Entertainment

Stars Wax Poetic About L.A. in Leto's Video

by Alanna Bennett

If you've ever wondered how people like Kanye West, Lindsay Lohan, Corey Feldman, Olivia Wilde, and a bunch of the performers who haunt Hollywood Boulevard felt about Los Angeles, you now have your answer, and it's brought to you by Jared Leto. Leto's band 30 Seconds to Mars has a new video — "The City of Angels" — and it gets all kinds of emotional/cynical/dreamy on, you guessed it, LA and all its glory.

This video took me on a roller coaster of emotions, by which I mean I alternated frequently between loling at Jared Leto, emoting at the LA skyline, and just feeling really depressed about the long-standing state of the city I just moved to this past summer.

It's actually a really interesting video, not just in that it reminded me once again that Jordan Catalano is in a band and still has a lot of famous peoples' phone numbers, but also because it's another look into the weird gritty fame machine that Los Angeles has become since the movie industry moved in all those years ago.

Because sure, there's Kanye West and there's Lindsay Lohan and there's Selena Gomez, but there's also a Michael Jackson impersonator, and Marilyn Monroe and Superman impersonators — as well as a porn star — and all of them are talking pretty frankly about what fame (and the potential of not actually achieving your dreams) does to them.

As someone who lives literally three blocks from the place on Hollywood Boulevard where those impersonators strut their stuff for paltry tips — and as someone who spends her days writing about people like Kanye West and Lindsay Lohan — it's kind of a doozy.