Tomorrow night I’m catching the updated, remastered, 16 x 9 version of Thom Andersen‘s Los Angeles Plays Itself at Cinefamily, where it will also screen on Saturday, Sunday and next Wednesday. Finally! 11 years after catching the first version at the Toronto Film Festival and almost a year after reading about the new version in a 9.20.13 article by Robert Koehler. It was announced last month that Cinema Guild will distribute.

“Andersen’s new and improved version of his influential, paradigm-shifting and pretty damn funny essay film, Los Angeles Plays Itself, [is about] how the city has been used as both backdrop/stand-in location and as literally itself,” Koehler wrote.

“The remastered version includes a replacement of nearly all of the film’s hundreds of sourced clips (switching out from videotape and laserdisc to DVD and Blu-ray), plus a few changes in the movie selected to illustrate Andersen’s ideas. Andersen has retouched a few other things, like the aspect ratio (it’s 16:9 now, rather than 4:3), shifting the intermission to the 92-minute mark, trimming and expanding a few scenes.

“At a new 170-minute running time, Andersen says ‘the whole thing is two or three minutes longer, but I hope it will seem shorter.’”