To Live And Die In L. A.

Hey! Don’t they have tailgating laws in L. A.?

That’s a way to start a movie. I don’t really know Friedkin’s movies that well (beyond the big hits like The Exorcist), but this felt very 1985s fresh, even at a 40 year remove. It starts with the title song playing for two and a half minutes interrupted — it’s an amazing tune, and Friedkin knew it.

Wheee! Those colours!

You couldn’t have found a more 1985 colour combination. Or fonts.

Yeah, OK, this is why I bought this bluray (in 4K even): John Mullaney’s “talk show” this year used To Live And Die In L. A. as the title track, and I just liked it so much that I bought the soundtrack CD for this movie, and I liked the CD so much that I bought the bluray, and now I’m watching it.

A cop with only three days to go before retirement! Uh-oh!

I loved this money laundering sequence. So nerdy.

Oh darn!

And also — this seems like a totally normal place for a cop to live, doesn’t it? (OK, secret service.)

Having heard the entire movie soundtrack a bunch of times before seeing the movie is weird. Like, every other scene there’s a new background track and my brain is going “oh, I know that thing” and then my brain is like “well, duh, brain”.

It’s such… I don’t want to say “odd movie”. If this was 1985, and I’d rented three movies from the video store, and one was a Golan-Globus movie, one was a Schwarzenegger movie, and one was this, I would have found that totally natural: Yet another vague straight-to-VHS action/drama movie, would have been my thought (as a teenager). (But I’m guessing this never got distribution at all outside of the US, and perhaps it never was on VHS?)

But watching this now, I’m really into this movie. It feels exotic, like a period piece. But I’m also finding Friedkin’s choices sometimes incomprehensible. It’s like “wat”.

Why is there a different font on the clock every time, though?

For a movie that plays with clichés as much as this one does, the plot is genuinely surprising. I really enjoyed watching this, but is it a good movie? Is it brilliant? Is it a work of genius? Is it a cynical spoof of undercover cop/heist movies? Is it a disaster? I can totally see the argument for all of these.

Hey! Lesli Linka Glatter directed some Twin Peaks episodes, didn’t she?

OK, now I’m gonna google this movie.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. So it’s got a pretty decent budget, and while it didn’t bomb, it didn’t really many much money either. And it did not get shown anywhere other than the US, apparently.

Heh heh. It’s true, though.

To Live And Die In L. A.. William Friedkin. 1985. ⚄