Neo noir: LA Confidential
This is quite possibly the most and the least pure neo noir at the same time.
Most pure because it has almost all the elements (including an outdated political view that made sense in the 1940s but does not anymore and I'll revisit that on Monday because it is politics). It opens with narration, it has the fedora (Danny DeVito wears it) it has the muddy ethics, it has the femme fatale, it has the settings, it has the sense of history, it has some great shots of naked and nearly naked women, it has all the classic noir shots. It also, and this is very significant, has the budget to do these elements up with style
It doesn't have the wonderfully male nostalgia for technology, however, and that is a hint at where the impurity arises.
It's also the biggest grossing neo noir of all time unless you count Sin City as neo noir, and I don't.
So what is so impure about it? Answer: It has a chick flick hiding at its core.
Sex and the City
There was a recent piece about the top ten cities for bachelors. The cities featured are all nice enough in various ways but the quality that supposedly makes them all so good for bachelors is that women outnumber men by a significant margin in these cities.
Well, if you are a complete loser who can't get laid unless the odds are stacked heavily in your favour maybe but, really, anyone who knows anything about markets will rapidly see that these are less desirable places for single men to live. If they really were great places for guys, more of us would live there.
If I list the cities you'll quickly see the issue. In ascending order they are Baltimore, D.C, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Antonio, Chicago, Houston. Almost every one of those cities has Chick Lit or a chick-oriented cop show such as CSI or some other female fantasy all over them. Guys may move to these places for work, or family reasons or because they are gay but these are not the places of modern heterosexual male fantasy. (I suspect the places most men prefer to live in aren't big cities but that is a topic for another day.)
But they do go with a female fantasy that runs something like this: Single girl moves to the big city, finds sexual adventure, drinks cocktails, runs up huge credit card bills on cool fashion and glamour and gets her heart broken in a romantic way but then, before she loses her looks, meets a guy who really needs her but is also like something off the cover of a bodice ripper and marries him. And the makers of LA Confidential have hidden that plot line inside what might otherwise have been a truly great neo noir. It's not awful but the parts that play to that fantasy are the slow points in this film.
Spot the hunk
The first hint of what we are in for is the poster. Who do you think the star here is?
In fact, Kim Basinger plays a supporting role. But if you are a young woman who embraces the Sex and the City Fantasy watching this movie she is your alter ego; she is not actually you but a sort of blown up you who has more failings but, at the same time, is glamorous enough to allow you to escape from your drab, debt-laden life in the city where there are many more single women than single men for a couple of hours. (A ratio that, by the way, is reversed in the film.) To add to the glamour, it also has the threat of violence and sexual violence because, as scary as that stuff is in real life, it gets processed as eroticism when a girl watches it on screen. And best of all, the whole thing is wrapped up in a guyish movie that it will be a lot easier to convince some guy to take you to than it would be to get him into As Good As it Gets or My Best Friend's Wedding.
Okay, now we got the chicks in the theatre, who is going to be the candy man to get them all hot and bothered? Well, here are three names, see if you can guess:
It's a shame really because there were great possibilities here. Pearce is magnificent as is DeVito and James Cromwell is magnificent as ... well, I can't tell you what he is magnificent as without ruining the movie. But the standout, the man who steals the movie, is Kevin Spacey as Sgt Jack Vincennes or Hollywood Jack. The movie sparkles every second he is on the screen and fades when he isn't. When things go really bad for him, the movie loses everything.
But it made a lot of money and there is a lesson there. OTOH, it took a huge budget to make all that money and I doubt anyone will put that kind of money into a neo noir ever again.
Watch it twice. You have no choice but the follow the horrible Kim Basinger-Russell Crowe chick flic and the dumb politics the first time but once you know that stuff, you can watch it a second time with an eye for the surrounding stuff which is much better.
I may put some visuals up this afternoon and there will definitely be a post on the politics of neo noir come Monday.
