There is no doubt that L.A. Confidential deserves the top spot, and Curtis Hanson should be lauded, particularly for saving The Formosa Cafe.
I haven’t given it much thought, but I wonder what others here think. What movies should be on the list that are not? What movies are on the list that shouldn’t? (for me, probably “Friday”)
No Sunset Blvd? To much of the world LA means Hollywood, and this is the classic portrait of has-beens and also-rans chewed up and spit out by the dream machine.
Pretty good list, I’d say they really should have included Magnolia, but it seems they didn’t want to double-nominate any one director- in order to facilitate a diverse list- and they included P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights. Both could be said to feature the city of Los Angeles as a character, but I think Magnolia more so.
Not a bad list, although the 25 year cutoff seems rather arbitrary.
Anyway, while The Player is probably Altman’s most relevant movie for this category, and they probably didn’t want to include two Altman films, i think that Short Cuts is a better LA movie than quite a few on that list.
One that i definitely would have placed on the list is the Joel Schumacher film Falling Down. Love it or hate it (and the movie elicits some strong opinions either way), this really is one of the films about 1980s Los Angeles. The whole thing starts in a traffic jam, and we then have the incongruous story of a guy walking across the length of the city, encountering all sorts of LA characters and situations along the way, and offering some great commentary on 1980s America.