Archive for the &;Los Angeles in the Movies&; Category
LA Crime Story: Mortgage Fraud Beats BankRobbers
July 9, 2009
Used to be California/LA led the nation in bank robberies, with 357 in 2006 alone. Perhaps Point Break&;s Presidential bank robbery team (that&;s Patrick Swayze as Bodhi as Ronald Reagan) wasn&;t such a fantasy.
We&;re still up there with these desperate people (A former policeman and Little League coach known as the &;Polite Bank Robber?&; The 180 pound &;Starlet Bandit&; in movie star sunglasses? A father/son bank robbery team, anyone?) but there&;s more people robbin&; with a pen and a calculator these days.
According to the LA Times Peter Hong,
&;The FBI&;s annual mortgage fraud review says L.A. leads in mortgage fraud, measured by reports from the agency&;s field offices.
&;The Los Angeles field office received 9,971 &;suspicious activity reports&; in 2008; second-place Miami had 5,155. The report says fraud schemes include builders offering secret incentives to home buyers, such as falsely inflating a purchase price to make it appear as if a buyer has made a down payment when none was made. If the home forecloses, there is no home equity for the lender to recover.
Other schemes the report identifies are scams in which a group uses a straw buyer to intentionally default on a mortgage, then buys the property at a discount from the lender through a short sale; and foreclosure rescue schemes in which perpetrators offer to help a borrower in foreclosure and surreptitiously take over the deed to the property.&;
We may not have a football team&;but hey, we&;re number one!
Tags:colorful-bank-robbers, Los-Angeles, Los-Angeles-bank-robberies, Los-Angeles-foreclosures, Patrick-Swayze, Point-Break, Point-Break-live Posted in Crime, crime-and-punishment, Los Angeles in the Movies, Los-Angeles | 1 Comment &;
ForeclosurePorn
June 26, 2009
&;Bank owned home!&; screamed the sign. I turned the Mustang up the street and joined dozens of other lookie-loos staring at the (mostly) empty Studio City house.
The search for a REO has become the new status symbol. It&;s also pornographic in the voyeuristic allure of going through a very recently vacated home and staring at the left behind possessions of the former owners, while fantasizing about their lives and what brought them to this. Sometimes its pretty clear; the Tarzana house I looked at last week turned out to have a $596,000 mortgage&;and a $251,000 second! The banks were still fighting over what they would recover while the moving truck came.
The Studio City house (at least with REOs realtors dispense with calling them &;homes&;) seemed to not only satisfy people&;s pornographic fantasies of the absolute lowest price, but may have belonged to porn people as well, judging (and I&;m not judging) by the framed 8&;10 theatre cards of &;Desire&; and the like, showing a pair getting down. (Perhaps the home&;s female owner?)
At least they managed to break out of the Canoga Park/Van Nuys porn ghetto, before they crashed back down to earth.
I found a Guess watch in the yard and thought of putting it in my pocket. My son said, &;I wouldn&;t touch anything here.&; He&;s smarter than me, and it also seemed like bad karma to swipe abandoned foreclosed possessions, so I left the watch, the porno placards and a burned copy of The Joy of Sex sitting there.
Tags:foreclosures, losing-houses Posted in Los Angeles in the Movies, Los-Angeles, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;
L.A. Film Noir not: The BlackDahlia
April 2, 2009
I love LA, and I love films set in Los Angeles, from Bladerunner to perhaps the most typical genre, film noir.
I finally saw Black Dahlia today on HBO, and it was as bad as they say. Worse, even.
It was one big acting lesson for the wooden juvenile leads, Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johanson. Watching Hartnett struggle to show grief and shock when his partner plunges to his death was a painful movie moment indeed.
The director was in love with mood shots and voiceover, both of which can be overdone. Then there&;s the father daughter make out scene, not too much of a homage to Chinatown. Not a surprise to learn that it was an over-the-top but past his prime Brian DePalma, bhind the violence and leering sex.
&;She looks like that dead girl. How sick are you?&; The line reading was so great that it repeated in the voice over. &;You&;d rather fuck me than shoot me.&;
And the script&;well, the real Black Dahlia, of the dead woman found cut in half in 1947, is considered an iconic LA crime, although who know why compared to the thousands killed in &;gang-related&; violence over the last There&;s not much to hang your hat&;or the script-on, so a plot has to be invented, so the filmakers tapped the James Ellroy novel. But the A and B lines about a mob tie-up, girls reading for Hollywood screen tests and a Hollywood gothic family don&;t make much sense or cover incoherence with screaming and overacting and grand guignol.
LA Confidental still rules, for three reasons: 1. Actual great acting, particularly the way under-utilized Guy Peerce, but also the world-weary Russell Crowe and Oscar-winner Kim Basinger. 2. Curtis Hanson, really a great, understatted director who can work in any genre and make you care even about a chick flick, In Her Shoes. 3. A well-written script that uses noir elemetns and period cars, sets and costumes but is not overwhelmed by them&;and deals with a continuing Los Angeles problem, our ambivalence with the LAPD.
Tags:Black-Dahlia, Curtis-Hanson, film-noir, Guy-Peerce, James-Ellroy, Josh-Hartnett, Kim-Basinger, LA-in-the-movies, Russell-Crowe, Scarlet-Johannson Posted in Los Angeles in the Movies, Los-Angeles | 1 Comment &;