To Live and Die in LA (William Friedkin, 1985)

When his partner is gunned down by counterfeiter Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe), Secret Service agent Chance (William Petersen) is willing to bend and break every rule to bring him to justice and avenge his friend.

I have heard of this movie for years, but I never had an opportunity to watch it. I have been meaning to re-watch Manhunter, but that review will have to wait. To Live... popped up on the internet, and I was finally able to watch it.

I feel like I need to take a shower. To Live and Die in LA is a mean, nihilistic policier where any moral line between black and whites is riddled with holes and set on fire. Released in 1985, this action thriller takes the loner cop protagonist to its most amoral extreme - Petersen's Chance is so unrelenting he seems to invite his own destruction.

The film opens with two scenes which highlight his near-supernatural attraction to danger - a brief glimpse of a man down a hallway and the sound of cutlery lead Chance into foiling a terrorist attack. In the second sequence, he bungee-jumps off a bridge - the filmmakers hold back on the reveal that he is tethered to a line, making it look like he is jumping to his doom. 

Played with cocksure confidence and a frightening level of self-absorption by Petersen, Chance is the polar opposite of his later portrayal of Will Graham in Michael Mann's Manhunter.

In the opposite corner is counterfeiter Masters (Willem Dafoe), another shark in human form who seems to recognise his opponent as kin. Dafoe's paranoid, smirking performance is the perfect counterweight to Petersen's intensity. 

The constant references to time act as a countdown to their final showdown.

As the film progresses, it becomes obvious that Chance and Masters are not exceptions - every character is scrabbling to get what they want. Chance and Masters are the most successful are the ones who are willing to do whatever it takes to destroy anyone who gets in their way.

The film is most famous for its car chase, involving Chance and his partner Vukovich (John Pankow) fleeing pursuing vehicles by going against oncoming traffic on the highway. The car chase is so excessive it almost stalls the movie, yet it also provides the key shift in the relationship between Chance and his partner. 

For the first half of the movie, I was struck by how piecemeal the scenes were between Chance and Vukovich - it almost felt like we were seeing too little of them in action. The dialogue in particular felt incredibly hackneyed - especially when Chance was talking about his deceased partner. It is dramatically functional, but it put me in the frame of mind that there was not much to be expected from the movie in terms of characterisation (the ridiculously cartoonish terrorist with his sticks of dynamite from the opening sequence did not help). 

The combination of the somewhat cliche dialogue and Roddy Muller's camerawork, which kept the characters and action framed in stark wide shots, meant the film's approach was so objective that it was hard to get a lock on what we were supposed to be feeling vis-a-vis the central duo. 

The film's emphasis on action is key for defining the characters and their relationships. What I took away from the car chase was Chance's complete disconnect from other people. While Vukovich is freaking out, Chance is focused on getting out of danger. Even after the chase is over, while Vukovich tries to calm down, Chance is busy knocking out the bullet-scarred back window. Cheerfully he tells Vukovich that he does not have to worry about the vehicle - they can just claim the back window was knocked out and get it replaced.

There are no consequences in Chance's world. Not for his partner, civilians or the snitch, Bianca (Debra Feuer) he uses to get close to Masters.

Chance's relationship with Bianca is the movie showing the underbelly of this character - he uses the weight of his position to treat her as his personal sex object. There is no personal-professional boundary to Chance's life - he happily abuses the power of his job to get what he wants. The film does not endorse the character's worldview - there is a sequence where a victorious Chance appears in her apartment and aggressively initiates sex over her protestations. 

At the beginning of the movie Chance's original partner criticises him for taking everything personally - and he is proved right. Chance is not motivated by some higher moral purpose - or if he is, he sees Bianca and all the people who he deals with as expedient to that purpose. 

I knew of the film's downer ending in advance, but it did not detract from my viewing. In fact, knowing that Chance is not going to make it enhanced the film. Chance is so detached from any sense of his own mortality that it makes sense that his end would come so ignominiously.

Fascinating and horrifying in equal measure, To Live and Die in LA might not be a satire, but its unflinching view of its protagonist feels like an indictment of the fascistic individualism coursing through the genre - there is something exhilarating about it, but Friedkin and his collaborators have no interest in the kind of mythologising and stark morality that was overtaking the action genre in the eighties.

BITE-SIZED REVIEW: Exterminator 2 (Mark Buntzman & William Sachs (uncredited), 1984)

Four years after his first rampage, John Eastland (Robert Ginty) returns to arbitrarily murder random gang members. 

