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Don’t call the city "LA" when Thom Andersen is around. It’s just another way to patronize and trivialize his home town, whose depiction on celluloid he critiques in this rambling, diverting, trenchant movie essay. Neither should you confuse his film with Fred Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself (1972), which Andersen characterizes as a "gay porn masterpiece" and briefly analyses for its paralleling of rough sex with increasingly urbanized landscapes. Like the city itself, Andersen’s film sprawls and meanders; it hops from film clip to film clip backed by the filmmaker’s curmudgeonly, acute, long-winded commentary (voiced by Encke King). Themes emerge slowly and erratically. At first, Andersen focuses on Hollywood’s power to transform its own environment into a simulation representing everything and nothing. Gradually, a more ideological agenda emerges. There is a real Los Angeles effaced by the movies about it, he argues, and when films take the city as its subject — films like Chinatown, Blade Runner, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and L.A. Confidential, apocalyptic visions that pose omnipotent conspiracies as the cause of all the city’s woes — they leave audiences with a sense of satisfied cynicism and impotence. Andersen relates the facts behind these films, pointing out that there were no conspiracies, only knowing public acquiescence. In that sense, maybe the country has become one giant Los Angeles, refusing to know or to act, preferring the dream image to reality. (169 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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