They're showing LA Story on BBC 1 TV. I love this movie. Most attempts to combine Hollywood standard issue wackiness with extreme, educated self-conscious artiness make we want to …pause while I invent really crushing put-down … not watch. But for some reason LA Story works (and I've just learned from following that link that Steve Martin wrote it). I own it on DVD, yet I'm watching the broadcast version now. Can't help myself.

For extreme educated artiness, you need look no further than the rehash of the Hamlet graveyard scene, with Rick Moranis as the gravedigger. This ought to be first movie written-and-directed-by Doomed Loser stupidity at its most doomed. Yet I like it. It all adds to the sense communicated by the movie that Los Angeles is one of those Great Creative Cities, in the middle of its Great Creative Moment. Most of the scenes are pure Los Angeles, based on knowing the place, or at any rate knowing it as I imagine it. The talking signpost, the rollerskating in the art gallery, the driving twenty yards to see somebody, the twirly shop assistant (a wondrous creation by Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex in/and The City fame) called SanDeE* who is learning to be a "spokesmodel", the fact that Steve Martin's starting out girlfriend is a gift purchaser, the restaurant run by insane authoritarian Germans who are far too inquisitive. That graveyard scene fits into all that without any spot-the-join misjoining, seamlessly, by which I mean no more seamed than the material around it because this movie has about one seam every twenty seconds. Steve Martin's desperate, aspirational wackiness has never had a better setting. Victoria Tennant got a lot of flack for her effort in this movie. Something to do with her being a hopeless actress, as I recall it. I love her in this. More fun quotes from this movie here.

Gotta stop. Watching LA Story now is completely crazy, because I have three videos from Blockbuster on their new three for a fiver for a week offer, which have to be back this Thursday which is now tomorrow. Trouble is, they're not regular fun movie-movies, they're seriously arty movies, with Steve Martin nowhere in sight. Three Colours Blue, White, Red, directed by someone famous and foreign and unpronounceable. The movie equivalent of having to read War and Peace by the end of the week. I have to start in on those, now, and I may or may not keep you informed. At least there's Juliette Binoche involved.