When his new love interest is attacked by a gang led by X (Mario Van Peeples), Eastland/a stuntman in a mask turns his flamethrower on the gang of Mad Max-inspired bad 'uns.

While I do enjoy some of their output, I do not have a soft spot for Cannon Films. That being said, there is no denying that - unlike a lot of studios of the time and today - there is something distinctive about their output.   

There is a cartoonish quality to Cannon movies that have given them a cult audience. And it is always fascinating to see how their films - no matter whoever writes or directs - always share the same simplistic view of the world. In a way, their reductive approach to action movies in particular feel like unintentional commentary about the American audience they sought to reach - the villains are always racial stereotypes; their victims straight out of Reagan campaign commercials. They are so on-the-nose they could almost pass for parody. 

Like other studios, Cannon Films needed product that they could sell to investors. While this is necessary in the studio system, there is a something almost frenzied about Cannon's output, in terms of both variety and execution. It is almost like they wanted to grab every audience with every kind of movie you can think of (sometimes in the same movie; see the Flashdance-meets-The Exorcist mashup Ninja III - The Domination). To grab easy box office, they bought best-selling books, ripped off past hits and made innovative attempts at adapting different kinds of intellectual property such as toys (Masters of the Universe) and comic books (Captain America; the un-produced Spider-Man). They also made a lot of sequels to movies made by other companies.  

One of these films was a follow-up to a sleeper hit from 1980, The Exterminator.

The original Exterminator is a curious mishmash of Vietnam vet drama and vigilante picture — the sequel is a cartoon of ultra violence. I tried to watch the original, and could not make it 15 minutes in. While it aims for a similar gritty style, Exterminator 2 is so hyperbolic in its execution that it feels more of a piece with Cannon's Death Wish sequels than the original.

It almost did not come to the screen.

This movie went through a major overhaul in post-production — writer-director Mark Buntzman was fired after he went way over-budget and ‘movie doctor’ William Sachs was brought on to re-shoot large portions of the movie. Unable to secure leading man Robert Ginty for the re-shoots, Sachs came up with the ingenious idea of turning the Exterminator into masked flame-throwing anti-hero. Freed from having to show his hero’s face, Sachs shot various scenes with Ginty’s stand-in torching various gang members and Mario Van Peeples as the villainous X, the gang leader after the Exterminator’s blood. 

The plot is pretty simple — John Eastland (Ginty) spends his nights torching gang-bangers and his days accompanying his friend Be Gee on his route as a garbageman. When the woman he loves is attacked and injured by X’s gang, Eastland goes over the edge. 

This transition is less obvious in the finished movie. The movie opens with a scene of a masked Eastland torching a group of sadistic robbers, implying that he has already resumed murdering people (or never stopped in the first place). 

Once his girlfriend/plot device has been attacked, the movie is peppered with other scenes where Eastland torches other gang members — this means there is no real sense of escalation (or even justification) since Eastland never gave up being the Exterminator.

As far as the acting goes, the movie's stitched-together nature might have worked in its favour. In the lead role, Robert Ginty is a snooze. I do not like writing that, but the scenes with him and the masked stuntman playing him in the reshoots carry the same lack of personality. Frankie Faizon briefly appears as one of his friends, and the disjunct in acting styles has to be seen to be believed.  

While Ginty is a black hole, Van Peeples is pretty fun as the villain - with his build and physicality, there were a few moments where he reminded me of Tom Hardy's Bane (there is one scene where he kills an underling that is very reminiscent of that masked villain). Due to Ginty's absence for the reshoots, he took more of the spotlight and gives the movie more of a centre. Plus, this is a b-level action movie: without Van Peeples, this movie would be much harder to watch. 

By the look of the Ginty footage, the Buntzman version of Exterminator 2 would have been fairly underwhelming. Thanks to the intervention of the Cannon bigwigs, and Sachs’ reshoots, the final movie is the perfect example of the Cannon action flick: unpretentious, fast-paced and cartoonishly violent.

BITE-SIZED REVIEWS: Cocoon & Cocoon: The Return

These movies might not have been a good idea to review. 

Cocoon (Ron Howard, 1985)

Released in 1985, Cocoon was Ron Howard’s first film after he hit it big with Splash the previous year. 

Basically The Exotic Marigold Hotel for stars of Old Hollywood, Cocoon is a sweet, simple little movie that offers the likes of Don Ameche, Hume Cronyn and Wilford Brimley a chance at centre stage. 

