The Movie Moment: TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. (dir. William Friedkin, 1985)
5/31/2007 3:00:00 PM
(WARNING: BIG TIME SPOILER ALERT! If you have not seen To Live and Die in L.A. and have any intentions to in the future, do not read this piece!)
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me how I choose my weekly Movie Moment. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to answer him, mostly because I don’t really have a method- mostly I just pick scenes I like a lot. When he offered a few examples of Moments he might choose, my answer became clear — the only deciding factor for my Movie Moments is whether I think I’ll be able to write extensively about them. In selecting scenes for my weekly column, I find that I need to choose scenes that will allow me to write about more than simply the scene itself. Sometimes the scene will give me the chance to expound on an actor I love (as in my piece on A Fish Called Wanda) and other times on my own personal experience (like my post on La Belle Noiseuse). But most of the time, a great Movie Moment is one that illustrates the greatness of the movie around it, and occasionally, it will transform an otherwise good movie into a pretty great one.
In many ways, To Live and Die in L.A. plays like an 80s West Coast counterpart to Friedkin’s earlier The French Connection (a film I love, as you may recall). But while Connection’s Popeye Doyle was single-minded in his pursuit of criminals, the role was also full of sardonic humor and goofball asides, as when he would ask questions like “do you like to pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?” to disorient a suspect. On the other hand, U.S. Secret Service Agent Richard Chance (William L. Petersen) is all business. He’s as much of a hotshot as Popeye, but he takes himself completely seriously, and his work is more or less his life.
Consider the scene where Chance visits his girlfriend Ruth (Darlanne Fluegel) after a long day of work. They have sex, but afterwards the conversation turns to work. It turns out that Ruth is a paroled ex-con who Chance is pumping for information. When she asks him for more money in return for her services, he coldly responds, “Uncle Sam don’t care about your expenses. You want bread, fuck a baker.” Later, when she asks what he would do if she stopped giving him tips, he pauses a second, then says, “I’d have your parole revoked.”
It’s kind of strange to watch a straight-faced cop movie like To Live and Die in L.A. in our post-Shane Black age. For one thing, much of the storyline feels pretty formulaic. First, Chance’s partner and best friend, three days shy of retirement, gets killed in a botched bust. Then Chance resolves to solve the case and find the killer by any means necessary. After that, Chance is reluctantly paired with a new partner named Vukovich (John Pankow), who seems too green to keep up with him. It seems like the screenplay hardly misses a cliché — the weirdo villain (a counterfeiter named Masters and played by Willem Dafoe), the sleazeball lawyer, the shady procurement of funds, the chief who dresses down his agents. Even the big chase scene (one of the greats, as it happens) seemingly comes right on cue.
But then something happens that we hadn’t anticipated. Just as Chance and Vukovich are thiiiiiiiiis close to finally busting Masters, Masters’ bodyguard pulls out a shotgun and shoots Chance in the face. I remember the first time I saw To Live and Die in L.A., this scene shocked the hell out of me. In fact, I had considered submitting this scene for last week’s list of Memorable Death Scenes. When watching the film again, I decided against it because the death itself wasn’t especially memorable by itself. But in the context of the film, it’s a bravura moment. For one thing, normally at this point in the story, we would expect the big bust to go haywire, with Masters escaping the scene of the crime and Chance and Vukovich giving pursuit, perhaps calling for some backup. But there’s none of that here.
It’s at this point that Friedkin’s reliance on formula throughout the film begins to make a whole lot more sense. While Friedkin wasn’t the top-rank Hollywood director that he was during the 70s, he was still a top-notch action filmmaker. All of the formulaic plot points in To Live and Die in L.A. actually serve a rather unique purpose — they lull the audience into a comfort zone, to the point where we anticipate everything that’s going to happen next. Just when we’re sure how everything is going to turn out, he pulls the rug out from under us, no less masterfully than Hitchcock himself did forty-odd minutes into Psycho. After all, why would the director of The French Connection and The Exorcist make a by-the-book cop movie unless he had some trick up his sleeve? (Everyone who has seen Jade, please don’t answer that.)
