Movie 1940 Escape

Review: LA Noire

L.A, 1947, a newly graduated cop patrols the streets, solving cases that other men would have found impossible to piece together. A time when every case was in itself an epic up and down roller-coaster of gut wrenching murders and skilful criminals bent on becoming top dog.

How do you make a dent in the Goliath that is the dirty, underground world of L.A? By cleaning up the streets, one case at a time.

As we have come to expect from Rockstar, creator of games such as Grand Theft Auto, Max Pain and Red Dead Redemption, L.A Noire is an exceptionally well thought out and time consuming game. Not bad “time consuming”, like say cleaning your room or washing dishes, but a good “time consuming”, like playing tonsil hockey, or drinking.

The game as a whole gives you the feeling of watching a very good thriller or detective movie. Rockstar has taken the first noticeable steps towards creating a game that plays like a movie. Letting you control the main character, you decide how the plot plays out.

While this was the main theme to the game, in true Rockstar fashion, you have full control of where, when and how your character gets from point A, to point B.

There are so many side missions that putting down the controller is almost impossible and completing the story line comes second to shooting bad guys in the pip on side missions.

One noticeable feature of the game is the very advanced facial animation. In every case there will come a time when you have to question the witness. Rockstar wanted to make this as realistic as possible. In other words, all the witnesses show whether they are lying or telling the truth with their facial expressions!

Controls are as basic as you could possible make them, meaning the age restriction of the game is the only thing keeping your 5 year old cousin from playing it.

Now comes the time when I explain what was wrong with the game. If you are a hater of the game, it gives me great pleasure to tell you that the list has very few entries.

1. Cases get repetitive after a while and the game does lag slightly.

2. See No.1 – there is nothing else, it’s just that good!

Apart from being an amazing escape for all those people that have ever wanted to be a detective, it sticks to real life methods of interrogation and crime solving (As much as is possible to keep the game flowing, can’t have you spending 45 minutes driving to the witnesses house, now can they?). A pretty good representation of what to expect come real life L.A in the 1940′s.

Some Things I Have Made: Movies You Ought To See: His Girl Friday ...

The really wonderful thing about His Girl Friday is that, appearances to the contrary, it is not a love story about Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant: it's a love story about Rosalind Russell and the newspaper business.  For the middle hour of the movie, Grant is offscreen trying to get Bellamy thrown in jail.  That's a whole hour where all we see is the fast-talking and talented Ms. Russell quipping with hardened newspapermen, interviewing murderers, comforting maligned and helpless women, and tackling police wardens for a story (literally tackling, it's brilliant).  No wonder that at the end of the movie she finds she can't give it up, even for the love of a good man. And Grant's plot to win her back has decidedly little to do with romance and everything to do with wanting his star reporter back.  They've just been divorced as the movie opens, but Grant assumes that she's coming back to work for him as usual.  When she says she isn't, he assumes she has a better offer from another paper, and tries to give her a raise.  It's not the fact of her getting remarried that he objects to; it's her quitting the business for good.  He wins her back not with romantic gestures or declarations of love--he's quite a heel, in fact--but by dropping her in the middle of a juicy story and waiting for her reporter's instincts to kick in.  He wants her back as an employee, not as a wife.  The comic punch that ends the movie is Grant suggesting that hey, instead of that romantic honeymoon they've just discussed, why don't they go cover a labor strike in Albany? The fascinating thing about this movie is the assumptions it's predicated upon, all of which seem entirely reasonable today but come off as odd for a midcentury film: first, that men and women can work together, if not as equals than at least in the same realm; that married women can choose to continue their careers; that some women can (and should, the film argues) give up the prospect of a couple of tykes in suburban Albany for an exciting life chasing down criminals; and that a woman can work in a man's job and still be attractive.  There are some particular reasons why His Girl Friday feels so progressive--for one, it's a Gender Flip version of a play called The Front Page , in which the Rosalind Russell role was male--and a certain amount of its appeal was probably due to the incongruity of Russell triumphantly shouting "I'm a newspaperman!

Leonard Maltin's 2009 Movie Guide

The Catholic crusade against the movies, 1940-1975

Movie greats, the players, directors, producers

American culture in the 1940s

More magnificent mountain movies, the silverscreen years, 1940-2004