With its neon-bathed shots of Melrose Avenue, decadent nightclub set-pieces and scenes plotted around the turquoise brilliance of swimming pools at night, "Less Than Zero" viscerally evokes the Big Empty -- the hedonism, superficiality and laissez-faire nihilism -- of '80s L.A. Adapted from Bret Easton Ellis' 1985 bestseller, the film functions as a Reagan-era anti-drug screed aimed at the MTV generation. It stars a subset of the Brat Pack -- Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz and a kinetic, pre-rehab Robert Downey Jr. -- as a trio of young, rich burnouts drifting through the city's nightscape in a haze of cocaine and anomie. In particular, "Zero's" depiction of sex and death is just about as L.A. as you can get: McCarthy and Gertz get frisky in a '55 Corvette while spinning a doughnut at the intersection of Rodeo Drive and little Santa Monica Boulevard. And after Downey's character dies of an overdose amid Joshua Tree's desert landscape, he's buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
L.A.'s story is complicated, but they got it
The city has been a main character in many films of the last 25 years. Our film crew picks the best. It's a tough list to crash.
MOVIES
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, September 03, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 55 words Type of Material: Correction
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.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, September 07, 2008 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part E Page 2 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 51 words Type of Material: Correction
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.
Pitt stop: An uncredited Brad Pitt appears briefly in the film's fight scene -- a walk-on part for which he was paid the princely sum of $38.
-- C.L.
23 "Fletch" (1985)
"I'm Chevy Chase and you're not." Well, these days he's not really Chevy Chase either, but he was when he made this 1985 farce. The film adapts novelist Gregory MacDonald's character Irwin "Fletch" Fletcher, an investigative reporter with a loopy, tape-delayed brand of humor and a penchant for awful disguises. With the relentless one-liners and odd get-ups, it's almost as if Peter Sellers was a passenger on "Airplane" -- or maybe Jerry Lewis stumbling through "All the President's Men."
Fletch is on the trail of two stories: The hidden forces at work behind the drug trade on the sands of Santa Monica beach and the mystery of why a businessman named Alan Stanwyk would ask a homeless man to kill him. The bad guys include George Wendt as a scabby dope merchant, Joe Don Baker as the sinister LAPD chief and Tim Matheson in the Stanwyk role. Director Michael Ritchie ("The Candidate," "Semi-Tough") was adept at keeping Chase at the right level of snarky and subversive and, with that Lakers dream sequence Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (and yes, even Chick Hearn!), "Fletch" feels like a hometown spoof for the ages. Buy the DVD -- and a steak sandwich -- and put it on the Underhill account.
Role play: As Hollywood sized up the "Fletch" novels in the 1970s, producers came to author MacDonald with a number of very different casting choices for the title role, Burt Reynolds and Mick Jagger among them.
