***SPOILERS AHEAD***
This is an interesting documentary about Los Angeles--not brilliant, but it has some fantastic anecdotes. Novelist James Ellroy, who looks and acts like R. Crumb on acid, yaks about his wild-and-wooly youth and his fascination with the Black Dahlia. Director John Milius shows up to comment on surfing and to joke about the nuclear destruction of L.A. (he makes a cruel crack about Michael Eisner waking up to find the planet in flames and crying, "But I had a destiny!"). On the downside, there's too much time devoted to left-wing historian Mike Davis (later the subject of a devastating expose in the L.A. TIMES about his "creative" interpretation of history), who complains that there are too many white people in Los Angeles. People like him, in other words? But overall the movie is worth the trip.
This is an interesting documentary about Los Angeles--not brilliant, but it has some fantastic anecdotes. Novelist James Ellroy, who looks and acts like R. Crumb on acid, yaks about his wild-and-wooly youth and his fascination with the Black Dahlia. Director John Milius shows up to comment on surfing and to joke about the nuclear destruction of L.A. (he makes a cruel crack about Michael Eisner waking up to find the planet in flames and crying, "But I had a destiny!"). On the downside, there's too much time devoted to left-wing historian Mike Davis (later the subject of a devastating expose in the L.A. TIMES about his "creative" interpretation of history), who complains that there are too many white people in Los Angeles. People like him, in other words? But overall the movie is worth the trip.