However, this death scene is equally shocking because Chance isn’t the sort of cop-movie protagonist who we expect to get killed off. He’s more of an antihero than a flat-out hero, but his complexities make him interesting. Everything in his life revolves around his work, and although he sometimes bends or even breaks the rules, Petersen and Friedkin always show that he does so for the right reasons. Just as importantly, he always seems to be on the verge of something better — a more evenhanded relationship with Ruth, forging a bond with his new partner, or even solving the case. So much is left unfinished in Chance’s life that the suddenness of his death is as shocking as its brutality.
But of course, that’s the job, isn’t it? Early in the film, Jimmy asks Chance if he has any plans for retirement, and Chance says he doesn’t think about it. He’s so devoted to his work that he can’t imagine a life without it. So it is with the film itself. After a brief prologue, nearly everything in To Live and Die in L.A. is somehow related to the case at its center, and it’s a job that’s bigger than any one character, even its ostensible protagonist. In the film’s final scene, Vukovich pays a visit to Ruth and informs her of his death. But rather than consoling her on her loss, the two speak pragmatically, discussing her semi-professional relationship with Chance, up until Vukovich’s perfect final line:
“You’re working for me now.”
— Paul Clark
Previous Movie Moment columns:
- May 24, 2007 -- Freaks
- May 17, 2007 -- The Elephant Man
- May 10, 2007 -- Gilles’ Wife
- May 3, 2007 -- Babe: Pig in the City
- April 26, 2007 -- La Belle Noiseuse
- April 20, 2007 -- Phantom of the Paradise
- April 12, 2007 – Lolita
- April 5, 2007 -- Bus 174
- March 29, 2007 -- Belle de Jour
- March 22, 2007 –- Nashville
- March 15, 2007 -- A Fish Called Wanda
- March 8, 2007 -- 8 Women
- February 22, 2007 -- The Girl Can’t Help It
- March 1, 2007 -- Tree of Wooden Clogs
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Secret Talking: When Commentary Tracks Go Horribly Wrong
5/31/2007 2:00:00 PM
As most reader probably know, the Onion AV Club’s "Commentary Tracks of the Damned" feature is one of their funniest items, wherein their writers focus on filmmakers trying to fulfill their contractual obligations by waffling on about their latest films. Once upon a time, the commentary track was a useful and informative extra; now it has become another part of the marketing of the DVD, selling a film you've already regretted buying. (Yeah as if someone's really going to get something out of listening to the commentary track for Snow Day).
With this in mind, the British filmmaker Robert Thorn came up with this short film, “Secret Talking,” satirizing the concept of the commentary track and the bitchiness that should be erupting from it.
— Faisal Qureshi
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1939: No Longer Safe from Hollywood Remakes
5/31/2007 1:00:00 PM
Somebody, quick — hide Drums Along the Mohawk. Surely it’s pure coincidence, but let’s hope this does not spell the beginnings of an ominous new trend:
- Resse Witherspoon and Little Miss Sunshine screenwriter Michael Arndt are coming together to remake the classic 1939 Mitchell Leisen comedy Midnight, starring “Claudette Colbert as a destitute young woman in Paris who becomes a pawn when a wealthy man tries to get rid of the gigolo wooing his wife.” The original was written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. (One rumor has it that Wilder decided to become a director after visiting the set and realizing that Leisen wasn’t really doing anything.)
- George Cukor’s 1939 melodrama of infidelity and deception, The Women, is also being remade, written and directed by Diane English and starring Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Debra Messing and Candice Bergen.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Videos of the Day: R.I.P. Jean Claude Brialy
5/31/2007 12:01:00 PM
The great Jean Claude Brialy has passed away in France. Unbelievably prolific, US audiences would probably best remember him for his parts in numerous New Wave films. It was Claude Chabrol’s 1958 drama Le Beau Serge that put him on the map, but he also acted, quite memorably, for Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer as well. Here’s the trailer for Godard’s Une Femme est Une Femme, starring Brialy, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Anna Karina:
But for a certain kind of film buff, Brialy’s most iconic role may well be his turn as a blandly lustful diplomat trying to touch a beautiful young girl’s knee while on vacation in Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee. This scene from that film is a perfect example of the actor at his best, and you don't even need subtitles to understand it:
— Bilge Ebiri
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Sound the Alarm!
