FratFiles

• Save Paper

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......

View the rest of this paper...

Approximate Word Count: 1125
Approximate Pages: 5 (250 words per double-spaced page)

Similar Essays

1. L.A. Confidential
   

   L.A. Confidential 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

2. L.A. Confidential Review
   

   L.A. Confidential review L.A. Confidential By Peter Foy Ah, Los Angelas in the fifties. The glamour, the bright lights, the films, the women, the celebrities...all these things

3. L.A. Confidential
   

   L.A. Confidential L.A. Confidential L.A. Confidential is a movie of cops that are more corrupt than the criminals they arrest. Throughout the movie Bud White is portrayed to have

4. L.A. Confidential
   

   L.a. confidential Commonly, when we make value judgements about people we speak as if there were a single norm towards which everyone ought to be growing. They're supposed to

5. Hypocrisy Lies And Videotape At The L.A. Times
   

   has endorsed, while the Times says they are ethically bound to abide by a promise to a confidential source not to share the video. In an article in the Times dated October 30,