The top 25 of the last 25: L.A. is a complicated city, but they got it
The city has been a main character in many films. Our film crew picks the best. It's a tough list to crash.
1"L.A. Confidential""L.A. Confidential" (1997)
Los Angeles movies: An article in Sunday's Calendar about the best films of the last 25 years set in the Los Angeles area said of "The Big Lebowski" that Lebowski's mansion was on the Westside. The movie locates it in Pasadena. Also, it said "Training Day" was released in 1991. It was released in 2001.
Los Angeles movies: An article last Sunday about the best films of the past 25 years set in the Los Angeles area said of "The Big Lebowski" that the millionaire Lebowski's mansion is on the Westside. The movie locates it in Pasadena. Also, "Training Day" was released in 2001, not 1991.
She is as fitting a metaphor for the city as anything ever hatched by Hollywood: Kim Basinger's high-class call girl Lynn Bracken in the neo-noir potboiler "L.A. Confidential." Tragic yet glamorous, she's a cipher for intense desire and empty idol worship (dolled-up to resemble '40s ingenue Veronica Lake), a classic femme fatale director Curtis Hanson calls "the emotional center of the film."
"The character represents how I feel about Los Angeles and what I want people to feel about L.A.," Hanson said. "She's a natural beauty with a phony image, a disguise that's all about selling it to the suckers. But when you go beyond the image, as when you go beyond L.A. as the city of manufactured illusion, the character is not only beautiful but totally self-aware. Underneath, she knows the truth about who she is. Everybody else is struggling to figure it out."
The cinematic adaptation of James Ellroy's 1990 novel -- which stars Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey as late '40s Angeleno detectives out to solve a series of related murders -- masterfully interweaves police corruption, tabloid scandal-mongering, racial tension and racketeering, all set at the gates of Tinseltown's dream factory. And it couldn't take place (let alone have been shot) anywhere but here.
After "exhaustive" location scouting, filming took place in such beloved Hollywood watering holes as the Frolic Room and the Formosa Cafe, around Elysian Park where pockets of period-perfect architecture still stand, and Hancock Park, where exteriors for Basinger's character's house were shot near the Wilshire Country Club. As well, architect Richard Neutra's iconic Lovell Health House in Los Feliz doubles as the home of Pierce Patchett (the film's princely pimp played by David Strathairn), the only movie filmed there.
"The movie truly started with L.A.," said Hanson, who grew up in Tarzana. "I wanted to capture the city of my childhood memories. And I wanted to take a hard look at the dark side -- the booming economy, the exploding population, the corruption and racism -- as well as certain problems that are still with us. I wanted to capture the spirit of this place. The optimism and energy was real. It still is."
