My pal David Ginsburg started a podcast nearly a decade ago. Tales From the Fandom is a kindhearted visit to various fictional worlds with passionate fans of everything, everywhere, and quite a few things you may have never heard of.
David occasionally gives me time to rant, mainly cause he’s a nice guy and also I used to cook dinner for him in college.
Anyway, you can listen to us here. And if you want a whole lot more the link will take you to the seven other times I have crashed his podcast.
Some time ago, I wrote a bunch about Nic Cage in a review of Pig. Pig is a near perfect movie that uses Cage’s considerable talents to craft an astonishing drama.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is not that, and it shouldn’t be judged by that standard. It amused me though. And I certainly enjoyed how much of the conclusions that I had about Cage were similar to the points that Director Tom Gormican and writer Kevin Etten make here.
Maybe the guy just likes to keep working you know?
Anyway, Massive Talent is a fun comedy that plays with Cage’s persona but doesn’t tax his acting abilities to any great degree.
Cage gets to play both a normal version of himself and the Pure Id version of Nic Cage that he often displays in classics like The Rock, Gone in 60 Seconds and Ghost Rider.
The flick makes a few moves toward the version of Nic Cage who can nail down a serious drama. However, in this movie, the Nic Cage of Leaving Las Vegas, Pig and (I assume) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, is a feint, a shadow, and set up for another joke.
Which is probably as it should be.
The movie is a blast and Cage gets to have fun, playing two versions of Nic Cage, neither of which the actual Cage (Nicolas Coppola) really wants you to think is real.
The granddaddy of this particular kind of meta work is Being John Malkovich. Written by Charlie Kaufman. Cage would play Kaufman, and his imaginary brother, struggling to write a screenplay for The Orchid Thief, in Adaptation.
Which is to say that in a filmography that spans more than 100 movies sometimes when you watch a Nic Cage flick you can feel like you have been here before.
I’m pretty sure he made some version of Drive Angry like 5 times.
However, this thing made me cackle a bunch. It shouldn’t work but Cage and Pedro Pascal sell it with charm and enthusiasm. You are likely to see the twists coming but everything is handled with such joy that you won’t be disappointed.
It played with my expectations in a fun way but it also clearly did not want to do anything to tarnish the legacy of the man who has been the beating heart of movies as good as Raising Arizona, as wild as Face/Off and as ridiculously bad as Left Behind.
Morgan Freeman says he was once told, as he was getting ever more famous, that he would be asked to play God. He ended up with the role in Bruce Almighty.
In the same way it was inevitable that sooner or later Nicolas Coppola would be asked to play Nic Cage.
We are quite lucky that he plays “Nick Cage” in a movie as good as this one.
This is excellent work that expertly raised the tension to 11 for the first half and then hammers home the humor and horror for the second half.
It looks great on a budget that must have been small but doesn’t feel low-budget or schlocky at all.
Bill Skarsgard and Georgina Campbell manage to deliver the first half of the movie by themselves with no help from special effects or other cast members. It’s impressive work.
I especially enjoyed and laughed heartily at Campbell’s reaction to an early discovery.
And bonus points for Justin Long, who proves once again, that he can make a project with his singular abilities.
Those of you who love horror have probably already seen this. But if you missed it this is a solid little scare flick.
It nurses you along and then it rips your heart out.
I spent a lot of time in John Wick: Chapter 4 thinking about Zatoichi, The Blind Swordman.
A version of the character, or perhaps of descendent of the character appears in John Wick and is played by Donny Yen.
Before we get too deep into the wilderness here let’s just explain one of the coolest characters in cinema. Via Wikipedia, “created by Japanese novelist Kan Shimozawa. He is an itinerant blind masseur and swordsman of Japan’s late Edo period (1830s and 1840s).”
And, “This originally minor character was drastically altered and developed for the screen by Daiei Film and actor Shintaro Katsu, becoming the subject of one of Japan’s longest-running film series.”
