Review of Lost Angels

Lost Angels (1989)
7/10
This is what too much leasure time does to Earthlings
15 November 2023
The technologist tribe gave you idiots all this leisure time, from the steam engine to the washing machine to the little glow-box spy-tech phones you glue to your heads. And this is what the privileged upper-class white boys to with that leisure time. Not to learn and explore and care and improve, but to just become wastrels. This is not an entertainment movie but more a documentary about the collapse of American greatness. That old saw, "From rags to riches to rags, in three generations" is evident here. I don't know who is worse, the phony grinding strivers, or their juvenile delinquents.

Yeah, the production values are dated, but this is still a well-made flick. When I lived in Silicon Valley I commented how San Jose did not really have a ghetto, like Cleveland and Detroit, cities I had also lived in. A guy I met at traffic school (the second one run like a therapy session) told me the real wastrels were in Mountain View, the rich suburb. He explained the parents did not raise their kids. They just gave 'em 300-dollar shoes and a car, and told them to not bother them. So the kids ran wild. But since mommy and daddy were middle-class, they could buy their kids out of trouble, unlike in the inner city.

I also saw the middle-class kids trying to be bad, whether it was with Mafia wanna-bees in Cleveland or outlaw motorcycle gangs in Cali. One nice thing is that it is not hard to cast this movie in LA. These nepo-baby wastrels are everywhere. Perhaps the whole acting profession is a form of delinquency.

So a whole lot of this movie rang true, though it is a bit '80s dated. If you can apply the principles to today, the story still holds up. After all, going to a party-school college and taking a party major is just a more socially acceptable form of juvenile delinquency. A solid 7, good to kill time until Astrid comes on PBS at 10:00.
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