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12 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
Long, but worth watching if you have any interest in the history of Los Angeles and how it was portrayed in film., 10 September 2004
Author: Rex from Silverlake, CA, USA

Thom Andersen uses hundreds of scenes from a multitude of movies throughout the past century, to express his opinions about the true Los Angeles in this cinematic essay. He takes the common opinion that Los Angeles has no discernible culture, and presents two basic reasons why this opinion is so prevalent.

1. Los Angeles used to be a culture rich city until the richer, more affluent, citizens decided that it's more profitable to have apartment complexes, high rises, and strip malls.

2. There is quite a bit of culture remaining in Los Angeles, but because everyone is too busy driving themselves from point A to point B as fast as possible, they don't see it.

Whether you agree with his opinions or not, the film is worth a look (although nearly three hours long) to see all of the footage of Los Angeles over the years, and how it portrayed LA at the time.

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12 out of 14 people found the following review useful:
Fascinating, 27 June 2004
8/10
Author: tezby from Zeguma Beach

You may have noticed other comments here saying that the film is long, boring and has a droning voice over. While it is 3 hours long and has a narrator with a voice like a sedated Billy Bob Thornton, Los Angeles Plays Itself is one of the most fascinating film-crit documentaries ever made.

The director assumes that the viewer has a certain level of understanding of film theory, and that would probably help when the narrator starts citing David Thomson, Pauline Kael, Dziga Veryov and Ozu, but it's not entirely necessary to enoy the film either. All you really need is an understanding that a real place - the city of Los Angeles - is also a fictional place - the LA of the movies. The documentary is like an extended home movie made up of clips from films and interspersed with sections created by the director.

What holds it all together is an examination of Los Angeles as a place in films (locations, buildings), as a stand in for other places (Africa, Switzerland), as a record of places lost (buildings, neighborhoods, people, cultures), as focus for nightmares and dreams (SF like Blade Runner and Independence Day) and more.

While the voice over could have been paced a little better and be bit more "up", this film really rewards viewers who are willing to accept the documentary on its own terms. I found I just couldn't stop thinking about it and now, when watching movies shot in LA, I keep remembering moments from Los Angeles Plays Itself.

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10 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
A well thought out movie, but few visitors last till part 3, 29 January 2004
Author: maartenwinters from Den Haag

I watched this movie at the 'Rotterdam Film Festival' in The Netherlands and beforehand had no idea what to expect. After a few minutes it became clear to me that the movie was a collection of hundreds of movie-fragments, all located in the city of Los Angeles. Being a movie freak I was very interested from that point on, and Thomas Anderson didn't let me down. A terrible amount of time and research must have been spent making this movie, and it pays off! Having been in L.A. myself I really liked all places that are shown in the movie, and all movie-fragments being shown. Unfortunately, a lot (I think to many) of old movie fragments are shown (1950-1960), which makes it a little 'unrecognizable', at least for me. After part two of the movie, I had seen so many peaces of 'old material', and together with listening 2 hours to the voice of Mr. Anderson, I became to tired to go for the 3rd hour. Nevertheless, I can really recommend this movie to anyone who likes watching movies, and likes learning more about them and about a city that was so very important in movie making!

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8 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Los Angeles, 21 September 2004
9/10
Author: pwiancko from Los Angeles, CA

A fantastic film covering all of the bases of the way in which Los Angeles is seen through the eyes of Hollywood. Full of wonderful insights, this film is an in depth study more than it is a crowd-pleaser. Also a great source of information for film-buffs...a plethora of little-known facts and behind-the-scenes information. Some of the movies are blockbusters, others you may not have ever heard of, but each film that Thom Anderson studies and quotes proves to be a unique take on the subject. If you love DVD special features, you will love this movie. If you love Los Angeles, you will love this movie. If you HATE Los Angeles, you will love this movie. If you don't know yet, or know nothing about LA, get your hands on a copy of this movie. It will make it easier to decide.

