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Movie of the Week #3 - L.A. Confidential (1997)
This is the third movie we discuss of Academy Award Winners. Kim Basinger won for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and it won for Best Adapted Screenplay. It was nominated for Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, Best Score, Best Sound and Best Director.
Did the movie deserve its nominations and awards? Did the screenplay and Kim Basingers performance in particular stand out? Feel free to add any thoughts, opinions, reflections, analysis or whatever comments related to this film.
The rest of the schedule is:
- 20th of November: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- 27th of November: West Side Story
This was a trip down memory lane. While I have seen this before, it must be more than 20 years ago because I couldn't remember all the twists and reveals. That cast lineup is just peak late 90s, early 00s starpower. Crowe, Pearce, Spacey, Basinger and DeVito.
Certainly a change of scenery from the last two films we have seen here. Pure noir-gangster-50s-Hollywood-cop-thriller entertainment. Simply just well paced, captivating, plenty of style and atmosphere and small doses of humor.
I feel like I was properly entertained, and a little afraid that might come apart if I think too critically about it. I know it is not that kind of movie, but does it have any sort of moral message? Does it have anything to say about police brutality, corruption and lying to the public to save face? Because it kind of seems like these things are portrayed as okay - if it is for the "right" reason. Or I am reading too much into it.
To answer my own talking point about the awards - Basinger didn't really stand out for me. Spacey did on the other hand. Probably fair it lost to Titanic in cinematography, but that was also an element that elevated the entire film. Noir look without the black and white - reminded me of Chinatown in that regard.
I enjoyed the film a lot. Crowe's performance was great too, his character was my favorite. (Most of the characters were great.)
To me, it was more of "Nothing is what it seems on the surface" rather than any moral message. A big part of the enjoyment was discovering more about what's really going on.
Very spoily! (I don't really know how to talk about the movie otherwise)
Bud White seems like a muscle man who's soft on women. But he grows distasteful of roughing up people under Dudley. We learn about the trauma he suffered, seeing his mother beaten to death by his father while he was left chained to a radiator. He hits Lynn because he loves her and felt betrayed. He might've killed Exley too, but getting to the truth was more important to him.Exley seems like a go-getter politician maneuvering for gains, with a 'by the book' sense of justice. Discovering the truth was more important to him than the gains. He eventually shoots Dudley in the back (but still successfully maneuvers and comes out on top).
Jack initially seems to be more actor than cop, until he feels responsible for a death. The mexican girl's false testimony. These characters were driven by their values, that was right enough reason for them. The characters were the highlight of the film for me, all the slimy stuff by the LAPD and Dudley's cabal was just a setting to watch the characters express their true values when pushed.
I love this movie, Pearce is great in it. It should've been the role that catapulted his career in my opinion but it doesn't seem to have done so, which is a shame. Such a stacked cast though (even if Crowe and Pearce weren't incredibly well known at the time) and it all worked out, everyone puts on a stellar performance.
I picked up the novel by James Elroy last year, along with the other three books in the LA Quartet and have still to get to it (got a huge list of reading in front of me).
Yeah, it is weird how Guy Pearce didn't take off. He was great in Memento but other than that, he hasn't really gotten many major roles. He was great in Brimstone though.
He's an outstanding actor so it really is a shame, he seems to be appearing in more movies over the past decade or so which is nice.
Either way, he was already fairly well known to Australian, UK and possibly New Zealand audiences for being in the Australian soap opera Neighbours.
I think you meant to reply to @winther, but accidentally made a new top-level comment. :P
I did indeed haha, noticed after I'd posted but not much I could do by then.
No worries. Winther still should have gotten a notification about your comment since this is their topic, and I mentioned them in my comment too. Just thought you should know though, in case you weren't aware of the mistake. :P
So when I was first getting into movies back in 2013 when I was both 13 and 14, I would watch/listen to a couple of YouTube channels. And these YouTube channels were ran by older millenials/younger gen x which resulted in them acclaiming mostly 90s movies. So as a result of that, the first movies that I would watch when I was starting out were from this era. The Usual Suspects, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Fargo. You know, very IMDb stuff.
L.A Confidential was a movie that I've been meaning to watch ever since that time, ten years ago now. I can't remember why I never watched it. I remember it being on Netflix for forever, in fact I think I've tried starting it several times. This is exactly the type of movie that I would watch with my mom back when I was in high school, so it's hard for me to understand why I just never watched it. Especially back then when I would watch literally everything that the internet recommended.
I can see exactly why it's praised, I can see why it's a classic. It's brilliant. It's peak 90s cinema. Hyper violent. Melodramatic. Big in scale. I really wish I did see it back when I was in high school.
It's almost impressive that in a movie this good, the weakest performance from it is the one that won an Oscar.
In terms of Oscar stuff, I know this was the cool kid's choice to win Best Picture. Because Titanic was too popular to bop it with the kids, this was real movie making not bullshit Hollywood film making. At least that's what I've heard throughout episodes of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. It also won Critics Choice back when they were first starting out and still pretending to be movie critics.
I personally like Titanic more, but I tend to lean more populist (e.x I like 1917 more than Parasite). Regardless, I think that the big three Best Picture nominees this year, Titanic, L.A Confidential, and Good Will Hunting, have one thing in common: they're all melodramas. They're all kind of in-line with Old Hollywood. L.A is noir, Titanic is like those big scale productions from the 50s, and Good Will Hunting is a performance heavy movie like On The Waterfront.
My favorite nominee is Good Will Hunting, which might actually be my favorite movie from the 90s period.
If I had to rank the nominees: Good Will Hunting, Titanic, L.A Confidential, As Good As It Gets, and I haven't seen The Full Monty. Overall a very strong year for the Oscar's (I also love As Good As It Gets).
If I had to pick a Supporting Actress winner that year it would probably be Moore for Boogie Nights to Driver for Good Will Hunting.
One of the few Noir films that can pull off a happy ending. That betrayal in the middle was done well, though seeing Spacey as a naive and well meaning vice cop is harder nowadays. He was a standout though.
LA Noire the game is a fun accompaniment. I'm sure because of the movie they made the vice cop deliberately a backstabber and the captain an honest man.