5/31/2007 11:00:00 AM
Regal Entertainment group is now instituting a program where one patron per screening is given a pager that will alert a theater manager of potential problems during that film. With the blandly sinister name of the Regal Guest Response System (RGRS), it’s already in use in 114 theaters:
”The Guest Response device is a hand-held pager with four buttons. Each button alerts local management of a different problem such as: sound, picture, piracy or other disturbance. When the patron pushes a button, a message goes to a pager worn by a manager which tells them the nature of the concern, and in which auditorium.”
I’d like to think that someone at Regal did their homework, read one or a dozen of our Worst Moviegoing Experiences, and came up with a practical response. Now, this device will not help you if you are stranded in the hull of a ship with a bunch of drunkards watching Porky’s, or if a senior citizen passes out from witnessing a Darren Aronofsky montage (good ol’ 911 still works best for that), but it will potentially help with correcting sound or picture quality. You can also play Movie Cop by ratting out potential bootleggers and other annoying patrons. However, your anonymity might be at risk when you start pointing your finger at the parties in question; witness protection is not part of this program.
As ridiculous as it sounds, this might turn out to be a good idea. I know there have been plenty of times where the sound was up too high or too low, the picture was a little off, etc. but once I settle into my seat it’s going to take a lot more than that to get me to risk missing the opening shot of a movie just to make a complaint that may or may not have any effect on the problem. (Especially when, in most movie theaters today, you probably have to wander around for a while to find someone responsible enough to talk to you about a screening issue.) The fact that this also ties in with some kind of lame membership that basically adds up to MovieMiles and encourages you to buy more overpriced popcorn and soda does make it potentially suspect. What say you? Are movie monitors a good idea that gives the power to the people, or just a placebo that will never actually fix one of a million possible annoyances when you go to see something on the big screen?
— Bryan Whitefield
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Morning Deal Report: Woody Gets a Deal, Sin City 2 Supposedly Alive, Hostel 3 Not Happening?
5/31/2007 10:00:00 AM
- Just a day after we linked to an item saying Woody Allen was having a hard time finding buyers for his latest, Cassandra’s Dream, it gets scooped up by the Weinsteins.
- In other news contradicting stuff we reported yesterday, Frank Miller says Sin City 2 is going to happen. Just, not, y’know, right now.
- Eli Roth says trilogies tend to suck, seeming to promise that there won’t be a Hostel 3. Which might come as news to, um, some guy named Eli Roth, who said the third installment of the series was pretty much ready to go last year.
- Zooey Deschanel has joined the cast of the new Shyamalan flick. Well played, M. Night. Now all those hipsters who hate you will be forced to see it.
- Half Nelson creators Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden will adapt Marisha Pessl’s acclaimed novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics, “about a teen who, after spending three years of high school moving each semester with her eccentric teacher father, looks forward to the normalcy of a full senior year in a North Carolina high school. She becomes part of an upper-crust social set called the Bluebloods, and gets caught up with the rest of her group in the mysterious death of their favorite teacher.”
- Get ready for a(nother) Hercules film.
- China’s building state-of-the-art digital cinemas. Lots of them.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Video of the Day 2: Zoe Bell: Stuntwoman
5/30/2007 5:00:00 PM
We linked to this one already a couple of months ago, but it’s worth a revisit. Acclaimed stuntwoman Zoe Bell has become something of a household name — at least among the indie arthouse film buff crowd — for her featured role (as herself!) in Death Proof, and for her expert stuntwork for Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill series. Here’s a reel someone put together of her work, including clips from Xena and Kill Bill.
