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, plays Lenny's wife. 

The only substantive female role is that of Carrie-Anne Moss's character. A lot going on with her. For a while, I thought she was just getting revenge on the guy that killed her person. She says some genuinely awful shit to Lenny and calls him a "retard." Even steals his pens so he can't write anything down before she tells him she is going to fuck him over (and fuck him) and that she will enjoy it more knowing that he's too stupid to remember. Ouch. But she ends up helping him. She might have figured out that the death of her dude was more the result of this other guy, played by Joe Pantoliano (the true villain of the movie), which is probably somewhat accurate. Still, I think she sees Lenny as a victim too, which is why she helps him. Her whole look and vibe are exactly like this girl I dated in 2002, who I watched this with. She thought that Lenny was the real villain, which I still think is insane. 

Nolan is the obvious MVP of the movie. Pearce is perfect but goddamn. It's hard to get over how great this film is or what it was like watching it for the first time. I've seen it roughly five times and like it more after every viewing. I still don't 100% get it, but I get closer with every watch. Multiple viewings are definitely a requirement. Crazy good.

Ravenous - Antonia Bird - 1999

★★★★- Like ‘Cannibal! The Musical,’ it’s based on this Donner Party-type incident regarding one Alferd Packer, who ate some dudes on an ill-advised trip for gold. It’s up for debate whether he or someone else on his trip, whom he said he killed in self-defense, murdered people in the party.

A frontier/cannibal comedy-western about getting "the hunger" after eating human flesh as well as coked-up energy and super healing. It was pretty great. 

I somehow watch a lot of cannibalism movies. I can’t stomach the thought of meat—long time vegan. (Parker is rumored to have been a vegetarian after this all went down, by the by). I feel like a starving in the wilderness scenario would be the only way I would ever eat meat again. But that would indeed be some shit that I would t be able to bounce back from. It’s one thing to say that you could do it if you were starving. But having a chunk of long-pig in front of you that you gotta eat to live. That would fuck up me real bad. So, yeah, exploring the deep questions here. Ye olde “would you eat someone” dilemma.  

Memento - Christopher Nolan - 2000

★★★★★-Memento. "We all lie to ourselves to be happy." Wow. Still fucking genius. Maybe more so than I remember. Holds the fuck up, I tell you. Christopher Nolan is perhaps my third favorite living director, depending on the day. This is the film that put him on the map. Rightfully so. 

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Christopher Nolan skillfully guides the audience through Memento's fractured narrative, seeping his film in existential dread.

Memento, a neo-noir psychological thriller, released in 2000, written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Gist is a dude with anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new memories), can't remember anything short-term after 15 minutes. He got this way from an injury resulting from an attack on him/his wife, who was raped and murdered. Having developed a system where he uses Polaroids and tattoos to track information, he is tracking down his wife's killer. 

The film is told through two sequences. The ones in color tell the story backwards in little chunklets. Basically, the audience sees shit the way he does, in these short increments with no idea how we got here until we get to the next chunk of time. The black-and-white scenes show what is happening chronologically. These sequences meet at the end of the film, producing the complete narrative. It is clever as fuck. 

Stars Guy Pearce as Lenny, the guy with the condition. I bought a shit ton of Guy Pearce stock after LA Confidential. Really paid off here. Some really good that guys in this film--you get Ned Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky) and Lieutenant Dangle (Thomas Lennon). Plus, total that guy Mark Boone Junior (most memorable part, for me, is as the pizza stealing FBI guy in Se7en). Jorja Fox, whom you might recognize from ER or CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, plays Lenny's wife. 

The only substantive female role is that of Carrie-Anne Moss's character. A lot going on with her. For a while, I thought she was just getting revenge on the guy that killed her person. She says some genuinely awful shit to Lenny and calls him a "retard." Even steals his pens so he can't write anything down before she tells him she is going to fuck him over (and fuck him) and that she will enjoy it more knowing that he's too stupid to remember. Ouch. But she ends up helping him. She might have figured out that the death of her dude was more the result of this other guy, played by Joe Pantoliano (the true villain of the movie), which is probably somewhat accurate. Still, I think she sees Lenny as a victim too, which is why she helps him. Her whole look and vibe are exactly like this girl I dated in 2002, who I watched this with. She thought that Lenny was the real villain, which I still think is insane. 

Nolan is the obvious MVP of the movie. Pearce is perfect but goddamn. It's hard to get over how great this film is or what it was like watching it for the first time. I've seen it roughly five times and like it more after every viewing. I still don't 100% get it, but I get closer with every watch. Multiple viewings are definitely a requirement. Crazy good.

L.A. Confidential is the greatest movie of all time

L.A. Confidential. Love a period neo-noir flick. This one is one of the best. Up there with Chinatown and The Big Lebowski. Watch this shit once a year(ish). That Kim Basinger is quite a looker. She is a classical beauty, this film well establishes. The soundtrack is killer. LA in the 1950s looks like the shit, even with the crime. Everything about this movie is fucking sick. A perfect goddamned movie.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Taut pacing, brilliantly dense writing and Oscar-worthy acting combine to produce a smart, popcorn-friendly thrill ride.

Oh, cops. They all, like 90% of them, fucking suck. This movie, and like 400 others I've seen, and the news media and my personal experience (luckily I've got white male magic going for me) and anecdotal experience have led me to this position. This movie sure as shit hammers it home. In the end, they are all corrupt. Even the incorruptible. Isn't that right ole buddy boy? It is.

This movie is also one of the best examples of historical fiction that I can think of. Ellroy sort of went off the rails with The Black Dahlia from 2006 but then one was spot on. Atmospheric. Cool. Would have won a shit ton of Academy Awards but was up against Titanic in 1997 and that won nearly everything. Near. Far. And so forth. Though Basinger won Best Actress and somebody won a writing award.

Following three very different police offers in the unpopular straight shooter Ed Exley played by Guy Pearce, cool guy Jack Vincennes played by rapist Kevin Spacey, and thug Bud White played by Russell Crowe who reluctantly sort of join up to investigate a murder within the historically corrupt-ass LAPD. This made all of these guys stars though Spacey was well knownish for The Usual Suspects. Crowe easily wins the movie. He became an A-lister after this performance. But don't sleep on Pearce or Spacey. They are both great as well. Also get solid performances out of James Cromwell who is the Daryl Gates prototype and the spitting image of my grandpa and Danny DeVito who is the spitting image of my female companion's dad.

Bunch of Hollywood in the 1950s stuff in here which is cool. Basinger's character, Lynn Bracken, is a Veronica Lake, the star of Sullivan's Travels, which keeps coming up, lookalike call-girl. The plot revolves around this prostitution ring of girls that look like celebs. This leads Exley to mistake the real Lana Turner for one made to look like her because of the company she keeps, a real-life thug named Johnny Stompanato. Some interesting Hollywood crime shit going on here. This asshole Stompanato was a bad dude. He beat Turner, escalating to the point where her daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed the gangster to death in 1958. Yeah, piece of shit. The type of guy that Bud White hates and at one ridiculous point in the film, White grabs Stompanato by the balls, literally, which was one of the dumbest, most unbelievable things in the film. He basically makes Stompanato his bitch. No way this dude gets away with that shit. Cop or not.