How long running? They made 26 films about Zatoichi. That doesn’t count a remake, which I adore, from 2003 by Takeshi Kitano. It was the first movie I can recall that was shot digitally. Kitano used digital effects to turn in some cool scenes and in particular, in a shot I haven’t forgotten in 20 years, floating droplets of blood.
It also ends with the main cast doing a dance number after the story is concluded. And I’m sorry, there is no way for you ever to hate a movie that ends with everyone dancing.
If you have even passing knowledge of cinema history (and my knowledge of it is barely passing for sure) then you know that the directors of samurai films and westerns frequently borrowed from each other.
So the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo becomes the basis for Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. Kurosawa was pilfered again for The Magnificent Seven and some portions of Star Wars.
Zatoichi did not translate all that well into westerns although they did try it, in 1989, with Rutger Hauer playing the character as a Vietnam vet in a movie they called Blind Fury.
I missed it (I was 11) but Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up. But the American version you most likely know is Daredevil.
I don’t know that Stan Lee, Bill Everett and Jack Kirby had seen Zatoichi (1962) by the time Daredevil (1964) came along. The early version of him gives him radar superpowers created by chemicals that landed in his eyes.
Eventually, writer/artist Frank Miller pushed the character into ninja/samurai territory and ignored the radar superpowers in favor of Daredevil just being a guy with heightened senses who was well trained by a blind master called Stick.
This almost gets us to John Wick: Chapter Four and Yen’s latest version of a Zatoichi-like character, except for one thing. Yen played the Zaitochiesque, Chirrut Imwe, in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Shout out to ScreenCrush cause I had forgotten that one.
I don’t want to talk too much about Yen’s Caine in John Wick: Chapter 4 but he’s the second coolest person in the movie and the filmmakers give him a lot of room to both be awesome and tragic. There are a bunch of little moments and action beats that show you how Caine can manage to survive and thrive in a world of superassassins.
I also have to say, as wave after wave of bad guys attacked Wick I thought, “My God, are they gonna make 26 of these things. Is John Wick doomed to wander the earth forever, killing mostly faceless enemies until the end of time.”
Not to ruin anything but the movie suggests a final ending but the box office and the producers clearly want something else.
At this point, I’d be super happy with another Zatoichi remake with Yen in the lead. Something a bit quieter and with a bit more character development would be welcome.
However, Wick leaves the door open for a spin-off movie with Yen’s Caine as a co-lead. That would probably make a lot more sense financially. And, I’m ok with that too. If the Wick team is behind it there is no doubt it will look slick, and the stunts will be unreal.
Regardless, if you are doing a Wick rewatch throw on a couple of Zatoichi flicks into the mix. Also, check this out. It’s delightful.
John Wick: Chapter 4 looks amazing, it’s full of interesting and compelling action and it comes to a satisfying conclusion.
You should probably ignore the fact that I didn’t like it all that much. I went to an IMAX showing where they pumped up the volume to 11. And, for me, a lot of this movie hinged on the soundtrack. And the soundtrack was Europop? Dance? Electronica? played relentlessly and punishingly while Mr. Wick went about his violent business.
A lot of this is on me. I was done with this franchise when the third movie in the series ended on another cliffhanger. I don’t think I ever walked out of a theater more annoyed at the ending of a movie than I was at the end of John Wick: Chapter 3. And yet, here I was again on opening night paying for another installment.
I want to skip through all of my complaints and get to the good stuff, and there is a lot of good stuff here. Enough that I might go back through someday and watch them all. The short version might be that I liked the first John Wick so much that I almost wish they never made a sequel. I think the sequels got increasingly ridiculous and the mythology got so unwieldy as to be nonsense.
I believe in Kang and a Quantumverse more than I believe there is someone important on planet Earth whose name is Marquis Vincent De Gramont.