Oh, and if you’re hungry for more awesome stuntwoman vides (I hope I’m not revealing too much about myself when I say that it’s become something of a favorite pastime for me), go here, and here.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Cruising for a Bruisin': Kim Morgan on William Friedkin
5/30/2007 4:00:00 PM
William Friedkin’s latest, the indie thriller Bug, got some great reviews last week, hopefully signaling that his days of getting regularly savaged by critics are over. (Go here to read Nerve’s recent interview with Friedkin.) But there are some who believe that Friedkin’s greatness never really left us. Take Kim Morgan, for example. On her blog, Sunset Gun (the title comes from Dorothy Parker) Morgan launches into a detailed defense of the director, yoked to the release of his latest. "William Friedkin is back," she begins, "and I'm here to ask the 70s auteur to please stay. Just keep going. Damn the critics, to hell with the studios, make an even smaller picture if you have to and keep on going." Morgan then goes on to offer mini analyses of The French Connection (1971), The Exorcist (1973), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Sorcerer (1977), and the career-killing Cruising (1980). (I would have switched Exorcist with Jade , but that's just personal taste, and anyway Exorcist is probably the "better" picture, though I think that, in Durgnat-ian terms, Jade is more interesting for being a failure.)
Robin Wood for one has written interestingly on Cruising, but no one has rapped as ecstatically about the film as Morgan: "Oh how misunderstood and unjustly hated Cruising was. Friedkin went through hell for this picture and the stigma remains, just watch the documentary The Celluloid Closet during which the film is discussed as a blight on homosexual progress. And worse, the cause of gay bashing. But I'm with Camille Paglia on this one. Paglia has called the film a work of 'underground decadence that wasn't that different from The Story of O or other European high porn of the 1960s.' It's better than high porn, but it certainly plays sexually shocking, even today. Others have come around, and the movie is enjoying a re-release at this year's Cannes Film Festival (and DVD release soon). Goddamn finally. Again, accused of stereotyping and insensitivity to gays, this taut, finely scored and bravely acted (by Al Pacino) picture finds straight police detective Pacino going undercover in the subterranean gay subculture of leather bars and S&M to capture a (yes) gay serial killer. As Pacino struggles with his identity and sexuality, the picture goes far beyond ideas concerning sexual preferences and practices (we learn a few things about the handkerchief system, for instance) and truly explores all those gnarled secrets simmering under certain men. And the sounds of rubbing leather and footsteps have never been so gorgeously ominous. I can't even imagine this picture, with this big of a star being made today."
One of the talkbackers points out an interesting bit of trivia. "Felix" writes that the "hanky code scene from Cruising is also one of Powers Boothe's first screen appearances, and he's great as the bored employee rattling off the terminology."
— D. K. Holm
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Quote of the Day: Michael Madsen
5/30/2007 3:00:00 PM
” I am kind of sick of the U.S. and I am kind of fed up with all that Hollywood bullshit and that celebrity witch hunt. Alec Balwin calling his daughter a little pig. And Paris Hilton is going to jail. And Mini-Me is in rehab. Anna Nicole drops dead in a hotel. What the fuck is going on? David Hasselhoff is all drunk, eating a cheeseburger.”
- Somehow, when Michael Madsen says it, it has a certain poetry. (And that’s not just cause he’s a poet.) Check out the rest of his great interview with Premiere, in which he also casts some doubt on whether there might be a Sin City 2.
— Bilge Ebiri
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The Rep Report: May 31-June 10, 2007
5/30/2007 2:00:00 PM
NEW YORK:
- The IFC Center, where Killer of Sheep has been held over for at least a month now, unearths another lost classic by a major American director: Gus Van Sant's 1985 beautiful loser Mala Noche. Van Sant made the film in Portland in 16mm black and white for about $25,000; it doesn't get out to play much and remains MIA on home video. Mala Noche stars Tim Streeter as an affable lowlifer who becomes enraptured by a young Mexican. The movie is a lyrical ode to misplaced sexual obsession — rebuffed by his object of desire, the hero settles for screwing the kid's buddy, conducting a sort of affair by proxy — and though it's poetic, it's also energetic and funny. (After one of the Mexicans crashes the hero's car, Streeter can only exclaim, "You drive like you fuck!") Just a few days ago, Van Sant was feted at Cannes for his body of work. Mala Noche remains one of the high points of his career.
