Los Angeles Plays Itself

I’ve long been convinced that Hollywood writers of romantic comedy secretly pine for their own early years in New York, when they had no money but a great capacity for love. Just look at When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, and of course Annie Hall. On film, Manhattan often seems like a playground for lovers, who stroll through Central Park, nuzzle one another on subways, and find inspiration at the top of the Empire State Building. But if cinematic New York is for lovers, my L.A. hometown sometimes seems reserved for disasters: like earthquakes, fires, and terrorist attacks upon skyscrapers on Christmas Eve.

 The Los Angeles Times, obviously determined to show that there’s more to L.A. than Die Hard, recently published an Entertainment section devoted to the topic of “101 Best L.A. Movies.” Their sleuthing (and the follow-up section that features angry readers’ own suggestions) has served to remind me that L.A. is many sorts of places in one. It’s, of course, where movies are (or used to be) made: its agreeable weather and its amorphous nature have allowed it to pose as many other cities and countries. (Did you know that Martin Scorsese’s quintessentially New York-based Mean Streets was mostly shot in L.A.?) But a true movie fan knows that a Los Angeles location can imply many different aspects of life in the SoCal megalopolis. First place on the Times list went to Chinatown, showcasing crime, corruption, and a certain exotic flavor (“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”) Near the top of the Times 101 there’s also the weird fantasy world of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and, of course, the faded movie-star glamour of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. The Times’ top five also include the ersatz flair of the Beverly Hills nouveau riche (Clueless) and the futuristic nightmare of Blade Runner.

 But not every film on the Times list showcases the rich and famous. I was pleased to see the inclusion of Tangerine, Jackie Brown, and particularly Boyz N The Hood, all of which pay attention to the down-and-out, as well as to the pervasive racial tension affecting L.A.’s misfits. There’s also suburbia (Valley Girl, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and the ethnic pockets where English is not really the lingua franca (Real Women Have Curves, Mi Vida Loca). L.A. as a place of aspirations is showcased beautifully in everything from The Karate Kid to Bowwfinger, while LA. as the land of dashed dreams shows up in movies as different as Barton Fink and Slums of Beverly Hills. And the list also covers films that dive deeply into local occupations we Angelenos would rather ignore, like the San Fernando Valley pornography biz in Boogie Nights.

 When I first beheld the Times list, I anxiously scanned it to make sure it included The Graduate. (It’s #37, capturing the soignée lives of the swimming-pool set.) But some Times readers expressed dismay at the non-appearance of such films as the Oscar-winning Crash (a slightly overwrought movie definitely attuned to L.A.’s  car culture)), the screen adaptation of Nathanael West’s classic Day of the Locust (for me it misses its mark) and the hilarious Get Shorty. My own biggest complaint is the absence on the main list of 2009’s poignant romantic comedy, (500) Days of Summer.

This film, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, is a 2009 charmer in which a young  couple fall in and out of love while living and working in Downtown L.A. Local landmarks (the Bradbury Building!) and hidden corners are given their due. Hey, this is a “New York is for Lovers” movie set in my own hometown! 

 

 

 

 

Elvis Goes to Oz: “Wild at Heart”

 I watched Wild at Heart in memory of the late Diane Ladd: it was one of three films for which she received a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, though she never won the statuette. In 1974, she first earned a chance at Oscar glory for her supporting role as a feisty diner waitress (“Kiss my grits”) in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She was nominated a second time in 1990 for Wild at Heart, and then a third time a year later for Rambling Rose. Remarkably, in the latter two films she played opposite her real-life daughter, the very talented Laura Dern. (There’s a Roger Corman connection too—Laura, born in 1967, was apparently conceived while her parents were on location, shooting Corman’s biker classic, The Wild Angels.)

 Wild at Heart was written and directed by David Lynch, who had burst into the public consciousness in 1986 with Blue Velvet. In that provocative film, which explored the perverse underbelly of an apparently wholesome mid-western town, young Laura Dern (about 17 at the time) played a schoolgirl whose sunny naïveté is in marked contrast to the perverse doings going on all around her. She was again to star for Lynch four years later, but in a highly different role. In Wild at Heart, Dern plays Lula Pace Fortune, a North Carolina cutie simply oozing with sexuality. Her man is Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), a ne’er-do-well Elvis Presley enthusiast who treasures Lula even more than he does his genuine snakeskin jacket. Soon after the film begins, he’s carted off to prison, but when he returns it’s Lula he wants most. And the bulk of the film becomes their odyssey through the American South, heading for the distant dream of California.

 I hardly anticipated that this film is an unlikely nod to Dorothy and her friends easing down the Yellow Brick Road. (Instead of walking, the lovers cruise in a gaudy convertible, but the far-off Emerald City shines brightly in their eyes.) Of course an Oz story needs a Wicked Witch, and that’s where Diane Ladd comes in. As shrill socialite Marietta Fortune, she’s determined to separate daughter Lula from her lover, and it’s only gradually that we fully understand why. A widow, Marietta has several useful local men at her beck and call, and her intentions are hardly honorable.

 Though the film’s Oz references do not overwhelm the story, they give it a fanciful quality that sets it apart from darker Lynch projects. Nor does it fit tonally into the familiar “lovers on the lam” film genre, which encompasses grim dramas like Badlands and Natural Born Killers, as well as such older classics as They Live by Night (1948) and Gun Crazy (1950). It’s fun to spot the Ozian allusions, which include ruby slippers, a big pink bubble, and a real-life oversized Munchkin. True, Wild at Heart is not without its moments of graphic Lynchian mayhem. But its violence is of the comic book variety. And the ending is one that Lynch himself considered happily ever after, with true love conquering all, even wicked witches. (This was a marked change from the conclusion of the novel on which the film is based.)

 To the surprise of many (including critic Roger Ebert), Wild at Heart was cheered at the Cannes Film Festival, and received the prestigious Palme d’Or. Back at home, though,  Lynch learned his flick would be X-rated if cuts were not made. What I saw on DVD was still pretty wild. It may be perverse, but I liked encountering a “Dorothy” who could emphatically declare, “You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt.”  

 

David Lynch Sings the Blues

I’d never say that the films of David Lynch are favorites of mine. They’re rather too puzzling and too macabre to make me want to watch them more than once. Still, Lynch’s recent death seent me back to the film that cemented his reputation in the film world. So I sat down and watched Blue Velvet, which I hadn’t seen since its release in 1986. 

Lynch shot Blue Velvet after he’d already made a truly bizarre body horror indie (Eraserhead), a screen adaptation of a Broadway costume-drama (The Elephant Man), and a big-budget space opera (Dune). Following the latter serious but doomed effort to crank out a film version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel, Lynch leapt at the chance to do something more intimate. As his acclaimed TV series, Twin Peaks, would later show, Lynch was fascinated by the hidden corners of small-town America, the dark secrets behind the sunny facades. Blue Velvet begins (to the syrupy tune of the Bobby Vinton pop hit) with glimpses of happy Americana: cheery flowers blooming, an off-duty fireman waving at the locals from his truck, a neat row of clean-cut school kids crossing a street, a middle-aged man watering his lawn. Then suddenly the man collapses to the ground, and we realize that Middle America isn’t all sunbeams and rosebuds. (Ironically, at this early point we’ve already caught a glimpse of the fallen man’s wife, curled up on a comfy couch to watch a TV episode in which somebody is pointing a gun.) 

The hero of the story turns out to be Jeffrey, the son of the injured man. As played by Kyle MacLaughlin (who’d starred as Paul Atreides in Lynch’s version of Dune), Jeffrey’s a handsome and well-meaning fellow, home from college because of his father’s accident. Taking a walk in his neighborhood, he comes across a startling sight: a severed human ear. That’s when he can’t resist doing some sleuthing of his own. It quickly includes his neighbor, a pretty blonde high schooler named Sandy (Laura Dern), who jumps at the chance of playing Nancy Drew. 

What they discover is a side of Lumberton, their cozy home town, that they hadn’t anticipated. There’s a lounge singer (Isabella Rossellini) with a masochistic streak, a psychopathic drug dealer (Dennis Hopper) with rape on his mind, and a weirdly effeminate creep (Dean Stockwell) who’s into karaoke. And, of course, a guy with a missing ear. The clean-cut Jeffrey can’t resist getting mixed up in all of this, acknowledging with fascination that “I’m seeing something that was always hidden.”

The curious thing about Blue Velvet is that, despite a good deal of grotesque violence, the movie ends on an upbeat note. Jeffrey and Sandy are a happy couple, Dad is well again, flowers are blooming against a bright blue sky. It’s as though none of the ugliness we’ve just seen has ever happened. Still: those flowers look suspiciously phony, as does the chirping bird (a callback to Sandy’s earlier romantic dream of happiness) that perches outside the window of the family kitchen. And look! Isn’t that a worm in its beak? 

Blue Velvet will never be in my personal pantheon of truly great movies. I’ve liked other Lynch films better because I’ve found their characters more appealing: see, particularly, Wild at Heart (which stars Dern again, with Nicolas Cage). And the conundrums in later Lynch films like Mulholland Drive seem more worth figuring out. Still, Blue Velvet paved the way for the rest of Lynch’s important career. And it’s fun to see Isabella Rossellini wearing something other than a nun’s habit. 

 

David Cronenberg: Maps to Scary Places

I’m not sure what there is about the sturdy, Biblical name David that encourages perverse thoughts, but Movieland seems to be studded with writer-director Davids who consistently look on the dark side. David Lynch started with creepy works like Eraserhead, won widespread acclaim for Blue Velvet, achieved cult status with Twin Peaks, and continued off the beaten path with such disturbing films as Lost Highway  and Mulholland Drive. David  Fincher is perhaps best known for the not-so-grim The Social Network, but he got his hands bloody with flicks like Se7en, Fight Club, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Gone Girl.

And then there’s David Cronenberg, who has made a career out of exploring subjects that are eerie and gruesome. Cronenberg is Canadian, which I believe is supposed to make him mild-mannered and polite. Which he may well be, in person, but his mind works in peculiar ways. Maybe that’s why his favorite literary influences are Vladimir Nabokov and William S. Burroughs, whose bizarre and unfilmable Naked Lunch he once tried to adapt for the screen. Given his filmography, it’s no surprise to learn that his favorite school subject was science, especially botany and lepidopterology. (This field, the study of butterflies, would certainly put him in sync with Nabokov, an expert in the field.)

I was first introduced to Cronenberg via his ghoulish remake of The Fly (1986), starring Jeff Goldblum as an out-of-control biologist. Intrigued—and, as a Roger Cormanite, always on the look-out for low-budget ideas we could steal—I  dipped back into the Cronenberg canon to discover The Brood (1979), full of psychological and biological oddities that end in a shocking conclusion. Then came Dead Ringers (1988), a cold, clinical tale involving Jeremy Irons as twin gynecologists who share a perverse interest in women who are beautiful, inside and out. Not a lot of laughs in that one.

 I was impressed by Cronenberg’s riveting, though slightly more conventional, film approach to the graphic novel, A History of Violence (2005). But I’m thinking about Cronenberg right now because I just caught up with his most recent feature, 2014’s Maps to the Stars. This film has won its share of international awards, many of them for the lead performance of Julianne Moore as Havana Segrand, a troubled child of Hollywood.  Written by Tinseltown laureate Bruce Wagner, it has its share of mordant humor, based as it is on the questionable priorities of film stars and their entourage. But it seemed odd to me that Moore’s performance was singled out by the Golden Globes folks as a nominee for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical. This film is by no means a musical, and I’d be hard pressed to think of it as a comedy, given that it encompasses arson, poisoning, strangulation, and the shooting death of an entirely innocent creature. I guess it could be considered comic in the Shakespearean sense because it ends (sort of) in a wedding. And that’s all the spoilers I’ll dare to mention.

Suffice it to say that there’s an expert cast, led by Moore as well as John Cusack (as a pop psychologist to the stars), Olivia Williams as his wife, Evan Bird as their cocky child-star son (now appearing in a sequel to Bad Baby-Sitters), Mia Wasikowska as the new girl from Jupiter, and Robert Pattinson as a Hollywood hopeful. The horror elements of the story don’t necessarily add up, but they’re creepy indeed. And the swank venues inhabited by the Hollywood rich are reproduced with a cold, clear eye. That’s good for a shudder, at least.