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February 24th, 2004 |
Harlem, fall 2003.
I saw the best movie last night, Los Angeles Plays Itself. It was a three hour documentary about locations used in movies shot in LA and what that tells you about the city. It was kind of like a Chris Marker film, in the way it associately jumped around from one idea to the other, all footnoted with movie clips from the obvious (Double Indemnity) to the obscure (Midnight Madness). This was the film I dreamed someone (mostly myself) would make about L.A. cause it was all about the idea of how do you photograph a city that conveys some kind of truth about the place (juxtaposed with the very LA-centric issue of ‘how do you photograph a place that’s already been featured in about thirty movies?’)? Having lived in L.A. for four years I constantly thought about how the place seemed to me with how it looked in the movies. My first house there was right next to the location of a famous Laurel and Hardy film and my next street was prominently featured in LA Confidential and Naked Gun. Both places were shown in the documentary and I kind of gasped, as if there’d been a brief glimpse of an old friend.
Also, if you have $2,000 dollars to blow, you could buy a print by William Eggleston.
Has anyone seen the commercial or much less tried Chaser?