Anyway, the soundtrack mostly, killed this movie for me. That’s closely followed by how long it is. This is a movie where a guy kills the same five or six stuntmen over and over again in the same kind of way from the start until the finish. If you watched this thing I want you to ask yourself how many times you saw two things:
1. A guy using his kevlar suit like Batman’s cape to block a bullet (utter nonsense)
2. John Wick having to get the muzzle of his gun in just the right spot on his enemies face in order to kill him.
However, the movie has plenty of reasons to recommend it to a certain kind of moviegoer. It absolutely looks amazing. And every sequence from New York to Japan to Paris has its own visual style and color and verve. If you are one of those guys who just want to watch something beautiful then this is for you.
This cast is stacked with heavy hitters. An action role that allows Keanu Reeves to be mostly silent and physical was the perfect spot for him and I don’t blame him for going back to the well again and again.
Meanwhile, Hiroyuki Sanada, Donnie Yen, Rina Sawayama, Laurence Fishburne and Clancy (freaking) Brown are all carrying entire worlds with just a few lines and facial expressions.
Bill Skarsgard is practically perfect as arrogant Eurotrash. The Marquis is a great villain who you absolutely want to see get taken down by Mr. Wick.
Nearly all of Ian McShane’s career is built on playing devious father figures to television and movie heroes. And he’s so completely on point here and makes every thing just a bit better.
I love the way he says, “Johnathan.” It’s perfect, please give him all your acting jobs.
And, the final 40 minutes or so of this movie is incredibly good. I imagine I felt that way because the shootouts got more physical and umm crunchy and because the soundtrack finally gave us some relief. They mixed in some classic rock hits and that made a world of difference.
Anyway, I liked the end of this, I just felt like I had to march through a lot of things I didn’t need to get there. There is a version of this movie that has a different soundtrack and is an hour shorter that I would have adored.
But this ain’t it.
I watch … a lot of things. Including several hours of television a week. I was always this way but dadhood changed the game.
I need to keep an eye on kids who are watching kid stuff on my big beautiful television while trying not to watch the same episode of Abbie’s Flying Fairy School for the 500th time.
So what happens in my house is I have AirPods and an iPad Pro and plenty of things to keep me entertained thanks to this new golden age of nerd-centric television.
Here are a few quick hits.
Season 3 and Picard is finally the show that Star Trek: The Next Generation fans all wanted Picard to be. If you grew up with TNG, like I did, then you finally get a show that gets Jean Luc Picard on the bridge of a Starfleet ship and surrounds him, mostly, with cast members from the original show.
It’s a season of television that looks like a movie-level production and hits, so far, all the right nostalgic beats. People might call that fan service, but I would argue that like Star Trek: Brave New Worlds, it’s not fan service to make the thing that fans of the thing expect.
There is a lot of online talk about spinning out this show with a Captain Liam Shaw series. I’m not opposed to it, and his character (who’s basic level is: ‘I’m a jerk and I hate all of you’) is a unique new role in the Star Trek ensemble. Odo was maybe closest to this but he had a heart of gold, I’m still not convinced, even though they have softened him in the last two episodes, that Shaw won’t just sell everyone out the minute he gets a chance.
And quite frankly, I hope he does.
Actually, as I’m typing this I think I just figured out who Captain Shaw is in the Star Trek universe — Frank Grimes. If you don’t know the reference please go find the Simpsons episode and check it out. But his reactions to Picard and Riker and very much, “How can you keep breaking all the rules and then somehow spin that nonsense into gold?”
I may start saying ‘Grimey’ every time Captain Shaw pops up on screen. The online chatter is that everyone wants a Shaw spin-off. I will only allow this if you bring back Wesley Crusher and make him the head of engineering. I would prefer someone just hand Will Weaton the keys to the Enterprise but my guess is that remains unlikely.
Anyway, every episode of this season is a treat and a love letter to Star Trek fans of a certain age. It’s as good as a cup of hot earl grey tea.
I know everyone is excited about Ted Lasso and for me the show remains one of the very best sitcom / dramedy things on television. But I need you all to go check out Shrinking.
Shrinking is Ted Lasso but with psychiatrists in California instead of footballers in England. In some ways, as Ted Lasso ends Apple TV managed to find the perfect show to carry the baton.
