5 Feet of Fury

‘[Y]oung Ellroy led a life that included petty criminality, alcohol and drug abuse, vagrancy, and golf caddying’

Exceptional piece about L.A. Confidential.

Recently, some stuff happened that was… unpleasant.

Revealing. In a bad way.

I kept thinking of this movie the whole time, because it’s about how the world really works.

(So is its over-rated, similarly-themed predecessor, Chinatown, except L.A. Confidential is so much better than that, and I won’t hear otherwise. Yes, the “dark underbelly of glamourous Los Angeles” thing is SO overdone, but in this film, it works.)

A single throwaway line changes everything — except it doesn’t.

You could hand a DVD of L.A. Confidential to a teenager and say, “Kid, memorize this and you might make out OK.”

Luckily, I’m ahead of my self, deadline-wise, this weekend, so I think I’ll watch it again.

PS: I too have absolutely had it with this crap for some time now:

And I love that it does all this against a bright, sunny, colorful background. Had this movie been made a couple years later, all this seediness would have been shot in a washed-out brown or blue tinting that so plagues art direction in the 21st century.

***
Jezuz, does EVERYTHING have to look like Se7en and Fight Club?

What year is it again?

I’m old. I can’t SEE what’s going on.