When a film is named after a city, it had better have something to say about the town — especially if it’s taking the name of one of the biggies, like London, Paris, or New York. Writer-director-star Michelle Morgan’s “L.A. Times” is unquestionably “a Los Angeles movie,” in that it makes great use of the hills, valleys, galleries, and bars around the city as the backdrop for an episodic romantic comedy. But more importantly, Morgan tries to say something significant about the culture of her city in the 2010s. Her observations about Hollywood’s image-consciousness and the transactional nature of L.A. relationships are nothing new. But there’s a specificity and a liveliness to her jokes that makes them feel almost fresh — or, at the least, relevant.
Morgan plays Annette, an opinionated wannabe screenwriter who at the start of “L.A. Times” is living with and sponging off her boyfriend Elliot (played by The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone), the creator and showrunner of a popular “Game of Thrones”-esque medieval cable drama. Elliot’s an easygoing guy who enjoys the way Annette challenges him, but when she becomes convinced that they’re just faking their happiness, she leaves him, intending both to become self-sufficient and to work her way down the list of potential dates she’s been keeping throughout their relationship. Her first stop? Ben (Robert Schwartzman), an “online media content distributor” who also has ambitions to write screenplays. (Nearly everyone in this movie is a frustrated writer… including one of the extras on Elliot’s show, who says she’s “writing a script” but “hasn’t started yet.”)
“L.A. Times” follows Annette’s adventures in singlehood — which mostly involve housesitting for an in-demand actor friend while waiting for Ben to call her back. The movie also tracks what’s happening with Elliot, who has trouble using his position of actual Hollywood power to score women (even though the star of his show points out that, “You’re the guy girls blow off the guy you used to be for.”). Instead, he hooks up with a snobby high-end prostitute, Ingrid (Margarita Levieva), whom he pays extra to dress up like Annette and nag him.
Almost half the film though is about Annette’s friend Baker (Dree Hemingway), an interior designer who has bad luck with men, including both a demanding client (Tate Donovan) and her own creepily attentive cousin (Kentucker Audley). Much of “L.A. Times” is about the rockiness of the Los Angeles dating scene, which is exemplified by Baker’s inability to figure out whom she can trust and who’s a player she shouldn’t sleep with on the first date. (The answer: They’re all players. And sex on the first date is nearly always a mistake.)
Morgan suffers some first-time feature-filmmaker woes. She gets overly cutesy with her framing, composing shots that unnecessarily call attention to themselves with how oddly they’re cropped. She also writes dialogue that frequently sounds fussed-over, as though the characters had time to think up perfectly articulate lines before speaking them. This really only works with Annette’s character, who sounds like she stepped out of a Whit Stillman film, ready to make definitive judgements about proper codes of behavior.
The biggest problem with “L.A. Times” though is that it comes across as fairly aimless. The characters endure minor setbacks to keep the plot afloat, but none of the stakes are all that high, and the ends they all come to are alternately predictable and underwhelming. More than anything, this movie feels like a calling-card project, meant to land Morgan her own “Girls”/“Insecure”-style HBO show.
But that’s okay, because quite honestly, Morgan could make a terrific TV series. She has a strong screen presence — at once ingratiating and thorny — and she has a knack for writing sparkling, sophisticated jokes, in the mold of ‘80s-era Woody Allen. “L.A. Times” is nothing groundbreaking, but it is funny and charming, and up-to-the-minute. Morgan mocks everything from yoga etiquette to young Hollywood’s “game night” fad (in which hot under-40 actors, filmmakers, and agents host parties where they break out Twister). In a way, the rough familiarity of Morgan’s digs is part of the point. In Los Angeles, everyone thinks they’re creating something original, when in fact they’re part of a long tradition of goofing around, staying stuck in adolescence, and wondering whether their girlfriend or boyfriend is successful enough to be a keeper. [B+]
