This didn't have to happen. Ellroy's novel is a ferocious, caterwauling slab of pulp -- a big Buick 6 of a book that serves up 1950s-era L.A. as if the only creatures who strode the West Coast were mobsters, hookers, corrupt cops and scandal magazine editors. The only bummer about "L.A. Confidential," the book, is fighting your way through Ellroy's ridiculously rat-a-tat prose. ("The girl boo-hoo'd; sirens scree'd outside. Bud turned Sanchez around, kicked him in the balls. 'For ours, Pancho. And you got off easy.'") Reading Ellroy can be like deciphering Morse code tapped out by a pair of barely sentient testicles.
Curtis Hanson, the director behind the yuppie distress films "The River Wild" and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," has said in interviews that he wanted to preserve as much of Ellroy's language and dialogue as possible in his version of "L.A. Confidential." Hanson has succeeded -- perhaps too well. The first half of this film has a blocky, studied, too-well-lit......
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Approximate Word Count: 1125
Approximate Pages: 5 (260 words per double-spaced page) |