La La Land is if Jacques Demy and Baz Lurhmann did a narrative adaptation of Mike Davis’s "City of Quartz." Los Angeles is playing itself as the dream dump this time. The city is in its costume, sipping dry vermouth in a jazz bar and talking about the girl with the dragon tattoo. If Paris is eros, Los Angeles is anti-eros. Los Angeles is a list of complaints with a monomaniacal optimism sinewing it.
I am fascinated by the idea…
Zizek, a surprisingly generous critic, finds in Carpenter’s They Live a masterpiece of Hollywood leftist cinema and lifts an exciting reading of ideology from the film. I, a far less generous critic, find it to be a bit too paranoid-style to have a sound capitalism or ideology critique. However, I do think that it is far more daring and potent than most of our contemporary ludic class films. Strangely, They Live is not even a film about class – save…