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6 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
"L.A." = ineffable, 4 April 2005
10/10
Author: Eye-on-the-pie-in-the-sky from Seattle, WA

Trenchant and epic in size is Thom Andersen's "Los Angeles Plays Itself" – a doc that analyzes representation as much as it analyzes representation of Los Angeles itself.

How I adored the narrator's (Encke King) voice! It was at once sardonic and annoyed – a reflection of Andersen's emotional regard toward the whole matter, no doubt. What we hear are critical observations of the film clips that we see – there are quite literally dozens and dozens of clips here. This may seem disorienting and exhausting (to the interest level) but it's not. So struck with the compelling argument that Andersen presents to us do the hours fly by like minutes (not vice versa as Addison DeWitt said in "All About Eve").

Funny/interesting it is how this doc is set up like a conventional narrative film that Hollywood is guilty of routinely (and cloyingly) pushing on to the consumer - first we laugh and then we cry. The only difference here (and it's a big one) is that we're looking at actual subjects that existed or still exist. We cry for Los Angeles, you ask? Well, I'm not at liberty to discuss the poignancy that's present – it must be experienced firsthand in order to attain those surprise tears that are greatly missing in our movies.

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5 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
You have to love Los Angeles, 4 May 2005
9/10
Author: (dennis-whelan) from Southern California

Criticisms are valid, but this film is not entertainment...in the popular sense of movies today. That said, I was riveted for three hours, without an intermission. I just couldn't leave, and risk missing something! I've been secretly admiring Los Angeles for years. I love driving its main boulevards for miles and experiencing the pan-cultural ethic a single street. Western, Sepulveda, Slausen, Sunset, Van Owen. Here is a film that I always wanted to see, and encourages me to see more films about Los Angeles. I've always felt that Los Angeles was a city in its late adolescence/teen age years: pimples, raging hormones, lack of history and eternally looking to the future. Andersons take on the city, it's image in film as a personality, place and thing are very juicy indeed. Best seen at multiple sessions! Can't wait for the DVD.

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4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Interesting footage of city ruined by filmmaker's agenda, 12 September 2008
4/10
Author: gnome-5 from Santa Monica, CA

Where do people get the idea that movies are supposed to represent some kind of objective truth? That seems to be Andersen's main bug. He faults Hollywood for fictionalizing Los Angeles history. He says that rich white people can't make films about L.A. because they only know the rich white part of the city, and because they might offend their rich white friends. It seems in his view that only people who walk the streets and ride the buses are qualified to depict life in this city, but the clips he shows from a few "neo-realist" films don't feature the city very much, except for a long shot of a guy driving past a closed tire factory.

But all movies (even documentaries and those by poor black filmmakers) are constructs. By their nature (meaning meddling by cinematographers, editors, directors, etc.) they can only present a subjective view of the city. So why not embrace that? Things like "creative geography" are inherent to the art form, so why discount them? Ultimately, Andersen has a bug up his hinder about what he considers to be proper film-making, and it flies in the face of a hundred years of cinema history. And this guy is a professor of film studies!

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5 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
You will never look at films in quite the same way again, 20 June 2005
10/10
Author: Howard Schumann from Vancouver, B.C.

Los Angeles Plays Itself asks the question - should we expect films to represent the truth or is anything acceptable in the name of entertainment? Director Thom Andersen is mostly concerned about how his city, the City of Los Angeles, has been represented in the movies. In an abrasive and brilliant three-hour cinematic essay, he wants us to know that the history, locations, and social makeup of Los Angeles bears little resemblance to how it has been depicted on screen over the years. According to Andersen, "Los Angeles is where reality and representation get muddled," he says. The public conception of Los Angeles (he despises calling it LA) he says is of discontinuity, nonexistent addresses, phony telephone numbers, rich and corrupt individuals who live in modernist houses in the hills, and ethnic minorities who live next to oil refineries if they live at all.

