My Un-Funny Valentine

A certainly entirely-cliche-free film called Valentine's Day is opening up right before Valentine's Day and starring a ton of huge stars, all of which affects me very little until they started airing this:




Ah, the trials and tribulations of love and being drop-dead gorgeous and living in LA, where nobody RSVP's. Yeah!

I mean, wait, actually that would be "No!" This cliche is a derivative of the "everyone's a flake" stereotype, but the problem is it's completely at odds with another big LA social stereotype: That we're obsessed with lists, red carpets, "it's who you know," etc.

So really we can't win. Except in this trailer, where a shot of an empty dining room reveals that Jessica Biel's evite doesn't have zero responses because Angelenos are flakes, but because her character's annoying and nobody wants to go to her party. See, Angelenos do what they say they're gonna do after all!

Public Service Announcement

One of the main inspirations for this blog, Thom Andersen's 2004 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, is currently having a rare run at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. This close-to-three-hour musing is a rambling, beautiful, and thoughtful presentation on how our city, its landscape and its people have been depicted throughout movie history, told via over 200 film clips:

This cinematic essay focuses on the discrepancy between the lived-in urban reality of Los Angeles and its various century-deep cinematic mythologies. The movie is about more than just what the movies get wrong. It’s about the way the imaginary space of cinema intrudes upon the actual space of our lives, so that the L.A. of the movies becomes a kind of separate urban reality unto itself.

Damn straight, Toronto Star! The film screens tonight, tomorrow and Saturday at 7:30 pm and Thom Andersen will be appearing in person.

¡Yo Quiero Less Cliches!

I was quite excited to see Beverly Hills Chihuahua was coming for the purposes of this blog, but then I realized that, unlike Beverly Hills Cop or Beverly Hills Ninja, this film doesn't actually take place in Beverly Hills:

While on vacation in Mexico, Chloe, a ritzy Beverly Hills chihuahua, finds herself lost and in need of assistance in order to get back home.

Oh well. Here's the trailer, which is stirring up much more controversy than a Disney talking-dog musical should for its attitude toward Latino culture, women, and treating Mexico and Peru as interchangable:


As you can see, the titular city gets surprisingly little screentime, so they've got to really make their point quickly, cramming images that shorthand "Beverly Hills" into just a few seconds. So these are the shots we get:

1. city streets

2. corner of Rodeo and Wilshire

3. hot babe in sundress with dog in purse

4. yellow expensive-looking convertible sportscar

5. palm trees

6. mansions

What, no kidney-shaped swimming pool? I suppose the above is quick and efficient and doesn't really hurt anyone, or necessarily indicate the Beverly Hills scenes will be candy-colored cliches or anything...

Okay, I'm off to erase that image from my brain in the yearly goodness that is the Sunset Junction Street Festival, which is conveniently located right by the Mack Sennett Studio so I can pop over after filming. See you at the Cold War Kids.

Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me

Lest you think all we do here is complain at Nobody Walks in LA, I'd like to point you toward a new film making the festival rounds. Okay, it's called In Search of a Midnight Kiss , which is a title roughly as affected as At Play in the Fields of the Lord, but besides that it does sound quite good, and like a real, actual representation of Los Angeles. I can't tell you much about the film itself as it doesn't open til tonight, and Fatty and I are busy with reshoots, and being that I'm the top comedienne of the silent era, I can't exactly show up unannounced at the Arclight. But I do like what the director says in today's LA Times about filming in downtown LA:

Meanwhile, the fleeting, single shots of a number of buildings downtown are the most elegiac, encountered not as settings but as subjects of emotional intent. Having gone through a very difficult transition after arriving here from Austin, Texas, in the summer of 2003 -- he'd lost his girlfriend, his car and went broke (all of which is represented in "Midnight Kiss") -- [director Alex]Holdridge aimed to infuse this inner turmoil into the downtown landscape.

"My emotional state at the time was, on the one hand, raw, depressed, frustrated and feeling a bit hopeless," he said. "And yet for me, just recognizing how unbelievably beautiful it is down there, I couldn't believe how gorgeous those theaters were, how beautiful the banks were."

Well of course they are! But those of us who live here and frequent downtown's establishments (like the Redwood Bar, where I'll be spinning '80s post-punk and '90s indie rock tonight after filming) and don't live in a fantasy world created by mass media don't need to be told that. But you know who does need to be told that? Apparently the Brits:

The film had its theatrical premiere in London in mid-July and continued its rollout throughout the U.K. before opening stateside, and audiences there,according to Holdridge, “were shocked to see that L.A. – ‘We only know it as beach bimbos or ghetto or Beverly Hills.’ They’re thinking: ‘We’ve seen thousands of movies from L.A., but we never get to see what L.A. looks like normally.’ ”

Alex Holdridge, we at Nobody Walks in LA thank you. You have brought me one step closer to no longer having to bring up Benny Hill just to counter my UK friends' belief that The OC is an accurate representation. You can come blog for us any time.