BEFORE: Well, that's enough of very cold Utah and very cold Russia, I'm moving back to sunny Los Angeles for this one. Riki Lindhome carries over from "The Wolf of Snow Hollow".
THE PLOT: Sam, a disenchanted young man, finds a mysterious woman swimming in his apartment complex's pool one night. The next morning, she disappears. Sam sets off across L.A. to find her and along the way he uncovers a conspiracy far more bizarre.
AFTER: Man, this was a tough film to get through, and not just because the running time was over two hours, with about 20 minutes of actual story. A bigger problem was that the movie was filled with random stuff that kept happening in various places around L.A., but at the end of the film since nothing really connected to anything else and there was no coherence, it just felt like a huge waste of time - all that nothing never really came together and formed something, and I would have settled for anything, really. But no, life's a big mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped inside a big ball of nothingness, I suppose. Watching this will make you feel like your life is just absolutely pointless, if this film is meant to represent life, which I for one am not really sold on. Or maybe I felt like I was going insane - look, I may have been close once or twice but I've never been CLINICALLY insane, but then, maybe insane people are so insane that they don't realize their own insanity, that's part of the problem, I think. If you knew you were going insane, you'd check yourself into some facility somewhere, and clearly not everybody does that.
So sure, if you want to feel a little like what it feels to go insane, or if you just want to completely waste two hours of your time, watch "Under the Silver Lake" - maybe you can draw some connections between the rando things that happen and maybe you can discern some meaning to it all, but damn, I'm still stumped. This is a modern film about modern-day Los Angeles, and the main character, Sam, has no job, no source of income and is about to be evicted from his apartment, but instead of FINDING a job or trying to improve his situation, he sets out to find the girl who moved into his apartment complex and then essentially vanished two days later. (Of course, he slept with her first, so he may not be in love, he may just be looking to get laid again.). But I guess anything's better than job-hunting, am I right?
Sam's journey across L.A. puts him in touch with underground parties and concerts, usually where a band named Jesus and the Brides of Dracula are performing. To try and find this missing woman, Sarah, he follows a woman who takes three dolls from her apartment, but she drives off with two friends in a car and they go paddle-boating on a lake, then they give the dolls to a man who is dressed as a pirate for some reason. He also speaks to a woman who dances while covered in balloons, a couple of hookers who are also wanna-be actresses (or they dress up like famous actresses, it's not really clear) and the daughter of a billionaire who has also disappeared. (Of course, Sam sleeps with some of these women he meets, that seems to be a running theme.)
But then the news breaks that the billionaire has died in a car accident, along with three women, one of which was wearing a hat like Sarah's and had a small white dog that looked like her dog. OK, so she's dead, call off the search, mystery solved, right? Nope, Sam keeps looking because he's convinced she's not dead, just hiding somewhere or being kept somewhere against her will. So he presses on, meeting the maker of a comic 'zine about old Hollywood legends like the Owl's Kiss (a naked woman who comes into people's houses at night and kills them for some reason) and the Dog-Killer (umm, someone who tries to kill all the dogs in L.A. for some reason). Comic-Man keeps plaster casts of dead celebrities' faces, explains the old hobo code to Sam, and is also convinced that the maze on the back of a kids' cereal box is a real treasure map to something hidden in Los Angeles. Umm, OK, Comic-Man might be even crazier than Sam.
Someone tells him that there's a hidden code in the song "Turning Teeth", recorded by Jesus and the Brides of Dracula, and so he gets a big book on codes and sure enough, he's able to decipher one, and this sends him over to the famous Griffith Observatory (and not back to those plaster casts owned by Comic-Man, which would have seemed a bit more obvious) and this puts him in touch with the Homeless King, who shows him the entrance to the secret underground tunnels. But what is their function, and how does the cereal box map fit into everything?
I don't know, this is some kind of weird cross between "L.A. Confidential", "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" and "The Da Vinci Code", but all set in modern L.A. At least it seems to borrow liberally from those sources, but it can't quite fit all those pieces it steals together to form the jigsaw puzzle picture that it really wants to make.
The actress-prostitutes show him where the mysterious Songwriter lives, and this is an old man who supposedly wrote every song from "The Twist" to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and that seems sort of impossible, but he did put the secret message in the "Turning Teeth" song, and also quite ironically he wrote "I Write the Songs" for Barry Manilow, because Barry Manilow sure didn't. Since Sam doesn't believe what this Songwriter is saying, then he has to kill him - sure, that tracks. Then he goes back to see the Comic-Man, but it's too late, he's been killed by the Owl's Kiss, who was caught on security camera footage for the first time ever. (She was very naked.) So then his only recourse is to follow a coyote to another party, where he meets that daughter of the dead billionaire again, and she gives him a bracelet with a set of chess moves on it, while they're swimming in the L.A. reservoir, but then she gets shot dead by bullets for some reason.
Surprisingly, there is a payoff to all of this, everything does connect, or at least we're led to believe that it does, and there is a completely irrational explanation for why Sarah disappeared, I won't spoil it here because you wouldn't believe me, anyway. Does it make sense? No, of course not, nothing about this film makes sense, it's just designed to waste two hours of your time. And Sam should have been looking for a job anyway, to get some rent so he didn't get kicked out of his apartment. Or he could have borrowed money from his mother, why didn't he think of that? Nah, he chose to ramble around L.A. on a pointless quest for five days, so he gets what he deserved, he has to live with a woman who owns a bunch of loud squawking birds and he'll never be able to sleep again. I'm fine with that.
I'm also reminded why I live in N.Y.C. and not L.A. We may have all kinds of crime, corrupt politicians and terrible weather, but at least we don't have cult leaders, coyotes and thousands of useless struggling film actors. (Just useless struggling Broadway actors...)
Also starring Andrew Garfield (last seen in "Breathe"), Riley Keough (last seen in "Zola"), Topher Grace (last seen in "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!"), Patrick Fischler (ditto), Callie Hernandez (last seen in "Alien: Covenant"), Don McManus (last seen in "The Starling"), Jeremy Bobb (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Zosia Mamet (last seen in "Alone Together"), Jimmi Simpson (last seen in "Hello I Must Be Going"), Grace Van Patten (last seen in "The Wilde Wedding"), Bobbi Salvor Menuez (last seen in "Nocturnal Animals"), Wendy Vanden Heuvel, Chris Gann (last seen in "The Purge: Anarchy"), Jessica Makinson (last seen in "My Own Private Idaho"), Stephanie Moore, Sibongile Mlambo (last seen in "Message from the King"), Rex Linn (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Laura-Leigh (last seen in "We're the Millers"), Luke Baines (last seen in "Saving Mr. Banks"), Allie MacDonald, Victoria Bruno, Lola Blanc (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Sydney Sweeney (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"), Guy Nardulli (last seen in "Red Notice"), David Yow (last seen in "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore"), Adam Bartley (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), June Carryl (last seen in "Sweet November'), Summer Bishil, Karen Nitsche, Sky Elobar (last seen in "Miss March"), Annabelle Dexter-Jones (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories"), Pepi Sonuga, Oscar Best, Greg Wayne, John Eddins (last seen in "Identity Thief"), Mary Cameron Rogers, Kat Purgal, Olivia Fox, Brian Gattas (last seen in "The Bling Ring"), Deven Green (last heard in "The Addams Family" (2019)), Devin Kawaoka, David Harper, Jenn An, Darrel Cherney, the voice of Deborah Geffner (last seen in "All That Jazz"), and archive footage of Lauren Bacall, Janet Gaynor, Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe.
RATING: 3 out of 10 vandalized cars
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