Ameche was considered a lightweight heartthrob in his day (despite strong performances in the likes of Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait), and Cocoon cemented his comeback after his great double-act with Ralph Bellamy as the scheming tycoons in Trading Places (John Landis, 1983). 

Hume Cronyn, one of the great character actors, had been delivering great performances going back to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and the classic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946). His on- and offscreen wife, Jessica Tandy, had played Blanche in the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and would go on to experience her own late-bloom resurgence with Driving Miss Daisy (Bruce Beresford, 1989).

The main star is Steve Guttenberg. Fresh off Police Academy, Cocoon helped him consolidate his run as an 80s leading man. His everyman hero feels like a studio note - an add-on to appeal to a younger audience. While he is an entry point for the audience, there has always been something a little pointless about his subplot. 

The story is relatively simple — a group of people living at an old folks home get a second chance at youth when they sneak into the neighbouring property for a swim and find that the new owners have filled the pool with the cocoons of the title — the cocoons contain aliens who have been in hibernation — the neighbours, led by Brian Dennehy, are of the same species, and have come to Earth to retrieve their brethren.

Eventually the secret spills out to the rest of the retired community and they all get into the pool. With so many bodies, the cocoons’ energy is drained and the sleeping aliens die.

Their mission having failed, the aliens prepare to leave. The movie ends with the old people joining the aliens on their return home...

This movie should be silly and mawkish — it should be completely and utterly ridiculous. And it is. 

But it is also a testament to good casting and Ron Howard’s unironic approach to the material. In terms of drama, Cocoon is fairly light, considering the sci fi trappings and special effects. In this respect it is closer to ET, in that it is based around relationships between benevolent aliens and a small group of humans sympathetic to their cause.

While it is not straight-out classic, the focus on the relationships of these characters, and how they deal with age, makes it stand out from other major studio sci fi fare.

Cocoon: The Return (Daniel Pertrie, 1988)

After the cocoons’ resting place is disturbed, the aliens have returned to secure their sleeping brethren. Our octogenarian heroes hitch a ride back to re-connect with their old lives.

Complications soon arise when one of the cocoons is discovered by a government laboratory. While the aliens try to figure out how to save the captive, their elderly friends begin to lose the vitality their extra-terrestrial sojourn has granted them, and they forced to reckon with their own mortality (again).

Released three years later, Cocoon: The Return is a prime example of a redundant sequel.   

Cocoon is a small, simple story built on a simple premise that can really only work for one story. Bringing back most of the original cast, Cocoon: The Return undoes the story of the original and runs through variations of scenes from the first movie, without adding anything that new or interesting.

Cocoon 2 adds its own version of ET’s military alien hunters, but it never comes off like a genuine threat. Possibly, the filmmakers felt that a subplot about scientists experimenting on the cocoons was too dark. Certainly, the sequences in the lab feel a little jarring.  

The one scene that feels genuine and hits the same emotional high as the original is Hume Cronyn’s final scene - it helps that Cronyn is playing opposite his real-life spouse. There is an emotion and verisimilitude that the rest of this movie cannot match

In the end, while never actively terrible, Cocoon: The Return is a rote, copycat sequel that never justifies its existence. Stick with the original.

BOOTLEG REVIEW: How To Be A Human Being (Glass Animals, 2016)

This review was originally published in 2016

Glass Animals return with their new album ‘How To Be A Human Being’. As an instructional manual, it is flawed. As an album of music, it’s more compelling.

The album starts strong — ‘Life Itself’ takes its time with an extended instrumental intro that draws the listener in. It’s the kind of cinematic intro that is not that common these days (it’s what Quincy Jones calls ‘ear candy’).

Surreal songs like ‘Pork Soda’, ‘Mama’s Gun’ and ‘Poplar St’ waft about without ever coming together in a traditional pop sense. It’s not an unpleasant sensation. This is an album that would probably work as mood setting during a long drive.

The album continues in this vein, blending psychedelic imagery with strange sound design. it almost sounds like what you would get if Weezer fell through a worm hole into 1967 and discovered LSD. Overall, it’s a hard vibe to describe — you get modern nerd references mixed with distorted vocals, repetitive choruses, processed instruments and stuttering dubstep-like beats and loops. It’s a real smorgasbord of sounds and styles. 

There’s a weird sense of drive to the music, although I will admit to dropping out a few times. It could use some judicious re-writing and re-editing — songs go on a mite too long, and you never really get a grasp on what the underlying purpose of it all is.

If you are looking for something different for your ‘music for monotonous tasks’ playlist, this might be right up your alley.

BOOTLEG REVIEW: Bad Vibrations (A Day To Remember, 2016)

This review was originally published in 2016.

