To Live and Die in L.A.
To Live and Die in L.A. is a movie I find remarkable in its ability to drown you with positive and negative qualities — so many of each, and so evenly matched, that the two perfectly balance out and leave you with a hangover.
Consider the ledger:
- The character work is borderline incomprehensible — though I love Rick Masters altogether, and I love that his arc is left largely unresolved.
- The direction is beautiful (Friedkin! Müller!) and hamstrung by an atonal, often sitcom-esque pacing.
- The chase scene's heights are cancelled out by some truly awful reaction shots from John Pankow.
And then there's the sense that the whole thing somehow exists as a fever dream, untouchable by the artifice of any character besides our central few.
The ending wants you to interpret it either very somberly or very trivially, which is not unlike the rest of the film. Perhaps I needed to grow up a decade earlier to appreciate it.