No surprise, given that most of the Ted Lasso team is behind Shrinking. A show that starts with its main character in both a deep depression and a mental health crisis should not be this much fun. But it’s light and breezy and it became one of the shows I couldn’t wait for each week.
Bill Lawrence, who created (co-created?) Shrinking and Ted Lasso also created Scrubs way back in the 1990s. If these shows connect with you I hope you check out Scrubs. It was a high-quality sitcom all the way to the end.
I’m running through the first season of Perry Mason. I’m not sure that I care all that much about the central mystery. I gave up on it after the pilot came out because I wasn’t emotionally in a place where I could watch something about a murdered baby. However, I’m better this time around and I think it’s intriguing. Mainly though, I’m staying with it because it’s visually stunning. The folks doing this are from Boardwalk Empire and the shows share a similar look. They also — at least so far in the first three or four episodes — share a similar problem. The main character is often not the most compelling person in the show.
The Mandalorian endures. I don’t agree with two of the takes I’ve heard so far from this season.
A: That the creators committed a grievous sin by reuniting Grogu and Mando in an episode of a spin-off show. To me, that’s the kind of complaint people make so they can be relevant on social media. I want you to show me the Star Wars fan who was only watching The Mandalorian and declined to watch the spin-off on the same streaming network that they were already paying for. This person does not exist. Please stop.
B. That The Mandalorian has taken a dip in quality. Four episodes in and I think it’s as good as it’s ever been. This is to say that I think everything Marvel does is a work of staggering genius and I think most of Star Wars is silly nonsense for babies. Please, if you read these missives from me, adjust your expectations accordingly.
C. Only lightly kidding there. But, given the reactions to lots of different things, we may be at a point where the audience really is exhausted with Star Wars and superheroes. Just taking Star Wars and live-action this season of Mando begins after Disney gave us two previous seasons, a season of Boba Fett, a season of Andor, and a season of Obi-Wan Kenobi. That doesn’t count new cartoons and old movies. Even if the audience wants more how do storytellers give them something that’s entertaining but also isn’t just a complete rehash of something they have already seen?
Or to put it another way: Why does this season of Picard hit me so hard? Because it’s the first time in 30 years I feel like I’m watching the actual thing I wanted: More Star Trek: The Next Generation.
If it had not been gone for so long, I would not have missed it, nor would I be having such a great time with the new version of it. How do you fix that?
Maybe just by giving people a road sign. Hey, we have a story we are telling and it ends in Season 6.
That’s a dangerous way to do it, but these types of shows aren’t really murder-of-the-week things. Given their structure, each season theoretically is supposed to be building to one big story that ultimately ends. It may not be the worst thing, three or four years in, to tell people how much longer the journey will take.
I have, just now, seen all the nominees for best picture.
I got the last two Saturday night and Sunday morning but even so, I’m surely qualified to select the winners in each catergory.
I made up my mind early on that The Banshees of Insherin was the best film of the year and at this point it may be stubbornness but I’m sticking with it.
However, I think the category is the strongest it’s been in years and whichever movie actually wins (Everything Everywhere All At Once seems likely) I will probably be satisfied.
Unless it’s Elvis or Top Gun.
Anyway, here’s how I got them ranked.
Banshees
Everything
Tar
Triangle of Sadness
The Fabelmans
Avatar
Women Talking
Elvis
All Quiet on the Western Front
Top Gun
Picking the rest of the Oscar races is ultimately unfair because I haven’t seen all the movies in each category. But let’s do it anyway.
I haven’t seen The Whale and probably won’t see the The Whale but let’s just all agree to give this to Brendon Fraser without ever watching The Whale.
Part of me says let’s give this to Andrea Riseborough for managing to run an Oscar campaign that was somehow so controversial that the selection committee had to respond. That’s the kind of chutzpah that means you’re gonna make it in this town.
Anyway, I keep coming back to Michelle Williams who was asked to play Steven Spielberg’s mother as a warm and caring crazy person. I think that may have been the best performance of the year despite impressive work from Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh.
