My list is still fluid. Films can go in and out, even from one day to the next as I watch the films again. Last night I began to watch LA Confidential for about the 3rd time. I turned it off after about 20 minutes. It seemed like a fake confection, a concocted story. I didn't buy into it, any of it, any of the characters as people, the only possible exception being Kim Basinger. I was too aware that it was an effort to tell a story about a past time. Danny De Vito's role seemed like a device to me, an annoying device. Both characters played by Crowe and Pearce were straining to be real or overdone. Mitchum's narration in Farewell My Lovely (1975) plus his witty lines are much easier to accept. I cannot explain why the latter is okay by me and the former is not, but that's how they affect me. In both these movies, racial slurs are overdone or seem unnaturally spoken. In LA Confidential, a mass beating of Mexicans in the jail seems overdone.
Responses