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Thanks, Thor -- that's why I enjoyed the hell out of it. (And in the best Warner Brothers Cinemascope since REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE.)
BTW, when I listen to the Goldsmith soundtrack, I also listen to the song compilation CD, (which includes a Golsdsmith track), and I highly recommend both albums to lovers of the film.
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It's not true. Bernstein was offered the film but turned it down (to do Hoodlum, a decision he may well have regretted!)
So Bernstein got to score "the film that should have been" that time, usually Goldsmith's specialty. I saw "Hoodlum" with an unforgiving audience and quite enjoyed laughing it off the screen with them. Sometimes a really bad movie can be fun!
Bernstein's score shines through the incompetent filmmaking, however, and it's actually one of his best of that period in my opinion. --Be careful not to accidentally pick up the OTHER "Hoodlum" album, by the way, the "Music Inspired by the Film" rap/pop CD!
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I'm with Preston - simply don't understand how anyone could think LA Confidential is superior to Chinatown. It's enjoyble, but no masterpiece - Mr. Hanson is not in the same league with Polanski, who was at his peak when he made Chinatown. Chinatown also has one of the greatest screenplays ever written. And the Goldsmith score is perfection (I have the Lambro score, which is interesting in its own right, but has none of the genius of what Goldsmith ultimately did).
Also, the downbeat ending of Chinatown had no interference from ANYONE at Paramount and to infer that that was so is not fair. The ONLY one who took exception to the downbeat ending was screenwriter Robert Towne, who, at that time, hated it. He has since mellowed and I believe he's admitted that even though he couldn't see it back then, Polanski had been right to insist on it. The film is actually unthinkable without it.
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For me, CHINATOWN is a masterpiece and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL is just good but flawed. That ending truly ruins it, whereas CHINATOWN has one of the best noir endings of all time. Check out Jake standing there in Chinatown, reliving his earlier nightmare, and most likely wondering whether he's on some kind of Mobius strip he's doomed to ride over and over again for all eternity! He's so stunned by what's happened that his men have to bodily drag him away--now THAT'S what I call existential despair! On the other hand, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL--which is clearly intended to be noir--has the happiest ending imaginable, ludicrous beyond words. It reminds me of the happy ending that the movie studio tried to force onto Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL. Very frustrating, because I do believe that L.A. CONFIDENTIAL otherwise came close to masterpiece status.
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Thanks, Haines and Uncle. I knew about the irony of Towne and the ending. I guess when I'm talking about "against all odds and big studio tendencies," I'm speaking of TODAY's odds and studios, which is why CHINATOWN is CHINATOWN and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL ain't, for all its virtues up to a point.
You know how some people traipse around L.A. looking for locations written into the works of Raymond Chandler? A friend of mine once went to the address in Chinatown given in CHINATOWN for the fateful rendezvous. The actual address in 1980 was a vacant lot.
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I consider the ending of L.A. Confidential te be fairly cynical.
The conversation of the 2 city officials, followed by the posthumour decoration and honorable funeral of the film's biggest villian.
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Posted: |
Jan 25, 2006 - 10:08 PM
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By: |
Morlock1
(Member)
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I personaly don't get all this talk about LAC's ending. It's nowhere near as good as CHINATOWN's, no question there. But to dismiss it as your typical Hollywood happy ending? I think it is much more than that. I always saw it as some kind of comment on what kind of ending people were expecting. You were expecting "Forget it Jake, It's Chinatown"? We're gonna give you the bad cop and the hooker driving off into the sunset. It doesn't fit the tone of the scenes immidiately precedeing it, true, but it fits the tone of the film perfectly. It just sounds like James Ellroy in a wonderful way. He loves noir....but he has this kind of twisted, unexpected sense of humour, which IMO is one of the great pluses of the film.
EDIT: Stefan's post is further example of this approach
Can't wait for THE BLACK DAHLIA.....the story doesn't sound so hot, and neither does the cast, but Ellroy, Vilmos Zsigmond, Dante Ferretti and James Horner, all working on a DePalma film? Sounds kind of surreal to me. This sounds like excellent material for DePAlma to go back to his brilliant, darkly comic work from the 70's.
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Alex, I never said that L.A. CONFIDENTIAL owed its ending to studio interference, I was speaking about "tendencies" in general. And the fact that it was exactly the ending Hanson wanted doesn't make it any better an ending to those of us who found it so unsatisfying. (If anything, it makes it worse.) But then, as the post after yours indicates, for some people the ending is just fine. Personally, I think the poster is being too kind and reading too much into the movie. When you have to do so much twisting and pretzeling to justify an ending like that, it's usually a good idea to try to come up with a better ending. If you guys liked it, that's your privilege, but it just didn't work for me. And remember, I was 100% WITH the movie -- UNTIL that ending.
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Posted: |
Jan 25, 2006 - 11:22 PM
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By: |
Heath
(Member)
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I consider the ending of L.A. Confidential te be fairly cynical.
Cynical but heartless and pulp-shallow.
Chinatown was deeply cynical too, but, for all its central character's jadedness, it spoke from the heart without a shred of sentimentality. Oddly enough, the most moving scene might be the last, deftly simple, exchange between Huston and Nicholson: the "Why are you doing all of this? How much better can you eat? What can't you buy that you couldn't already afford?" scene. The implications are profound and, literally, global. It shows an anguish in the writer's heart.
There's nothing remotely like that in LA Confidential's screenplay. Instead, it is merely content to say that seedy things happen in Tinsletown's dark corners, tough guys are tough, corrupt cops are corrupt and hot dames are hot. It's high class pulp fiction. Good, but a second viewing is unnecessary and unrewarding.
Chinatown is the best film Goldsmith ever scored, and I think history might well write it that way. Just so happens he wrote perhaps his best score for it too.
And in ten days, yet.
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Ending or no ending, LA Confidential is no Chinatown, not in any way, shape or form, IMO.
Curtis Hanson is a passable director and nothing more, as his career before and after has shown time and time again.
Polanski, at the time of Chinatown, was one of the most interesting filmmakers around, had already made one masterpiece (Rosemary's Baby), and several great films, including Repulsion. Robert Towne's script is far beyond Brian Helgeland's for LA Confidential, and has some of the best dialogue in movie history. And the period feel of Chinatown is exemplary, while LA Confidential's period feel always feels like "art direction". In fact, I hate to nitpick, but the period feel completely collapsed for me when they showed the Pantages - no amount of period autos could disguise the Pantages as it is today - with the box-office on the side. It would have been very simple to place a proper box-office shell where it belonged and as it was in the 50s.
I enjoyed LA Confidential, but it never achieved the greatness of Chinatown - it's an okay picture, competent with decent performances. Chinatown is iconic, from its first frame to its last, and it didn't take time to achieve that status - those of us who were there opening day (as was I) knew it immediately. I must have seen it four times that first week.
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There is absolutely nothing wrong with a happy ending. I love the one in Confidential--would have hated a different ending.
DH
Your first statement's way too broad. There's definitely something wrong with a happy ending if you're making OTHELLO and it ends like SOUND OF MUSIC.
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I agree with Joan: an overrated score to an overrated movie. The problem with Chinatown is, like a lot of mysteries, it's all about who did what to whom, and why, but precious little about genuine human feeling, of which Chinatown has little. A few seconds of
"She's my sister -- !"
SLAP!
"My Daughter -- !"
SLAP!
"My sister -- !"
SLAP!
"My daughter -- !"
Simply doesn't cut it in that department.
Now, Billy Wilder's and I.A.L. Diamond's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is another matter, entirely...
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