We can all just get along without this

WHEN YOU SAY it this way, it sounds like a very long time: It’s been half a decade since the attacks of Sept. 11.

The feelings are still as raw as an IED wound. When movie trailers for 9/11-themed films recently began hitting the theaters, New Yorkers wept and protested, “Too soon, too soon!”

I get it.

But on this side of the continent, it’s been more than 14 years since a different kind of urban wound, this one self-inflicted -- the Los Angeles riots. A new film about that left me protesting, “Too late, too late!”

“The L.A. Riot Spectacular” spent less time in a movie theater than an empty box of Milk Duds. It’s already out on DVD, with a surprisingly cool cast made up of Ronnie Cox, Charles Durning, Snoop Dogg and Emilio Estevez. George Hamilton plays the “chosen representative” of the “people of the hills,” the rich who find the riots are “ruining our lives” by obscuring the view with smoke from distant burning neighborhoods.

Where the 9/11 films are as grim as it gets, “Spectacular” is meant to be a comedy, a spoof on racial frictions -- it aspires to be something akin to “Crash” with a laugh track. But it’s still reality based, and what all reality-based movies share -- maybe the only thing they share -- is a belief in film as a mediating force, a glossary guide to the real thing, an oblique means of dealing with truths that, like a solar eclipse, are too searing to look at directly.

“Spectacular” opens with the line, “Based on a true story ... but hey, this is Los Angeles.” It was Los Angeles, circa 1992, half a generation ago -- and too much of the context has to be summoned from memory for “Spectacular” to deliver. The pitfall of political satire, which “Spectacular’s” director says this is, is its shelf life. Imagine “The Daily Show” doing a riff on the Stamp Act; it might have had ‘em tearing the hair out of their powdered wigs in 1765 Boston, but the flummoxed members of the studio audience in 2006 Manhattan would just be scratching their heads.

What Angeleno under 30 knows that, oh yeah, there was bad blood between the mayor and the police chief? That Korean-owned stores were singled out by rioters? That the LAPD retreated from the fray? And that Rodney King’s nearly $10-million lawsuit wound up at less than half that, with his lawyers trying to claim more than King received? If you don’t know all that, how can you laugh at jokes about it? It’s like home movies; you probably had to be there.

What fragments of wit that manage to struggle out of the adolescent snickering in “Spectacular” come from pungent points that are still true of Los Angeles. Crips and Bloods standing singlefile on opposite sides of a yawning open grave, sparing everyone time and trouble by just shooting each other simultaneously and falling in. Next!

Beyond such enduringly droll bits, much of “Spectacular” is fatiguingly crude and dumb and vulgar. But I watched it the same day that I read in U.S. News & World Report that the leader of the free world, George W. Bush, “loves to cuss” and “can’t get enough of fart jokes. He’s also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides.” Maybe I’m the one out of the laff-riot loop.

In the movie, on the day the riots begin, a plane skywrites above the Watts Towers, “We’re screwed.” What really showed how screwed we were was the real videotape riot footage interwoven with its comedic incarnation. Just as I expect any movie about 9/11 will suffer in contrast to the somber and unadorned realities, watching the actual burning and looting just made the funny stuff a lot less amusing. In one of the good scenes in the movie, Snoop Dogg, watching the rioting from under a car, utters a truth beyond the moment: “This is a lot more interesting than anything Hollywood comes up with.”

Everyone cries at the same things -- pain, death, loss -- but the filmmaker’s burden is that we all laugh at very different things. (How much overlap is there between Three Stooges fans and Spalding Gray fans?) Add the time gone by and you’re in a different culture altogether.

“Spectacular,” aware of this chasm, opens by throwing the intervening years in reverse, to reach back to 1992. On the screen, the videotaped planes fly backward, out of the World Trade Center. The Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City rises from its own rubble. Waco, the Unabomber -- let’s all pretend they never happened. Somehow, that manages to be the biggest, and the cruelest, film joke of all.

PATT MORRISON’S e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com.