Opening with the punishing assault of the title track, A Day To Remember coming storming back with their new album Bad Vibrations.

Comprising 11 tracks, this a quick, heavy hit. No bloat, no mucking around. These guys are here to turn that space between your ears into a mosh pit.

Not that the assault is completely unrelenting — ‘Paranoia’ flirts with a hummable melody while pulverising your eardrums with heavy riffs and drum fills. It’s all very unpretentious and to the point. ‘Naivety’ is surprisingly melancholy for a song filled with chugging guitars and drum beats, with singer Jeremy McKinnon looking back on how much he has changed since his youth (considering he is 30, it can’t be that much). 

Other songs like ‘Exposed’ are more straight-ahead death metal barnstormers, with Cookie Monster vocals and every aural touchstone of that genre you can think of.

The album juggles between these two tones on an almost song-to-song basis, which means the overall pace never flags. One minute you are listening to the anthem ‘Bullfight’, and then onto the barrage of ‘Reassemble’. It’s a rollercoaster of an album, and far more enjoyable than the title would suggest.

The content belies the collective age of the band — the lyrics deal with age, and regret, and nostalgia. It’s this lyrical maturity which adds a real dimension to the crunch of the music. It feels more real and relatable than the empty navel gazing of so many post-punk bands.

Overall, Bad Vibrations is a strong album from the veteran band. Sonically, it doesn’t re-invent the wheel, but that does not detract from the strength of the material they have developed here. New listeners will find a lot to enjoy here.

BITE-SIZED REVIEW: Jumanji - The Next Level (2019)

When a group of old high school friends - Spencer (Alex Wolff), Anthony/Fridge (Ser'Darius Blain), Bethany (Madison Iseman) and Martha (Morgan Turner) - reunite a couple of years after the events of their previous adventure in the video game Jumanji, they find themselves sucked back inside the old video game. 

Only this time, their grandparents, Milo and Eddie (Dannys' Glover and DeVito, respectively), have also been sucked into the game. They have to work together to complete the game so that they can return home. 

A sequel from the school of 'the same, but different', this sequel to the surprise hit Jumanji - Welcome to the Jungle maintains the simplicity of the previous film's concept, but throws in a couple of new elements that make it just different enough to be a pleasant time-waster.

Following the Arctic nothingness of Hobbs and Shaw, I was starting to see the ceiling on Dwayne Johnson's appeal.

Watching this movie (and thinking about the last one), it is bizarre that these movies feature Johnson's most... vulnerable performances. Is it because he is playing a fictional character within the movie? Is it because the first one was successful?

It is a strange set of affairs when Johnson allows himself to be vulnerable only when he is embodying the pixelated avatar of a nerd. 

Aside from pondering the thought processes of its leading man, there is not much to chew on. The movie does not reinvent the wheel, but it is refreshing.

I am pretty sure that you could watch this one without having to see the last one. So many sequels are obsessed with world-building. Here, you have a premise that allows for future add-ons but does not require them. 

While it has a certain melancholy to its resolution, The Next Level continues to mine the basic conflict between the personalities and the characters they are saddled with. 

jEach of the key cast members have new conflicts that are exacerbated by their new avatars. The main storyline is built around our heroes' grandparents (Dannys Glover and DeVito), former friends who have a long-standing resentment that they are forced to confront inside the game.

Akwafina joins the cast as Spencer's new avatar, and fits in pretty seamlessly. The original cast are still fun. The one questionable choice was Black playing Fridge's avatar, although he does avoid falling into a caricature. 

Johnson and Hart, playing the bickering old friends, are weirdly invigorated. It is truly bizarre how committed they are to these characters' relationship. I am not saying this is a Michael Leigh-level drama, but there is a gravitas there, and they play it without tongue in cheek. 

While it is no masterpiece, there is something noteworthy about how skilfully this movie manages to avoid screwing up the original (sequel's) simple premise. I cannot say I am looking forward to a third movie, but it is more intriguing than any of the Rock's other upcoming vehicles.

Related

Jumanji - Welcome to the Jungle

Shazam (David F. Sandberg, 2019)

Teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel) has been in and out of foster homes most of his life, ever since his mother disappeared when he was a child. Determined to be re-united with her, he has been willing to break any and all rules to find her.

Out of options after his latest gambit failed, Billy has to deal with a new foster family, a new school, and - after an encounter with a dying wizard (Djimon Hounsou) - the fact that he has transformed into a super-powered 30-something (Zachary Levi) and an angry bald man with a glowing eye (Mark Strong) wants to fight him for some reason.

