Hacker Cinema
L.A. Confidential
1997 · Film · 138 min
Directed by Curtis Hanson
Three detectives in the corrupt and brutal L.A. police force of the 1950s use differing methods to uncover a conspiracy behind the shotgun slayings of the patrons at an all-night diner.
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3 comments on Hacker News
It's one of the very few movies I chose to sit down and watch but had to stop after just a few minutes.
The others would be The Departed — I loved the original Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs, but I couldn't bear to watch more than a few minutes of The Departed. And the David Lynch Dune.
Usually I tough it out, L.A. Confidential, for example, I thought was awful, but saw it through to the end. I couldn't believe that the same director (Curtis Hanson) could have made such an awful (though, stangely, lauded) film and also the absolutely amazing Wonder Boys (and the servicable The Hand That Rocks the Cradle).
One of the things that Ted Chiang talks about is the adaptation of James Ellroy's novel L.A. Confidential to the film of the same name:
If I had read the novel first, I would have said it was impossible to adapt into a movie. But what the screenwriters did was take the protagonists of the novel and construct a completely new plot in which those characters could play the same basic roles. The resulting movie is faithful to the spirit of the novel even though it’s radically unfaithful to the text. That’s an approach that would never have occurred to me; I think I’d be too reverent of the original to adapt anything to film.
I think the challenges of adapting Story of Your Life to film were different, but it was certainly something I was thinking about when I walked into the theater. I personally think they did a pretty good job, but I suppose that depends on what you thought the essential part of Story of Your Life was.
Now that I think about it, the movie Ender's Game was pretty faithful to the source novel, but probably fell down as a movie because of it. It's interesting to think about how that movie might have been better if it had tried to be (as Chiang says of L.A. Confidential) "faithful to the spirit of the novel" while playing faster and looser with the actual source material.
I have no idea who you're talking about. I took the handle from the film L.A. Confidential.