Some thoughts, having just finally seen 500 Days of Summer (which I really liked!):
1. I would like it on record that I had publically declared Ringo my favourite Beatles months before Zooey Deschanel made it the hip thing to do.
2. The movie seems to be set in Hilarious Bizarro World Los Angeles, in which people ride public transit and actually hang out downtown, without bitching about it. Bizarro Downtown LA looks pretty much like New York, but with palm trees. Real Downtown LA looks pretty much like New York, but with more dirt, blazing sun, lots of shops selling quinceanera dresses and disreputable electronics, and palm trees if you look hard enough. Oh, and Clifton’s Cafeteria.
3. Because it was set in Downtown, there was lots of good old architechture porn – Downtown is full of wonderful old buildings that used to be movie palaces and theatres but now are mostly abandoned or converted into retail space or use as filming locations. Ironically, I was watching this movie in the multiplex at the Grove, the foyer of which is meant to look like the interior of the old single-screen movie palaces (think crystal chandeliers and marble) and, in fact, has a informational display about LA’s old theatres, but, as a multiplex, is partly responsible for why those theatres can’t stay open.
Depressing! I’m going to bed. I am still on Port Elgin Standard Time and I am going to STAY THAT WAY, DAMMIT, because it means I am going to bed at midnight and getting up at eight in the manner of a normal, functional adult, rather than staying up until three and getting up between 11 and noon and then feeling so guilty for sleeping in that I then stay up until 3:00 under the auspices of getting work done (mostly this work period involves a lot of reading of fashion blogs). It’s vicious, I tell you.
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Wait, don’t you regularly use public transit in Los Angeles?
The thing about Downtown: if you only need to get to the Mid-Wilshire district, Hollywood, and Pasadena, public transit works great and those hipsters who live there think the rest of LA (the entire west side, in fact) don’t really know the true soul of the city. This has been a running joke since I was a college freshman.
Also, I have taken the Amtrak to Santa Barbara and San Diego numerous times. It’s awesome and I’m glad they showed that in the film.
Well, yes, and I spend a lot of time downtown (not because I need to, but because there are things there that I like to do and see), but conventional wisdom is that people don’t do those things. And there are a lot of people in LA who would never dream of riding a bus, even though there are lots of us who do it. My comments above are less about reality than they are about how most people I know see the city. People complain that there is nothing downtown – I think everyone needs to be forced to walk around the Central Market and Broadway and the textile district and then maybe they’ll notice that, yes, there is community there. And this attitude is changing slowly as the area gentrifies, but gentrification obviously brings its own problems, and I worry about the community that exists there being pushed out.
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