Blanchett as Lydia Tar gets to be a internet meme forever and doesn’t that mean more than a little gold statue?
Anyway, if the ballot was in front of me I’d probably vote for Yeoh because I think she should be recognized and I think she is that good in a weird and beautiful movie. And she deserves an Oscar for her body of work.
Not to well actually anybody, but well actually, I think Nope or The Northman would have won this category for me.
Since neither are nominated I would have to think about how to rank this thing.
Of the movies that are actually in the category I think Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert had the toughest job. They had to take confusing material and turn it into something that made sense, keep the audience interested and kept things moving along to a satisfying conclusion. It was a high bar but they leapt over it like pros.
I want to give Spielberg all the flowers here because he showed enormous restraint and his movie works twice as well because of it. I said before that when the movie ended I wanted a montage of little Stevie directing his heart out and winning awards and whatnot.
That Spielberg knew better and understood that he shouldn’t gild the lily gets extra points from me.
Martin McDonagh, Todd Field and Ruben Ostlund all delivered great movies too.
Again it comes down to how you rank the thing. If I’m picking the director of the flick I liked best then it’s McDonagh. If it’s based on degree of difficulty then its Daniel and Daniel.
My real answer is Jordan Peele for Nope. Second place and winner is Daniel and Daniel.
Stephanie Hsu is my first place choice by a mile here. Kerry Condon is great in a great movie. Angela Bassett and Jamie Lee Curtis both deserve it as a lifetime achievement awards.
But Hsu all the way for me.
Barry Keoghan made me cry in the movie. Ke Huy Quan made me cry in real life.
Brendan Gleeson is excellent as always. I haven’t seen Causeway but Brian Tyree Henry is always a delight.
Anyway, let’s give this to Quan and reward him financially with a Short Round Disney+ show.
Score: Babylon (nothing else is close)
Screenplay: Banshees
Adapted Screenplay: Women Talking
Cinematography: All Quiet
Visual Effects: Avatar
Costume Design: Elvis
Editing: Everything
Production Design: I dunno, you pick it.
Makeup and hair: Elvis
Sound: All Quiet
Triangle of Sadness offers the best, and funniest, metaphor for the state of the world over these past few years.
Two men are on a boat and they are arguing about the socialism vs. capitalism. Meanwhile, the boat is sinking.
That one of these men is the captain of a luxury cruise ship and the other is a Russian capitalist who made his millions selling fertilizer just enhances the joke.
Once again I hope you walk into this as cold as possible because the movie manages to shift its characters into a different venue twice and each time is delightful. I had no inkling of the film’s third act but it was wonderful.
When writer/director Ruben Östlund first deals out the movies themes I was concerned. The last thing I wanted to watch was another expression of how rich people are evil. But this isn’t that and the movie is both too witty and too wise to let the audience get away with an easy explanation for human behavior.
While the arguments on the ship perfectly capture politics in the English speaking world the situation in the latter part of the flick nails down the pandemic.
Who is really important to society? How badly does the world need a CEO? Does it need that person as badly as it needs a truck driver, a grocery store employee, or the person prepping the food at a meat packing plant?
If all you can offer society is that you can be beautiful on Instagram what will you be doing for work if that particular economy crumbles?
Or, when the capitalist starts quoting Karl Marx you know things have gotten dire. Maybe we are all just a few bad choices away from the law of the jungle.
I watched this on Oscar weekend doing my best to catch all the best picture nominees before the ceremony. And this movie proves that this year’s offerings are full of winners. My pick remains The Banshees of Insherin but nearly every other movie could win and I would remain satisfied.
Theoretically, Triangle of Sadness ends ambiguously. Yet, I have no doubt as to what happened next. The last line, said by one of the main characters, sealed her fate.
The first Creed is as good as the first two Rocky movies. It builds on all six of the previous films, invests heavily in new characters, and keeps Sylvester Stallone around to finally play the older trainer character.
