Los Angeles 2025

We did a lot of random stuff in the Los Angeles area in addition to the theme park visits.

We visited a playground near the Rose Bowl that was fun, but not big fun. A lot of summer camps were there swapping in and out of the playground.

Spinning for fun

Dad takes a spin

We went up to Griffith Observatory, balked at the parking cost, and did a quick shot with the Hollywood sign before going back down the hill.

Sign alone

LA as seen from Griffith Observatory

Us with the sign

We went downtown to Grauman's Chinese Theater, a famous venue in Hollywood that has the Walk of Fame outside its courtyard and the footprints of Hollywood celebrities inside its courtyard.

Less famous but colorful El Capitan across the street

We did not go to see this movie

Proof I was there

We saw lots of celebrities' marks.

Harrison Ford on walk of fame

Harrison Ford in concrete

Roy Rogers, Trigger, and his pistol

Abbott and Costello and me

Comparing hand sizes with Black Widow

Comparing hand sizes with Thor

Harry Potter gang

Could be a Potter

Not far away is a branch of Madame Tussauds Wax Museum but only posed outside with the Hulk (they have a 4D exhibit with Marvel characters inside but we were not sold on going inside the museum).

Can I hold him back?!?

Strangely unworried about the situation

Another store even further away had some recreations of famous villains, like the Predator.

Predator ready to get me

We saw a BTS-related billboard (along with several posters of the same).

Can you really love Jin more?

Back in Pasadena, we had custom coated and filled cream puffs at Beard Papa's.I had the green tea eclair with vanilla filling. Yummy!

Green tea 

Movie Review: Sunset Blvd. (1950)

Sunset Blvd. (1950) co-written and directed by Billy Wilder

Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a down-and-out screenwriter who is about to have his car repossessed. He wanders over Hollywood looking for someone to loan him a couple hundred dollars. His agent could but won't and nicely threatens to drop him as a client. His producer friend at Paramount could but won't and a script reader (Nancy Olson) comes in with some negative feedback on one of Gillis's earlier submissions. He gets a flat tire on Sunset Boulevard and pulls into one of the old movie star palaces. It looks rundown but has a big garage for hiding his jalopy. As he walks around, Joe is called into the house by a guy (Erich von Stroheim) who looks like he's the butler. Joe is taken up to the master bedroom where a distraught woman (Gloria Swanson) is ready to have her beloved put in a coffin and buried. That beloved is a dead chimpanzee. He's about ready to escape this looney bin when he recognizes the woman--Norma Desmond, the famous silent film star who hasn't worked since talkies came in. She's very full of herself but when she finds out he's a scriptwriter, she pitches him the script she has been working on for twenty years, "Salome." Who will play the young Biblical temptress? Norma of course. Joe is desperate enough to stay and work on the script, slowly turning into a kept man. Can he keep his own self as he enters Norma's cocooned life?

The prospects are bleak, especially considering the film starts with Joe Gillis floating dead in the palace's pool. Gillis provides a film-noir voiceover (presumably from the afterlife?) promising to tell the true story of what happened to him, not the phony sensationalism of all the press that's hot on the heels of the coroner's men. Norma starts out as a crazy, seemingly unstable and unsympathetic character, though as Joe learns more about her, the viewers find her pathos. Joe becomes a little less sympathetic as he falls into the trap and finds himself without the strength to get out when he darn well could. Joe runs into the script reader again. She's found a nugget of a really good story in one of his scripts and wants to develop it with him. He's interested but trapped; it's hard to get away from Norma's suffocating lifestyle and the reader is dating one of Joe's best friends. 

The acting is superb. Swanson was a happily-retired silent era star who makes the character both understandable and genuinely horrible when she needs to. Holden is great as the film-noir sap who can't escape his fate. Von Stroheim's loyal servant makes a lot of surprising revelations but still is believable. The script has a lot of dark humor and an unsentimental look at how people behave, especially people in Hollywood.

Highly recommended--this is top-tier film noir.

It's also the subject of A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast #282, with more fabulous commentary on the movie. Thanks for inspiring my re-watch of this classic.

Movie Review: Hail, Caesar! (2016)

Hail, Caesar! (2016) written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is a fixer at Capitol Pictures in the 1950s. His job is to make sure operations run smoothly at the studio, mostly by fixing problems that come up. Like the singing cowboy who can't quite act in a sophisticated melodrama and is driving the director crazy; the swimming star who is pregnant and unmarried; the big star (George Clooney) who is kidnapped off the set of the studio's big Biblical epic. The epic's script has already gone through the theological wringer of a rabbi, an Orthodox priest, a Protestant minister, and a Catholic priest (which is a pretty funny scene). Eddie is a Catholic and struggles with his sins and with an offer from Lockheed for a better paying, fewer hours job.

Both the characters in the movie and the movie itself vacillate between earnestness and frivolity. It comes off as the film makers both admiring and poking fun at the Golden Age of Hollywood. The problem is they have too much admiration to have the sharp and biting satire I was expecting. The lighter tone would be okay if there was more comedy or the comedy was funnier. A lot of jokes have too much set up, leading viewers to guess the punch line long before it's actually delivered on screen.

I did like the theme of the importance and value of work. Eddie is considering the offer from Lockheed because the company does serious business and he can have more home life and deal with more rational people than the Hollywood set. But there is value in the work he does at the studio, it isn't completely frivolous. There's an extended subplot with a sort of Hollywood communist think tank (though they seem to have jumbled up Locke, Hegel, and Marx, with more emphasis on jumble than on philosophy) which also reflects on the value of work. But again, the film makers can't seem to decide whether to take it seriously or not and the sequence comes off as muddled filler that helps to tie up loose ends of the plot.

I wouldn't say this is a bad movie, there are plenty of entertaining bits. But the movie has a lot of potential that never gets actualized, so it winds up disappointing. If taken as pure fluff, it's a fine film. But is that really what they were going for?