Samuel L. Jackson is producing and staring in a movie based on JG Ballard’s “Running Wild.” There’s something in “development hell” for nearly everything he’s written, but this is only the third Hollywood-produced JG Ballard adaptation. Full list at Ballardian. (A shame Five Easy Pieces-era Jack Nicholson never played Vaughn, although, as the author said of that script, “This version was set in Los Angeles …It was a genuine translation, not just of language but of everything. I didn’t really like it. It was almost Disneyfied — ‘Walt Disney Productions presents Crash!’”)

Film Review: “Confessions of a Superhero”

People call Washington, DC, “Hollywood for ugly people” but the two cities are alike not just because they are one-industry locales. Both places are made up of outsiders. The difference is in how people arrive. You U-haul into DC with a full suitcase, fresh out of college, find a high rise apartment, and have a research assistant job or internship lined up already. The mythic Hollywood welcome — by Greyhound, of course — well, he most likely left a broken home, maybe straight out of high school. He’s got a vague idea of how auditions work and probably still lives in his car.

If you’re on Netflix, you’ve probably seen a recommendation for “Confessions of a Superhero.” Go watch it. It’s not what you think. It exposes the melancholy underbelly of its quirky subject matter, and might be the best documentary yet about the “Boulevard of (Broken) Dreams,” (I have yet to see “Los Angeles Plays Itself.”)

“Yeah, I’m SAG,” the say, as they rationalize their gigs as acting practice, but working as a superhero can be as demoralizing and time-consuming as a temp job. The four would-be actors are unfortunately stereotyped (the obsessive geek, the formerly homeless guy, the small town ex-cheerleader, and the bitter older guy.) but something special comes out in these contrasts.

The major difference between Washington and the LA is that the city of quartz is in love with its myths. As David Denby wrote in his review of the Black Dahlia, “Los Angeles, spreading out, broods over its history until it rots. Events from decades ago—a famous murder, a Hollywood scandal, a corrupt real-estate deal—serve as the basis of L.A. novels and screenplays, and the movies made from these fictions become part of the city’s sense of itself, and that, in turn, gets fed into new novels, screenplays, and journalism.”

And outsiders love the myth too. We want to believe that in five years everyone in the film (well, everyone except the abusive bitter husband) will “make it,” even if just in a perpetually running ad for Claritin-D, and imagine they’ve moved out of their cramped apartments into Pierre Koenig case study houses (because everyone outside of LA pictures the upper middle class in houses like that.)

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Posted by Joanne on Mar 10, 2008 | Link

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