Containing clips from literally hundreds of films, Los Angeles Plays Itself is divided into three parts plus a very welcome intermission. Encke King narrates but the text is from Andersen, a Professor of Film Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and a resident of Los Angeles since age seven. The first part, The City as Background, looks at how real sites have been misleadingly portrayed in a cinematic history of buildings and houses turned into something far from their intended purpose. Using clips from such diverse films as The White Cliffs of Dover and DOA, he shows how the massive sky-lit Bradbury Building was turned into a British hospital, a Burmese hotel, and a police headquarters. In The City as Character, he shows the deterioration of the residential downtown area known as Bunker Hill that went from an upscale neighborhood to one of seedy rooming houses until it was finally leveled for redevelopment and commercial high rises.

Accessible by a railcar known as Angel's Flight, Bunker Hill in the movies became a setting for adultery and murder in film noirs such as Kiss me Deadly and Double Indemnity and eventually a futuristic dreamscape in Blade Runner. These are contrasted with the documentary The Exiles by Kent Mackenzie that shows the reality of the cultural dislocation of a subculture of Arizona Indians living in loneliness on the hill. Andersen discusses landmarks that no longer exist such as the Pan Pacific Auditorium and laments the passing of the drive-in restaurant and drive-in movies. He has little good to say about films such as Altman's Short Cuts, Steve Martin's L.A. Story, and Woody Allen's Annie Hall that, he says, repeat tired clichés about his city. He also takes umbrage at films like War of the Worlds, Predator 2, and Independence Daythat blow his city to smithereens to satisfy the audience's need for destruction.

The final part is called The City as Subject and here Andersen exposes the lies of films such as Chinatown and L.A. Confidential that tell only part of history, delving into the real scandals in L.A. history that reached far deeper than that shown in the movies. He even dissects good old Joe Friday in Dragnet, showing it as a TV series that mirrored the LAPDs contempt for the ordinary citizen. The essay ends with a look at some rare independent films that portray a part of ethnic Los Angeles overlooked in big studio productions. These are Bush Mama, Killer of Sheep, and Bless Their Little Hearts, a film about the tribulations of an aging unemployed black man in South Central Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Plays Itself is a fascinating excursion into the history of cinema and Andersen's commentary is hard hitting, insightful, and revealing. He invites us to reawaken our senses and view movies consciously, not simply accept uncritically what is presented on the screen. Whether you agree or disagree with his point of view, I guarantee you will never look at films in quite the same way again.

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4 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
A must for every tourist - high and low, 12 February 2004
10/10
Author: dcbdramaturg from Berlin, Germany

This documentary changed - oh no, not my live, but my looking: at Los Angeles and at movies in general. The City of Angels will never be the same - L.A.. And from now on I will classify the films I see into high and low tourist: Through which stranger's eyes do they present the city they pretend to live in???

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1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Mordant, funny and pointed, 11 January 2008
8/10
Author: grcomm from United States

Okay, it's not "entertainment" as someone else complained. And I bet Thom Anderson is damned proud of that! On the other hand, if you are interested in film and American society, this is an endlessly absorbing piece of work, sort of a U.S. version of Chris Marker's provocative and witty dissection of the European left released here as "Grin Without a Cat." This is essay film-making at a very high level of intelligence. Anderson's thesis, wildly over simplified, has to do with the way that American filmmakers use the depiction of L.A. to promote a certain vision of urban society, of architectural modernism and of late capitalism. He draws on such a wide range of film clips -- everything from Samuel Fuller and Robert Aldrich to Michael Mann and Roman Polanski to obscure indie films of the 50s and 60s -- that this film will probably never be released on DVD simply because the rights clearances will take forever. I was particularly struck by his remarks on the cynicism of films like "Chinatown" as fueling a sense of social and political powerlessness among audiences and the comparison to some of the terrific Black indie films of the 60s and 70s, particularly Killer of Sheep.

My only real quibble with the film, and it is not inconsiderable, is that it wasn't clear to me -- admittedly on one viewing -- how the two halves fit together either visually or in terms of the ideas.

But what a pleasure it is to see a movie that HAS ideas, and expresses them with wit and savvy.

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