- The Museum of Modern Art kicks off "To Save and Project: The Fifth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation (June 1-18), a wide-ranging program of "gorgeously preserved masterworks and rediscoveries" that owe their continued existence to the International Federation of Film Archives, the Women's Film Preservation Fund Program, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and other heroes. Among the offerings: Andy Warhol's split screen epic The Chelsea Girls; Lindsay Anderson and Guy Breton's documentary Thursday's Children; classic animated shorts by Dave Fleischer, Faith and John Hubley (Windy Day), Gene Deitch (Munro), Ray Harryhausen, and others; early silents from Australia, Italy, Sweden, and Germany; and obscure works by Jean Renoir, Satyajit Ray, King Vidor, and others. Definitely something for everyone here...
- Magnum Photos, the international cooperative of photojournalists, was founded sixty years with the aim, in Henri Cartier-Bresson's words, of providing "a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually." To celebrate the anniversary, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is putting on "Magnum in Motion: Photographers and the Moving Image" (May 30 - June 4), featuring a series of documentaries made by or honoring such Magnum photographers as Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold, Jean Gaumy, and the legendary war photographer Robert Capa. in addition to the work on display — which, in the words of Lincoln Center, is "loaded with historically charged time capsules from Magnum's past" — on June 3 there will be a panel discussion on "the future of photojournalism", featuring Elliott Erwitt, Susan Meiselas, and other contemporary masters of the form.
- The mountain might not ever come to Mohammed, but for stubborn stay-at-home New Yorkers who missed the Sundance Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival is coming to New York, or at least to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. "Sundance Institute at BAM" (May 31--June 10) includes features and short films selected from this year's festival line-up, as well as a panel discussion on documentaries that will include Nick Broomfield, Barbara Kopple, Albert Maysles, and Raoul Peck.
CHICAGO:
- For one week beginning June 1, the Gene Siskel Film Center is presenting the North American premiere of a new restored print of Sergei Bondarchuk's 1967 adaptation of War and Peace. The movie, which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, runs 415 minutes and took seven years to complete; as the Film Center delicately puts it, "It tops several categories in The Guinness Book of Records." But it may not just be a gigantic novelty; Bondarchuk, who died in 1994, was a wildly ambitious writer-director-actor whose work showed a natural talent for what used to be called "epic sweep." (Unfortunately, the attention he got for this movie led to him being hired to direct the aptly titled Dino De Laurentiis production Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon; that bomb finished him off in the West and did him no favors when he restarted his career back home.) Who knows if you'll get another chance to see his best-known work given the big screen treatment that the filmmaker and God intended?
SAN FRANCISCO:
- From June 1-7, the Castro is programming a tribute to composer Bernard Herrmann, with due space given to his early work for Orson Welles (Citizen Kane), his trademark collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho, Marnie), and his final scores for such tyros as Brian DePalma (Obsession) and Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver). One happy decision the programmers have made is to take a weekend break from all that high-pitched psychological tension on Saturday and throw the folks a Ray Harryhausen triple bill. See how Herrmann's famously high-strung art plays when set to the high-spirited action of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Mysterious Island, and Jason and the Argonauts.
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LOS ANGELES:
- American Cinematique at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica is ringing in summer with Budd Boetticher movies all weekend long. Cowboy fans who are still catching up with the oaters that Boetticher made with Randolph Scott will probably find something here worth circling, but the program also includes The Bullfighter and the Lady with Robert Stack, Gilbert Roland, and Katy Jurado — probably the most successful of the director's attempts to capture the squalor and glamour of the matador's art.
SEATTLE:
- Through June, Grand Illusion Cinema is promising the early work of Europe's leading provocateur-filmmaker, Michael (Cache) Haneke, in new 35 mm. prints. Things kick off this weekend with the 1989 A Slap in the Face and the 1992 Benny's Video, the first and second installments in the director's "emotional glaciation" trilogy. Should be a deluxe way for newer fans to get a taste of how Haneke first started glazing our emotions.
— Phil Nugent
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