jjrous This movie is almost three hours long. It is narrated in a dull,flat voice. It uses hundreds of film clips, some for as little time as 5-10 seconds. It ends abruptly, without any sort of wrap-up. Yet..it works beautifully. A good example of how breaking all the rules can sometimes pay off handsomely.

210west The filmmakers clearly went to a lot of trouble to assemble all these clips of Los Angeles past and present, but the peevish and pretentious narrator, droning nonstop in my ear, soon got in the way. Worse, the focus of his grumpy soliloquizing was often at odds with what was on the screen. For example, while we saw a wild (and obviously painstakingly worked-out) scene from a Buster Keaton comedy in which a cart releases a cascade of beer barrels onto a steeply sloping road, the narrator continued yammering on as if completely oblivious to what was taking place on screen. He was busy pontificating about how (if memory serves) some images can be characteristic of one particular urban locale while others are more generic. Duh. Watching the movie, or trying to, is like sitting in a theater with a depressed grad student seated behind you, muttering a sour, self-referential monologue to himself, without a pause, while you're attempting to concentrate on the film. After a while, you want to turn around and yell SHUT THE F#%& UP ALREADY!!

mjcfoxx For a three hour documentary about a town that houses 10 million and looks dusty and dirty even when it's at its pristine and pretentious best, this is some compelling stuff. The droll voice of the narrator (Encke King- please tell me that's a pseudonym for the documentary's creator, Thom Anderson) expounds the essay like a cynical alcoholic history professor might talk about the Arapahoe during a Friday night session in which you were hoping to deal with no more important topics than whose breasts look best on GoT or what's up with Jets QB situation. And you'll listen to him because what he says makes sense. Yes, Hollywood is full of overprivileged white guys who pretend the city they live in doesn't exist outside of their fortress-like movie studios and bougie Bel-Air penthouses. I myself lived in Los Angeles for a year, and Hollywood is more of an odor than a thing. You get a faint whiff of it from time to time, but for the most part, Los Angeles is a place where underprivileged multi-ethnic people scrape out a living and pay too much for it. Every single Asian country is represented there (China, Japan, Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, the Phillipines, all of 'em), and of course a good 1/3 of it is Mexican (and you can't forget how many black people live there...). It's a melting pot.Anderson includes a history of Los Angeles by showing how the filmed history got everything wrong and he expounds on the cops and how they're portrayed. His essay sounds like what it is: a tenured film professor being overly critical and at times pseudo-intelligent about an industry borne of immigrants when at its best... which is hilarious given how kind he is to anyone obviously not born in America, as though their portrayal of Los Angeles is more honest because they don't pretend to know anything about it (or probably care all that much-- I lived there, and I never found a reason to care about it. It was a just a place with a lot of people and not a particularly inviting one). This would probably be labeled communist propaganda if it came out during the 50s with how much it seems to disdain anyone who isn't working class or below. Which would be more admirable if the filmmaker was just some guy who watched a lot of movies while he scraped out a living repairing motorcycles in Simi Valley and not some coddled condescending liberal who's been sucking at the film school teat since the 60s.And yet, I give it an 8. The guy does know his stuff.

GRMacE Much like the city under analysis, this film school project is without equal in many respects. However, just like Los Angeles, the warts make for less than a perfect experience.My posting is thoroughly biased since I am, like so many of the posters to IMDb, a Los Angeleno who loves this city. We get the joke about Los Angeles. We live it every day. Someone told me that you have to live here for seven years before you begin to peel back the image of the city and actually find there are people living here. Whether seven is the correct number, I can tell you that viewing this movie will speed up the process considerably.With the director's guidance, viewing various movie clips over the years is an enlightening experience. The emphasis is placed on the background of the shot, not the foreground actors. This proves to be liberating and an unexpected pleasure. The insightful voice over convinced me that they had done their homework. Even if you think you know a lot about this city, you will learn more in two hours than you would pouring over history books for a month.Then there is the third hour. Ouch. Feel safe to leave the theater after the intermission. All semblance of historical detachment is thrown out the window and it becomes a personal diatribe against perceived slights and his take on racial politics. I happen to agree with with many of his sentiments, but his language is equal parts preachy, treacle, and bombastic. Also, unfortunately, in many places just plain wrong. Statements are made as fact (without attribution) that are mere opinion. No voice is given to reasonable voices from any other source. It is, of course, the director's right to make a personal film and take any side he wants. Watching it is another thing all together.The other major problem is the video transfer. Many of the clips are clearly lifted from VHS tapes that have been in a library or video store just a little too long. Even the best of the film has a washed out look would probably not be as noticeable on a TV, but on a big screen, the effect will take you back a bit. Oh, did you notice the running time? Obviously one of the filmmakers heroes is Michael Cimino.In the end, the entire experience is well worth your time if you have any interest at all in Los Angeels/Urban America/Big City politics.Just somebody get him an editor. While you are at it, how about a fact checker.