Sly deserved an Oscar and Michael B. Jordan proved he could take on all comers.
I watched the second one this week and it is much better than I remembered. It’s able to drag the cartoon villainy of the Drago character from Rocky 4 into something approaching a real world where all the characters behave as human beings.
The bad guys in Rocky 3, 4 and 5 are mostly mustache twirlers. But Rocky 4 is amazing. It understood that, at this point, Rocky needed a hissable villian.
Just check out the names: Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago, and Tommy Gunn. So what supervillain name does the bad guy get in Creed 3? Damian Anderson.
Like the movie, this is close but just doesn’t quite get there.
Rocky 4 took place in something way beyond the real world where the bad guy actually kills the hero’s best friend in the ring. That the entire Creed franchise is built on that moment proves that while it was an insane choice, it somehow was the right choice.
Creed 1 and 2 succeed even though they refused to give us those types of bad guys. Those movies are about Adonis Creed earning his place in the world and making his own legacy. He’s overcoming his history and proving his worth to himself, his family, and the world.
Almost nothing in the entire franchise hits harder than the climax of Creed when Rocky wants to throw in the towel and Adonis says:
Adonis Johnson: Don’t! I have to prove it!
Rocky Balboa: Prove what?
Adonis Johnson: That I’m not a mistake!
Creed
So what’s Creed 3 about? Well, Adonis is rich, successful, and retired. He’s had a storied boxing career (that we have only sorta glimpsed). When a man who was like a brother to him when he was very young gets out of prison, he has to confront their shared history and … for reasons … come out of retirement and face his past.
Except, I wish it were that simple.
Creed 3 creates a new champion that Creed has (off-screen) sponsored and sorta mentored. Then through shenanigans, Damian (Jonathan Majors) gets a title fight and cheats and hurts this other character in the ring. This spectacle makes Majors the heavyweight champ with 1 fight.
It overcomplication on top of overcomplication to get us to a place that anyone who has seen the trailer knows where it is headed.
The movie had me unintentionally laughing later by showing Damian’s professional record as 1-0. Why not just do a montage of fights with Damian to give him a record that makes more sense?
The movie spends a lot of time setting up Damian as a fully realized human being. And then it dips its toe into the idea that Damian is a conniving supervillain. And then it never quite delivers on that and backs away from it completely in the end.
In professional wrestling (and the Rocky and Creed movies are the same kind of male power fantasy that gives pro wrestling it’s juice) there is a term for annoying fans who want to rewrite the storylines.
It’s called fantasy booking.
So how would I fantasy book this? Pretty simple: Adonis is the champ. Damian gets out of prison and starts beating up all the contenders in the division. He won’t be satisfied until he has the belt.
Now, he’s using that shared history to taunt Adonis into a fight that Adonis wants to avoid at all costs.
Simple and straightforward and you can do all the shared history stuff too. Heck, if you need to complicate it you can have Adonis retire midway through the movie and then have Majors give him a villainous reason to return to the ring.
The movie does what it can to show why Adonis would get back in the ring but, and maybe this is just my personality, all I could think was, ‘Adonis has a wife who adores him, a perfect kid and more money than Muhammad Ali. I think I would clown that Damian guy in interviews and never, ever, get in the ring again.”
No one would go see my movie and no actor would play that part but it’s honest and true.
Even with my issues, most of this movie worked just fine. All the family scenes hit their marks. There is a scene very early between Adonis and his daughter that is adorbs. And while I wanted him to be a lot more evil Majors was compelling as always.
There is strong visual work by Jordan, who took on directing duties, and makes a meal out of several wrestler (boxer, sorry) entrances and other moments.
I was pretty happy with it all the way through the training scenes.
But I thought the final fight lacked something, especially when it went into art-house territory. A much younger pal just showed me how some of the fight choreography is lifted from anime and while that didn’t do much for me it probably brought out cheers from the people who spotted the references.
Young men and women are also, I suspect, going to enjoy the fashion and wealth on display in the Creed household. We got to Rocky IV robot territory one movie early.
