{"id":12316,"date":"2019-04-23T14:07:12","date_gmt":"2019-04-23T18:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=12316"},"modified":"2019-04-23T14:07:12","modified_gmt":"2019-04-23T18:07:12","slug":"shangri-l-a-i-watch-la-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2019\/04\/shangri-l-a-i-watch-la-story.html","title":{"rendered":"Shangri-L.A.: I watch “LA Story”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

When I was in fifth grade my family and I moved briefly to Santa Monica to be with family during a difficult time. It was hard for everybody; least hard for me, but I missed home a lot. I was unhappy and acted badly. So for a long time I thought of \u201cLA\u201d as a place I hated\u2013a place where I\u2019d been unhappy even though a lot of people were very kind to me. And of course nobody will ever fault you if you say you hate LA. What\u2019s not to hate?<\/p>\n

Then I visited again as an adult and realized how beautiful LA is. You can still see noir in the buildings; that unchanging sunlight is noir sunlight. (Sunlight in LA is like Andy Warhol\u2019s line about Coca-Cola: \u201cAll the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.\u201d) Every time I go back there I like it more.<\/p>\n

LA Story<\/em> is about loving LA and being loved by it, and I\u2019m always here for movies about loving a despised place. It\u2019s an utterly charming 1991 Steve Martin romantic comedy in which the greatest romance is with a city. Starting with the opening credits, perfectly punctuated by the sprinklers, you can feel the movie rejoicing in the city, in all its idiocy and violence and glitz. I loved this film, for real. The \u201copen season on the freeway\u201d scene is the most 1990s thing you\u2019ll ever see: cavalier, anti-moralistic, bullets whistling a happy tune. (There is only one thing that I like and that is whistling in the dark<\/a>.) LA Story<\/em> has a beautiful description of LA (\u201cI\u2019ve seen a lot of L.A. and I think it\u2019s also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is looking to the outside for verification that what they\u2019re doing is all right\u201d) but also the sharpest possible description of what it represents in the American psyche (\u201cLet us just say I was deeply unhappy, but I didn\u2019t know it because I was so happy all the time\u201d).<\/p>\n

The romance is so much better than it should be. So much more convincing and enjoyable. At first I thought I\u2019d enjoy the dialogue and the love of the city and the blank unholy Steve Martin of it all, but hate the women and the way the women worked in the romcom plot. Harris Telemacher\u2019s soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend is an \u201980s-haired shrew, he\u2019s distracted from his *~*soulmate*~* by buxom airhead SanDeE* (the delightful Sarah Jessica Parker), he\u2019s nicer than Shrew and smarter than Ditz and deeper than both of them and I was grossed out. But the movie makes a lot of smart moves that take its women beyond the sexist cliches.<\/p>\n

The first move, the most obvious, is that there are lots of women in the film. Harris\u2019s love interest is an English journalist (not reporter! such a nice little detail, how she corrects him on that) who\u2019s possibly hung up on her ex-husband (an underused but always lovely Richard E. Grant) but actually overprotective of her heart, unable to let her guard down. This is still at least cliche-adjacent, though very lightly-handled: \u201cOh no, I can\u2019t! This is how Mommy met Daddy!\u201d So it helps that Harris\u2019s best friend is also a woman, for once, a juicer\/performance artist (!) and general oddball. Plus, Parker imbues SanDeE* with such effervescence that she escapes cliche and becomes cartoon: an archetype, not a stereotype. Even the depiction of her \u201copen relationship\u201d is perfectly balanced. There\u2019s sexual-revolution satire (her boyfriend wanted to see other people, she agreed, but ladies didn\u2019t exactly fling themselves at his feet so now she\u2019s happily slutting it up while he mopes at home), there\u2019s just a hint of real sadness or emptiness in her shallow affairs which are always a little less than she wants them to be, but there\u2019s also the poignancy of her irrepressible, unsinkable-Cheerio personality. I adored this heart emoji of a person.<\/p>\n

And it helps that the romantic leads both make all the wrong choices. The lady\u2019s wincing caution is the wrong choice; so is Harris\u2019s pushiness, his windowside poetry and his flop-sweat speech about how she can just assume that he will<\/em> do whatever she needs him to do and then act like he has<\/em> done it. It also helps that both Martin\u2019s acting and the camerawork emphasize Harris\u2019s helplessness. He gets a ton of those shots from below, or swirling camera movements (e.g. in the scenes with SanDeE*), which make him seem overwhelmed and in need of firm guidance. Which he gets from a mystical traffic-conditions sign. Look, this is LA, that\u2019s a better guru than most.<\/p>\n

I admit I disliked the deployment of Shakespeare. It was pushy, like we wouldn\u2019t trust that a movie with quips about abstract art and \u201cthe new cruelty\u201d had a brain, or that LA had a soul, unless we got Hamlet<\/em> references. But I liked everything else. All the Cokes were good.<\/p>\n

Palm trees via Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was in fifth grade my family and I moved briefly to Santa Monica to be with family during a difficult time. It was hard for everybody; least hard for me, but I missed home a lot. I was unhappy and acted badly. So for a long time I thought of \u201cLA\u201d as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":12325,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[61,31],"class_list":["post-12316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","tag-california-dreamin","tag-god-bless-the-1990s-because-no-one-else-will"],"yoast_head":"\nShangri-L.A.: I watch "LA Story"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When I was in fifth grade my family and I moved briefly to Santa Monica to be with family during a difficult time. 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