Welcome to L.A.

The minute the singer uttered "City of one night stands", I should have stopped watching this but I soldiered on. I was hoping for a storyline with Laurel Canyon scene in it since it was a "musical" of that period and about LA. Nope. Welcome To LA has a great cast that is totally wasted. I'm pretty sure the cast completely trusted Alan Rudolph on this mess and signed their respective contracts and have to suck it up.

Sissy Spacek, Sally Kellerman and Geraldine Chaplin were were good all things considered. Is the whole movie a flashback? I waited and waited for a narrative but the writer hid it with the Easter eggs. Scenes like a minute of Geraldine walking on an alley emoting, then cut to an unrelated scene. Cut and paste is a bad way. Rudolph trying to be a 1970s Alain Resnais, he is not by a long shot.

Being an Angeleno who loves movies about LA, I say avoid this movie at all costs.

Ps I looked up the singer Richard Baskin on Discogs and I am happy to tell everyone that his contribution to the soundtrack was the last of his recording career.

A gauzy, perfume advertisement-styled depiction of Los Angeles as a carousel of lonely, emotionally needy people has a great cast of actors, yet is so self-conscious about its theme that it leaves everyone wilting in a sterile vacuum. Debuting director Alan Rudolph, who also penned the screenplay, is so narcissistic over these hapless characters that self-absorption is just a starting point--does he think these people are reflective of modern human lives? Keith Carradine plays a songwriter whom women want but can't get (he's mired in alienation); Geraldine Chaplin is an unloved housewife who roams the streets; Lauren Hutton (at her most attractive) is a photographer specializing in pictures of empty rooms, and so on. Rudolph and producer Robert Altman, trying--one assumes--for a West Coast "Nashville", take the edge off everything, so that the movie is a smoothly banal experience, passive and bland. Despite a minute or two of honest emotional despair, the film quickly becomes a pity party for the apathetic. *1/2 from ****

When Karen Hood (Geraldine Chaplin) tells Carroll Barber (Keith Carradine) "I love Greta Garbo," he responds with the slightly cryptic "Yeah, she's nice when you're by yourself."

Profound, but too offhand to be a predictable rejoinder. It's very striking, one of the most original of the film.

Especially do you get the flavour of the upper-middle-class world-weary young disappointed in Baskin's lyric:

"At first I loved your sweet complexion, your tawny cheeks and lip confections--they photographed you for your style.

your body held me for a while; you could disguise with such beguile

now lying her remembering it better than it used to be is loneliness, but it doesn't really matter now, I never really loved you much, I guess."

That's from the title song.

From "The Best Temptation of all" there is "there's so many bodies and scenes...so many faces and feelings...dreams...wet tasting dreams

when those silky infatuations come, enticin' me...invitin' me..excitin' me.."

The world of "bodies and pleasures" that was Michel Foucault's vision of the future of sexuality in the first volume of THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY was being lived out in L.A. in particular before he even wrote that it would come to this.

At a Malibu party where Carroll and his wealthy father Carl (marvelously played by Denver Pyle) confront each other, Carl's mistress Nona (Lauren Hutton) spends some stylized, posturing time with Carroll up the stairs overlooking the stylized party, the kind of party in stark white stylized modern LA houses where being comfortable must be impossible, and being controlled is an impossible necessity; and he says to her "Do you really care about that old man?" She says, knowing it won't do to say anything "less," "He sure seems to care a lot about me."

Earlier, before Carroll sees Susan (Viveca Lindfors) for the first time since his return, she says on the telephone "don't you want to see me?" and he says "I've seen you." As the older woman, somewhat desperately clinging to an unshared wish, she says "I've seen you too. I liked it."

To the love-and/or sex-starved real estate salesgirl Anne Goode (Sally Kellerman), Susan says, when she makes the arrangements for Carroll's apartment, "I pictured you plump and tiny with curly black hair--AGGRESSIVE. And here you are--soft and blonde and pretty." Anne, always trying to hard to please: "And here you are so beautiful."

Kellerman drives Carradine to his new Silverlake digs.

She says "this is Hollywood. I just love it. I don't know a thing about it, but I love it...(long pause)....does that sound like a line?...I didn't mean it to..I guess everything sounds like a line these days...Shameless, aren't I?...what are you thinking?....

Carradine: "About your shame."

************************************************************************

"People deceive themselves here, don't you think? Yes. And that's how they fall in love. And then, when everything is over, it's the other person that gets deceived. Am I right? Yeah. Van Nuys Boulevard...(long pause)..I don't need to be loved by anyone...I don't mind waiting...it's how you wait that's important, anyway..I think.. but everyone gets deceived...don't they..."

These are the opening lines of the film, which Chaplin intones in a cab going through L.A., riding all over it as she does every day, all dressed up in fur and pearl earrings and hat all for herself's own formality in the anonymity of a taxi ride.

I knew a number of people like this in 1976 and 1977. They were over-sophisticated and living in the strange limbo between the volatile, but vital 60's and the beginning of the carnage and sterization that began to open its fully tarnished flower with the Reagan era and has escalated to the deafening roar we have only 24 years later.

Bars were full of people who weren't on cellphones all the time.

They weren't ever on cell phones--even the ones you can still see.

Well acted but the movie just drones on about people that aren't as smart as they think they are. I lived in L. A. for 10 years and worked at Paramount Studios. I've met these people. Most of them are boring, self-obsessed people., Hutton being the worst of them.

Despite a fabulous cast led by Alan Rudolph regular Keith Carradine, this vacant, flat movie with virtually no plot is easy to classify as a lesser "Nashville" set on the West Coast. I mean, what are the major happenings, Denver Pyle makes Harvey Keitel a partner? Uh . . . that was about it, there's a party.

So, why the heck do I like this so much? I've seen it maybe 30 times, even though it's unavailable on any media, at the moment, at least, and every time I watch it all the way through to the last shot of Carridine looking sideways at the camera. I saw it when it first came out, and it stayed in my mind for decades until it started to show up on the movie channels. I can't explain it, the music is nice (particularly "One Night Stands" and "Welcome to L.A."), but the conversation isn't particularly clever (compare "Choose Me" for example). I can't really defend the film, how could I? There's no message, no plot, no outstanding performances to champion . . . I don't know, I just enjoy watching it. Beats me.