Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

For one of the few times in movie night history, our presenter had to bow out the night before the event, forcing us to miss the (don’t worry, upcoming!) Tommy Boy.  In its place, I picked another ’90s comedy, this one starring technically-not-SNL-alum Steve Martin – Mick Jackson’s 1991 rom-com L.A. Story.

I’ve always had an extreme soft spot for this film, and I don’t really know if that’s because it’s such a  pastiche of literary references, or in spite of it.  I mean, the Hamlet quotes (and other Shakespeare?) fly fast and furious, and we’ve got no less than Rick Moranis playing gravedigger, complete with Yorick’s skull.  But does this movie have anything at all to do with Hamlet?  No, other than that both stories have people in them.  No matter.  We can describe the film anyway and let you decide.

It was nice of them to make downtown a Par 7, really helps the handicap

Harris K. Telemacher (and no, the story seems to have nothing at all to do with the first four books of the Odyssey, other than that both stories were told with words) stars as L.A.’s Wacky Weatherman – a no-respect position in a city where, rumor has it, the zero-bit prediction of tomorrow’s weather being exactly what today’s weather was turns out more accurate than the local weathermen.

I thought you’d at least notice I recycled your Killer Bee outfit

Telemacher is in a stale relationship with Trudi – who it will turn out (spoiler alert!) is secretly sleeping with his agent, giving Telemacher a nice little get-out-of-jail-free card.  But Trudi has a role in this film, and that is to drag Harris along to fancy brunch he otherwise wouldn’t go to.  Two things happen because of this.

Head a bit foggy

First, Harris sees a man who has gotten out of his car to stare at a road sign.

The easily-identifiable You Now Know How The Movie Ends shot

And second, Harris meets British journalist Sara at the brunch.  Harris and Sara hit it off pretty big, and  it’s hard to see her offer to interview him for the piece she is working on (I mean, who doesn’t need to interview the comic relief on the local news?) as anything other than a come-on.  Still, Sara is on the fence as she is also trying to work things out with her ex-husband, so things are in the classic rom-com position.

…Twice!

Telemacher needs a bit of a push, and he gets one when his car mysteriously breaks down right next to a familiar traffic sign – except now he’s the one seeing its secret message.  And the sign is right – the weather does change his life, when a storm he doesn’t predict causes his producer’s boat to capsize, and he gets fired.  It’s at about this time that Trudi dumps Harris for the agent, giving him his chance at Sara.

So were you named after the synthesizer, or…?

So they begin spending a lot of time together, though much of it is shared with Sara’s friend Roland, who she kind of deliberately neglects to mention is also the ex-husband she’s potentially trying to work things out with.  Harris goes so far as to tell Sara that “All I know is, on the day your plane was to leave, if I had the power, I would turn the winds around, I would roll in the fog, I would bring in storms, I would change the polarity of the earth so compasses couldn’t work, so your plane couldn’t take off.”

It was spelled like that on the van!

But of course, it’s not that simple, and in the wake of Sara’s indecisiveness, Harris has his own meaningless fling with the overly flirtacious pants-sizer SanDeE*.  For her part, SanDeE* is quite open to Harris and his love for Sara, as she is evidently the embodiment of the Woodstock free-love era as it existed 20 years down the road in Santa Monica.

Mayflower Manners, Plymouth Rock Parties

In the end, both Harris&SanDeE* and Sara&Roland make weekend reservations at a resort hotel, where they bump into each other and all secrets are revealed.  But rather than use this moment to make up her mind, Sara instead runs from the situation, skipping town on everybody.

Signposts Screaming…

At least she tries to.  But Harris’ friend The Signpost has one more trick left up its sleeve, and somehow it manages to conjure the weather.  As Sara’s plane to London is on the runway, the winds turn around, the fog rolls in, a huge storm kicks up – even the polarity of the plane’s compass is sent out of whack – and the plane cannot take off, leading Sara to return to Telemacher’s and start the relationship we knew the film would end in.  The End.

You think with a statement like zis you can have ze duck?

One of the things that L.A. Story does best is to skewer its target (the L.A. culture) with a well-balanced mixture of mockery and love.  From the comic freeway shootout to the half double decaffeinated half-caf with a twist of lemon, to Telemacher driving 30 feet to the next-door neighbor’s house, to SanDeE* and her high-colonic, to the brutal and pretentious L’Idiot, the film is more or less a non-stop homage to everything that was ridiculous about Los Angeles in the early ’90s.  It’s a touchstone in that sense, a film that could be viewed a hundred years from now and be seen as a realistic, if exaggerated, perspective on the era.

Man With Pearl Riedells

Also, Telemacher likes to rollerskate through the L.A. County Museum of Art, which is quite a thing.

Another striking thing about the film is its lack of a true antagonist.  Richard E. Grant’s Roland is ostensibly cast in that role, but in truth, he’s the hero of another story – the one where he acts as protagonist, attempting to rekindle a relationship with his ex-wife, only to be involved in introducing her to a man he doesn’t know she has fallen in love with, befriending that man, and then shelving his attempts once he understands the true situation in a noble concession.  Roland, despite being cast to  look the part, is not in any way bad – he merely loses a fight he only belatedly realizes he is in.  Nor does one blame Telemacher, nor does one blame Sara (nor SanDeE* nor even Trudi and her infidelity, for that matter).  It’s simply a story where everybody ends up where they’re supposed to be, even if Telemacher does take a little push to get there.

As a movie, maybe it doesn’t hold up perfectly.  A rom-com by any other name would still smell as cheesy, you know.  Nonetheless it’s light and silly throughout, and it has a magical talking (well, spelling) signpost, so I don’t really feel my soft spot is misplaced.