Review of To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) by Jesse P — 09 Jan 2010

The film opens up with a scene that is pretty much the perfect tone-setter for the rest of the film and the city of L.A. itself. an islamic extremist on top of a hotel, dynamite strapped to his chest, Petersen trying to talk him down, his partner coming up from beneath, flinging the extremist into the air and then boom: a beautiful display of guts and bloody particles.

Friedkin doesn't want to make the usual macho montage here. his cop film is assuredly different with hints of surrealism and hallucinations. the decision to use a physically deformed man in a wheelchair where many directors would've gone with some feminine artfag in a scarf is an example of Friedkin's use of the strange to transcend the boundaries of the typical police procedural, which this would've been right down to the "i'm too old for this shit".

the surrealist tone of l.a. radiates from one scene to the next as Petersen's laughably macho character refers to criminals as "douchebags" and spouts off some of the best one-liners i've ever heard like "you want bread, fuck a baker" and it just becomes this self-aware performances edged with icy cool intensity in scenes like the car chase through the brown and beiges of L.

A.'s industrial districts. meanwhile there's Dafoe who gives his character the usual deranged fuckedness that only Dafoe can do but also gives him a very erotic quality whether he's making fake bills in a desert warehouse (which felt like a sex scene to me) or sitting naked by a fire and tossing his work into the flames.

the two characters are in strange contrast to each other as neither are inherently bad nor inherently good and Friedkin is smart enough to set that up from the start as in the opening we're shown the reckless machismo qualities of Petersen's character and the tormented human side of Dafoe's as he burns a painting of his outside his classy L.

A. pad. the decision to show them both as flawed and equally self-destructive makes them almost the same, so the pursuit becomes foggy and that's the way I likey my pursuit. fuck all that good cop, bad criminal shit we've seen before because Friedkin delivers a cop tale that is hazy as the Los Angeles sky that devours its inhabitants.