Mulholland Falls (1996)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Pretty Good

best movie i've ever seen.

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Amazing cast, acting, screenplay. If you Love 50s style police dramas, this is for you. In the style of Philip Marlowe. Don't miss this classic.

A thug cop runs up against military thugs as he investigates the mysterious murder of his former mistress.Great potential to this movie, but it's a dud. Brilliant cast, with Nolte doing his thang, and you can see him trying to spark some life into his character in the slap scene. But there's a constant sense of the actors crying out for drama and good lines. And John Malkovish looks bored as hell.The story is good, setting good, and it looks good. But the whole thing feels flat due to bad writing, directing, editing. At one point Nolte gets out of a car - after unbelievably knocking out two soldiers - lights a cigarette, and in the very next shot flips the cigarette away as he enters a doorway. Daft.There is an interesting theme in throwing people away, but not explored.Also the music is constant, hardly any silences, and all a bit gorgonzola.Basically this needed a dose of Tarantino or Lynch - either dynamic violence or weird malevolence. Thankfully we got it soon after in Reservoir, Pulp, and the other Mulholland.

The Wild West circa 1950s....This film reminds you not only of all the "B" LA/Desert based crime Noir films but it also channels a very strong updated Western vibe with its quasi legal vigilante justice story line. Endorsed by the "chief" a nice cameo by Dern, the un-officially sanctioned Hat Squad, Hoover (Nolte), Coolidge (Palminteri), Hall (Madsen), and Relyea (Penn) are like modern day Earp Brothers riding around the boulevards of broken dreams in the ultimate Western "boom" town, The City of Angels, "tinsel town", LA. Their mission is to keep the vice rackets under local control and their territory/turf runs from the desert ranges of the Cal/Nev border country to the Pacific rim. Their targets are any organized crime mobsters from the Mid West or East Coast who they sort of run out of town by sundown by escorting them to Mulholland Falls, sort of like Niagara Falls without the water.spoilersHoover makes you think of Dashiell Hammett's Continental OP, a big imposing stocky cross between Noir icons Sterling Hayden and Raymond Burr. He wields justice with a sap, again reminiscent of the way Wyatt Earp would coldcock outlaws with his Buntline special, and re-enforcing the films Wild West vibe. His partner Coolidge reminds you of Joseph Calleia's character in Touch of Evil, is a slightly neurotic transplanted Easterner, the squads methods of vigilante justice are effecting his life to the point to where he is seeing a female psychiatrist. The attempts by Coolidge to deal with old school Hoover's wild mood swings and his admonitions to the squad about how they agreed that they weren't going do this or that again are quite humorous. Hall and Relyea are both more laconic, though Hall is the cockier of the two. When the squad about to launch a victim off the "falls" mobster: You can't do this this is America. Hoover: This ain't America, this is LA...The catalyst to the decent into Noirsville is when the squad is sent to investigate the body of a woman who is embedded face down into the ground at a housing development in the hills above LA. She looks like she was run over by a steam roller, and when she is pried out and turned over her identity is known to Hoover who is visibly shaken. His reaction is noticed by his squad mates. An autopsy indicates that she fell from a great height, like a cliff, but there are no cliffs at the site. An X-Ray has a curious blank section caused by a radio active piece of glass. Back at headquarters a film canister arrives addressed to Hoover and a screening reveals a stag film spliced with shots of a desert resort, a military instillation, a hospital ward and soldiers at a tactical atomic bomb test.The stag film shows the films equivalent to the femme fatale, Allison Ponds (Connelly) a love goddess, fatal in one way or another to all the men she touches. Connelly is like a brunette Marilyn Monroe and she displays her assets in all their glory. Allison in the film is screwing an unknown man, Hoover's reaction to the film spurs Coolidge to confront him about the girls identity, and Hoover confesses to having a six month affair with Allison, a high priced prostitute. In flashback we see Hoover, during a raid on an after hours club, walk in on Allison bitch slapping a pimp who was about to shoot the teen aged girl laying on a bed behind her with junk. Hoover over doses the pimp dead with his own needle. Allison's best friend and neighbor is Jimmy Fields (McCarthy), a gay photographer, he sent the film footage to Hoover as both evidence of a government cover-up (the reason he thinks that Allison was killed) and for protection from her killers. He confesses to the existence of other films indicating that he also has a film of Hoover with Allison.The radioactive glass and the film sends the squad like a posse, riding across the desert to a Nevada test site in a 49 Buick Roadmaster. This beautifully filmed sequence strongly enforces the contemporary modern setting with the classic Hollywood Western replacing horses with automobiles, while at the same time evoking classic era Western US Noirs.Classic Noir locations used are the Los Angels City Hall, the Pacific Coast at Malibu, Desert Hot Springs, and Mulholland Drive. The film adds to that list a neat googie style apartment with pool and what has to be a unique instantly iconic neo noir location, the Sedan Crater in Nevada, a spooky nuclear bomb test site. The nuclear test angle of the story is a nod to Kiss Me Deadly but I've read that the films original ending was for Hoover and Coolidge, after surviving an emergency landing too near a test site, were to be incinerated by a nuclear blast. Now how utterly noir would that have been?I say I like it better than LA Confidential, and more every time I watch it. The Cinematography by Haskell Wexler (In The Heat Of The Night) is gorgeous.It got the hats right, it has a nice rendition of "Harbour Lights" by Aaron Neville, you gotta love that Buick Roadmaster convertible tooling across the gorgeous desert landscapes and also Jennifer Connelly's boobs. I guess you gotta find out these things for yourself rather than go by critics, it's the reason I never checked it out. WTF were they thinking? Is it because almost nobody wears fedoras anymore or drive dinosaur gas guzzlers?, or was it because the cast was all adults and smoking is frowned upon, who knows. It reminds you of all the LA based crime Noirs. The only small fault is Nolte's mumbling, it's hard to understand him at times. Nice enough score by Dave Grusin 9/10

This film looks fantastic and is chock-full of great actors(Nick Nolte, Melanie Griffith, Chris Penn, Bruce Dern, John Malkovich, Chazz Palminteri, and more).A low-brow Chinatown. The 'look' of this film, and Nick Nolte's performance are the only things that are even close to the level of that earlier, finer work.However, this is well worth a view - especially if you are looking for a throwback escape from all the new release trash that's out there today.Sidenote: Jennifer Connelly's breasts should be the standard of perfection.Some of the fine actors have to take a backseat because there are just so many involved here. Nolte, however, is the star of this show, and his performance is definitely noteworthy.It's Nick's performance, and Tomahori's attention to graphic detail that make this film above average. The plot is an atomic bomb.You'll like this if you liked: Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential(note: this movie is nowhere near that level), Miller's Crossing and Basic Instinct.64/100