Blog Entry #12

1. "Le Noir et le Blanc: Hybrid Myths in Devil in a Blue Dress and L.A. Confidential", by Elana Shefrin:
                  This article basically talks about the comparison of two box office hit movies, "L.A. Confidential" and "Devil in a Blue Dress". The writer of the article discusses the theme characters and the time of these movies with certain respects. The settings of these films seem like to recreate the midtwentieth century L.A. and California. There are lots of similarities between these two movies in ethnography and critical characterization. At the end of her article, she mentions that both of the directors( Hanson and Franklin) succeed admirably in their authorial purposes and that each film has a value as a work of art and as a representation of twentieth-century American culture.
2. "Border Crossings In Out of the Past and L.A. Confidential", by William Luhr:
                   In this article, the writer first compares the two film noir, "Out of the Past"( 1947) and "L.A. Confidential"(1998). He says, even though these two films are set in the same place and era, the post WWII United States, they were made fifty years apart and illustrate shifts of the cultures specially Latinos or other cultures to Anglo culture, in racial representation and in film noir. He also tries to draw more attention by discussing that, in terms of moving from one extreme to another, the area of deepest interest may lie in neither extreme- neither black nor white, Hispanic nor Anglo, male nor female but in the relation between an blending of them.
3. "A Good Cop Is Hard To Find", by David Thomson:
                  The author David Thomson writes this article about the characters of the cops, that picturized on  screens. He takes a piece of James Ellroy's novel, Confidential confronts us with the Los Angeles of 1953, a boom time when the police department has learned enough public relations to have a hand in the new television shows glorifying cops, without compromising its own daily grind of corruption, off-camera violence and private deals. Ciminality is okay as long as nice kids and their mothers never have to see blood on the streets. The article talks about the characters and their roll and acting in the movie and if the Oscar will do justice on James Cromwell. According to David Thomson, L.A. Confidential is the most modern movie on cops.
4. "L.A. Confidential", by Rob Walker:
           The article discusses the book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs- and Rock n Roll Generation Saved Hollywood", by Peter Biskind. Biskind is not particularly impressive as a writer, a journalist or a scholar. Though the book was supposedly years in the making, it's written in the style of a rush-job treatment, full of breathless quasi-sentences like "Altman was a Democrat, supported Adlai Stevenson" or "Beatty happened to read it, thought about playing the lead". And in the quest for sexy anecdotes, he routinely shrugs of the lack of corroboration, the denial even the flat-out contradiction
5. "L.A. Confidential", Film Reviews by Paul Arthur:
               The writer of this article Paul Arthur, discusses about the contemporary change of film noir, which has changed the meaning and atmosphere of the film noir. According to Arthur, the term has become a crutch, a cheat, an unearned password to a territory at once broader and more complex than any formulaic rehash of sexual duplicity. In distinction to greed-motivated operations of power, however, which is this context are evil by definition, the self-conscious adoption of artifice or playacting becomes a double-edged sword, a weapon wielded as readily the rtedress of corrupt practices in their expansion.
6. "Wilderness With Palms or Bears" by John Simon:
                   This article by John Simon, reviews two Hollywood Motion Pictures including "L.A. Confidential". He gives highly complementary comments about the movie making and direction as well as the acting. According to the writer, everything is credible, fits in with all the rest, and goes exciting to enthralling. the plot is absorbing, the characters are believable and even worth caring about, and the dialogue is tough and witty without ever sounding strained.