Also, I agree that Creed, in the third film in his franchise, does not need Rocky. But this movie did need someone who could play that role of amusing truth teller to the hero. The movie spreads that around to Phylicia Rashad (Creed’s mom), Tessa Thompson (his wife), and Wood Harris (his trainer). But that’s a tough role to fill and there’s just something missing.
Rocky, Mickey, Paulie, Apollo all had unique ways of putting their feelings into the world.
You get your face all fixed up. Handsome. Nice clothes. What’d you do for Paulie, anything? This! You give me a lousy, stinkin’ ex-lax watch. There!
Rocky III
If he returns to the sport, I hope Creed can find his own Bundini Brown.
“Float like a butterly, sting like a bee. Rumble, young man, rumble.”
Or to put it in the language of Mickey from Rocky II:
You’re gonna eat lightnin’ and you’re gonna crap thunder!
Rocky II
So I think this movie has some real missteps along the way although I was mostly entertained. I want to see it again, I’m betting when it is streaming I might be wowed. That’s what happened to me last week with Creed 2. I remembered it as being just fine but then when I watched it in the run-up to Creed 3 I was overjoyed with how good it was.
This movie might not be a knockout, but it fought me to a draw.
I want you to watch this movie before you read any further.
And the reason I want you to watch it is twofold.
1) it needs to be discovered for itself.
2) There’s no way to really talk about it without ruining it.
Ok stop here and do the thing. Please. For me.
You see? Even if I don’t tell you about that ending, even if I say something like, shock ending, or twist, or whatever. Or hey, “don’t read anything about this movie before you watch it.” That’s just going to give the game away.
I want you to walk into this thing cold like I did, and then watch Director William Friedkin effortlessly move from cop movie cliche into stuff I have never seen before in a cop movie and then into, “Oh my God what the hell is happening!”
Not only is that ending bonkers but the movie turns from a righteous cop trying to bust the guys who killed his partner into, let’s commit a crime ourselves for … reasons.
And then, Freidkin who was in the running for the greatest car chase ever with The French Connection takes it to another level (again) with a wild stretch of insanity on LA freeways.
He did things so insane that a key staff member tapped out. Check out this wild paragraph from IMDB.
“The film’s director of photography (and noted Friedkin enabler) Robby Müller declined to shoot the chase over safety concerns, so the second unit cameraman, Robert D. Yeoman, came on instead. (Fun fact: Yeoman went on to become Wes Anderson’s DP of choice. So keep this man’s enormous balls in mind next time you scoff at a twee center frame.)”
Heh.
They filmed the car chase after they filmed everything else believing that if something terrible happened (and everyone seemed to think it would) at least the whole movie was in the can.
Billy Freidkin directed a bunch of things but his most notable flick is The Exorcist. In other words, this is a director who is unafraid of bashing through the safety rails of society.
When I walked out of Uncut Gems, the Safdie brother’s thriller about gambling, basketball, and the diamond business, I said to myself, “That wasn’t a movie that was a heart attack.”
To Live and Die in LA plays in the same space with unrelenting tension, sex, and shocking violence.
It’s also clearly a movie that came out while Miami Vice was popular. I don’t think it owes that much of a debt to the show because for better or worse Freidkin is not Michael Mann. Freidkin would never be satisfied to just sit on a shot and let people “vibe.”
It does owe a little bit to Mann’s Thief. In Thief, you just get scenes of what purports to be actual high-stakes safe cracking. To Live and Die in LA does the same thing for counterfeiting.
However, as I was watching this I could see, in some ways, how Mann’s Heat could have been influenced by this. Maybe not. But if you were planning a crime movie night I could see you playing them back to back. Follow it up with Joe Carnahan’s Narc. Or Copland.
To Live and Die in LA is not on any streaming services but I really can’t recommend it enough for a certain type of crime movie fan. If Heat and especially Narc and Copland had you nodding your head then this one is for you.
Dark Highways 