It might be an effect of my disdain for prior DC movies, but I found this movie to be a delight.

There are no other words for it. After all the nonsense of the Zach Snyder trilogy, this movie feels like a great response to the relentless monotone of Man of Steel - here, the tone is multifaceted to reflect the subject matter and the story.  

Zachary Levi, so winning in Chuck, is great as the boyish superhero. Is he playing way younger than his childhood counterpart? Yes. Did I care? No! It is great to see him finally get a vehicle for his talents.

I also loved how clear the movie's theme was. Dr Sivana (Strong) and Billy are searching for acceptance from missing parental figures - Sivana's search is ultimately about power - having the ability to finally have supremacy over his domineering father. 

Meanwhile, Billy is searching for his mother, the only family he wants to be a part of. 

Sivana's quest is a tale of machismo pushed to its most monstrous extreme, while Billy sees the limits of being a loner when his fantasy of reuniting with his mother crash into reality. The movie is ultimately about the families we make for ourselves - when Billy finally accepts his new family, he is able to defeat Sivana.

The movie's style and tone were interesting: there is a brutality to some of the violence that surprised me - the opening car crash is horrifying - yet it fits as part of the story-telling.

 The diffference with something like Zack Snyder's entire filmography, is that the choices here felt like a way for the filmmakers to translate the comic book's origins in the Great Depression into contemporary terms.

It means the movie feels more grounded, which makes Shazam the character stick out more.

The presentation of the foster home and Billy’s new family really won me over - there is a sense of community and shared history to these scenes, with each of the kids given their own personalities and arcs. While the story is centred around a single super-powered being, the film places an emphasis on the importance of familial and communal bonds. Alone, Billy is lost - with his family, he can overcome anything. 

Overall, I loved this movie. Time to deploy the dreaded 'But...'

While the disconnect between Levi and Asher Angel's performances did not bother me, it would have been to the film's benefit if there is a unity between their performances - there is little of Billy's wounded stoicism in Shazam's child-like glee.

The one thing that I did not like was the presentation of the family's super-alter egos, particularly the transformation of Billy's foster brother and confidant Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer) into whatever the Shazam version of Captain Marvel Jr is (Adam Brody).

Freddy has a physical impairment and is bullied by other kids at school. It is a part of the conflict between Freddy and Billy. His character is the one who I felt was the most short-changed by the transformation. When Brody's version of Freddy appears, he is sans impairment. 

Freddy does refer to himself in ableist terms - he is frustrated by his impairment, and frames Billy's lack of responsibility as Shazam in terms that emphasise how much Freddy desires to be not just a superhero, but non-disabled. And in the end, he ends up living out that fantasy.

While it's always great to see Adam Brody in things, but the fact that Freddy's ideal self does not have a disability is disheartening. I have an impairment similar to Freddy's - I have certainly had frustrations and times of self-loathing in my life. But so does everybody, regardless of ability.

My frustration with Freddy in Shazam is that the character falls into the same trope of a disabled person who desires to be free of their impairment. 

This is not an issue specific to Shazam, however it is depressing that a movie like this - that places such an emphasis on the diversity of its cast - should uphold the trope of the muscular physique as a signifier of superheroism without any comment. It is just a given that superheroes look like this. Sadly, Shazam's emphasis on a family of people of different backgrounds has to boil them down to the same familiar archetypes (on a related front, critic William Bibbiani has a great Twitter thread on the fat phobia of Hector's transformation into the herculean DJ Cotrona). 

I do not enjoy writing about this, but I really liked this movie - which makes this element sting worse. It is hard to dissect something you like so much, but it is important to bring it up. It is rare that I am faced with a movie that strikes so close to home - that rarity is itself an indictment on portrayals of disability in cinema, but that is a rant for another day.

The transition to the final endorsement is going to be awkward as hell.  

I really enjoy Shazam - it is a lot of fun (I had so much fun I even stuck around for the mid-credit scene, and the reveal of another Shazam foe). And while it is aimed at a slightly younger audience than previous DCEU movies, it boasts solid characterisation and a great theme. Whereas Man of Steel and BvS were self-absorbed in gloom with no sense of hope or purpose, Shazam is mature, funny and empathetic.

I just wish that sense of empathy did not come with qualifications.

 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond called The James Bond Cocktail Hour. Every episode, we do a review of one of the books and one of the movies, picked at random. 

In the latest episode we review the 1963 film From Russia With Love, starring Sean Connery. Subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts!