Los Angeles
Confidential
This film is set in Los Angeles during the confidential era when
many things were kept hush-hush and on Quentin Tarantino. Everything was kept a secret during this time
because Howard Hughes put some sort of ban on web cams and I guess that kept
Dick Tracy from using his magic wristwatch and so he just quit. Toon Town’s been destroyed and The Rocketeer
had migrated south for the winter and so criminals just thought they could do
whatever they wanted.
This film has many twists and turns. It is adapted from a James Elroy novel and so
that fact that it makes sense is some sort of goddamn miracle. That man’s text is so dense and with so many
layers of subplots and different angles that the only way to approach an
adaption is probably to just adapt the book jacket. So I give Brian Helgeland props.
The cast is mostly made up of Australian actors and even though a
big portion of this movie is about the abuse of plastic surgery, Nicole Kidman
does not make an appearance. There’s no
real main character, it’s more of a co-lead type film with Guy Pierce and
Russel Crowe front and centre. They are
not playing Kim Basinger’s breasts as the poster might lead you to
conclude. They are the dudes standing
way behind her.
International sex symbol and tugboat brawler Russel Crowe plays a
cop with all sorts of rage problems because his father took his parenting
advice from a Johnny Cash song and named him Wendy. Wendy grew up and renamed himself Bud
Light. Crowe does a good job with a very
complicated character. All the other
characters talk about Bud Light like he is some sort of barbarian, yet Crowe
isn’t exactly physically intimidating.
He’s not very big and he’s pretty babyfaced in this film, but the times
when he loses his cool are good for the furniture man’s business. He’s also a lot smarter than everybody gives
him credit for. He’s doing lots of good
detective work in this movie, but people just want to use him as a goon. Crowe was still pretty new to playing
Americans at this point and opts for the robot voice. I find his robot voice slightly more
distracting than the typical smoker voice that most non-American actors bust
out when they play Americans. Crowe
would go on to master the American accent and even learn regional accents such
as Southern drawls, but not in movies as good as this.
Guy Pierce gets a slightly easier role playing Ed X. Lee, an
ambitious and sometimes naive straight-laced cop. He doesn’t mind everybody on the force
wanting to kill him, but is touchy when they mock him for wearing glasses. He does a good job with this role, but I did
laugh at how unnatural it seems when his passion causes him to fuck Kim
Basinger. That scene was kinda clumsy.
James Cromwell goes from the gentle farmer in Babe to playing a cop’s cop in this. Guess he likes pigs. I like how his character intimidates people
with pushy Irish charm and insists on calling them by their full first names like
he’s their headmaster. He’s probably my
favourite character in this big ensemble.
His character isn’t as much of a pervert as he is in the books, but I
think I like him better with the pushy quaint charm that Cromwell brings to him
in his interpretation of the Dudley Smith character.
And there’s also Kevin Spacey, who I’m not sure if he’s doing his
usual unconvincing job of playing a heterosexual or if his character is
actually gay. Whether he’s gay or
straight isn’t as key to the plot here as it was in that movie where they
expected me to buy that he wanted to hump a teenage girl while rocking out to
The Who. I don’t have any problem with
gays playing straights in movies. I’ve
liked lots of gay actors playing straight characters such as when Philip Seymor
Hoffman and Sasha Baron Cohen do. But I
never buy Spacey as a straight man. In
this movie he stands around Hollywood sets in flamboyant suits winking at
actors and has the ethical epiphany of his life over the death of a young gay
actor and gets angry at it being dismissed as a “homo-cide”, so I think his
character is supposed to be gay, but like I said, it doesn’t really matter to
the plot.
I like the way this movie twists around and isn’t afraid to kill
off likeable characters. In fact, they
kill the narrator! Holy shit, you know
you’re in uncharted territory when that happens! I always said that the aliens got what they
deserved in War Of The Worlds
because they should know that mankind’s most powerful weapon is Morgan
Freeman’s narration and if they really were superior battle strategists, they’d
take him out first. The bad guys in Los Angeles Confidential are smarter
than aliens.
This film is violent, and I think it did really need to be to sell
the danger we’re dealing with. It’s kind
of an action procedural film but not as actionny as a Lethal Weapon or a Dirty
Harry movie. They also say ‘fuck’ a
lot and have the good sense not to stand around looking proud of themselves for
it. The actors just say it like it
belongs in the sentence. Maybe they
trained on a cussing range to prepare for the film. There are lots of good macho moments and the
structure is almost like a more complicated For A Few Dollars More in that it seems like it’s setting up for
the two likeable leads to really kill each other but then teams them up to go
after the real villain.
I know this film has already been released in blu-ray, but I think
next time they put out another special edition they should have a feature where
you watch the whole movie with Jon Hamm playing all the roles. Punching himself, fucking himself, shooting
himself in the back, pinning a medal on himself and driving off with himself
into the sunset.
If you liked this, check out these
other similar writings that have been done on the hush-hush:
An Early Salute to the Writing of James Ellroy
I’ve
only read two of this man’s novels, but I’m hooked!
Getting’ old ain’t so bad when you’ve got a
bag full o’ money.
My essay analyzing this revolutionary film series.