This is quite possibly the most and the least pure neo noir at the same time.
Most pure because it has almost all the elements (including an outdated political view that made sense in the 1940s but does not anymore and I'll revisit that on Monday because it is politics). It opens with narration, it has the fedora (Danny DeVito wears it) it has the muddy ethics, it has the femme fatale, it has the settings, it has the sense of history, it has some great shots of naked and nearly naked women, it has all the classic noir shots. It also, and this is very significant, has the budget to do these elements up with style
It doesn't have the wonderfully male nostalgia for technology, however, and that is a hint at where the impurity arises.
It's also the biggest grossing neo noir of all time unless you count Sin City as neo noir, and I don't.
So what is so impure about it? Answer: It has a chick flick hiding at its core.
Sex and the City
There was a recent piece about the top ten cities for bachelors. The cities featured are all nice enough in various ways but the quality that supposedly makes them all so good for bachelors is that women outnumber men by a significant margin in these cities.
Well, if you are a complete loser who can't get laid unless the odds are stacked heavily in your favour maybe but, really, anyone who knows anything about markets will rapidly see that these are less desirable places for single men to live. If they really were great places for guys, more of us would live there.
If I list the cities you'll quickly see the issue. In ascending order they are Baltimore, D.C, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Antonio, Chicago, Houston. Almost every one of those cities has Chick Lit or a chick-oriented cop show such as CSI or some other female fantasy all over them. Guys may move to these places for work, or family reasons or because they are gay but these are not the places of modern heterosexual male fantasy. (I suspect the places most men prefer to live in aren't big cities but that is a topic for another day.)
But they do go with a female fantasy that runs something like this: Single girl moves to the big city, finds sexual adventure, drinks cocktails, runs up huge credit card bills on cool fashion and glamour and gets her heart broken in a romantic way but then, before she loses her looks, meets a guy who really needs her but is also like something off the cover of a bodice ripper and marries him. And the makers of LA Confidential have hidden that plot line inside what might otherwise have been a truly great neo noir. It's not awful but the parts that play to that fantasy are the slow points in this film.
Spot the hunk
The first hint of what we are in for is the poster. Who do you think the star here is?
In fact, Kim Basinger plays a supporting role. But if you are a young woman who embraces the Sex and the City Fantasy watching this movie she is your alter ego; she is not actually you but a sort of blown up you who has more failings but, at the same time, is glamorous enough to allow you to escape from your drab, debt-laden life in the city where there are many more single women than single men for a couple of hours. (A ratio that, by the way, is reversed in the film.) To add to the glamour, it also has the threat of violence and sexual violence because, as scary as that stuff is in real life, it gets processed as eroticism when a girl watches it on screen. And best of all, the whole thing is wrapped up in a guyish movie that it will be a lot easier to convince some guy to take you to than it would be to get him into As Good As it Gets or My Best Friend's Wedding.
Okay, now we got the chicks in the theatre, who is going to be the candy man to get them all hot and bothered? Well, here are three names, see if you can guess:
- Kevin Spacey
- Guy Pearce
- Russell Crowe
It's a shame really because there were great possibilities here. Pearce is magnificent as is DeVito and James Cromwell is magnificent as ... well, I can't tell you what he is magnificent as without ruining the movie. But the standout, the man who steals the movie, is Kevin Spacey as Sgt Jack Vincennes or Hollywood Jack. The movie sparkles every second he is on the screen and fades when he isn't. When things go really bad for him, the movie loses everything.
But it made a lot of money and there is a lesson there. OTOH, it took a huge budget to make all that money and I doubt anyone will put that kind of money into a neo noir ever again.
Watch it twice. You have no choice but the follow the horrible Kim Basinger-Russell Crowe chick flic and the dumb politics the first time but once you know that stuff, you can watch it a second time with an eye for the surrounding stuff which is much better.
I may put some visuals up this afternoon and there will definitely be a post on the politics of neo noir come Monday.
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