To Live and Die in L.A. (85, William Friedkin)

After making some Oscar-winning classics in the 1970's, William Friedkin was mostly demoted to a director of stylish yet underappreciated genre thrillers, but even his The French Connection can't hold a candle to this mid-80's effort, which may be the most tonally-efficient and hardest-nailed cop flick ever made. Those who make police procedurals should take a look at this film and see how to take procedure and make it cinematic. Mongos might scoff at the 80's trappings, the now-cliched plotlines, and the Wang Chung soundtrack, but those who have advanced beyond the laughing at nostalgia blockage will see that the film is still extremely stylish and manages to avoid MTV style editing in favor of a more innovative approach to scene and tone transitions. 

And looking chronologically, you might also notice that To Live and Die predates a lot of things that might crop up as cliched (esp. the "I'm too old for this *beep* line that it seems Shane Black stole for Lethal Weapon). More importantly though, almost all of Friedkin's characters have depth and personality. And I'm not talking about ham. These characters all inhabit a slightly over-the-top world, but they bring it back down to life by acting as naturally as possible. William Petersen especially shines here, portraying Chance with the right mixture of determination and human degradation that won a lesser performance by Gene Hackman an Oscar in the 1970's. 

But what makes things even more interesting is the way in which Friedkin plays with the notions of protagonist and antagonist in this film. He worked with it somewhat in The French Connection by making Popeye Doyle a self-absorbed racist bastard, but in that film, the enemy's only personal traits was that he was a smarmy French businessman. And that's where the difference and shades come in here. By the end of the film, Masters (Willem Dafoe) is much more the protagonist than Chance or Vukovich. 

That's not to say that Chance and Vukovich aren't complex or likable characters, but the film seems to take place in this capitalist dreamland, a place where money's so sought after that people deal in the stuff, and the film's characters simply have degrees to which they follow that dreamland's ethics. The film's opening sets this dichotomy into place as the moment of Masters destroying his legitimate art is followed by a whirlwind credit sequence depicting street level counterfeiting. 

But as an artist living in the 1980's, Masters also seems to find solace in his "funny money." Take, for instance, Friedkin's painstakingly accurate portrayal of the counterfeiting process. It seems important when you consider that we never see Masters working on the supposed masterpieces that he burns. Master's knack for art purifies the artless object, makes it clean (which may be why the final step in the process is running the bills through a dryer: now that he has "washed" the object of its blase use, he has to dry it). 

At one point, Masters pays a street level thug with the bills for a prison hit on a potential informant. After the hit goes south, Masters murders the criminals and burns the money. Crouching naked in front of his fireplace, he piles handfuls of the bills onto a roaring fire. Asked why he's doing it, he says that he can't use it now that someone has "handled" it. There's a certain self-assured purity to what Masters does, but the gig does have occupational hazards like the murder of a federal officer. Near the end of the film, it becomes clear that Masters is simply waiting for the other shoe to drop, recognizing that selling out his artistic talent to capitalist *beep* is to place himself on a lit fuse. 

In the end though, because he recognizes these things, Masters' soul is clean. He may contribute and participate in the cash craze surrounding him, but on the inside, he's just a tortured artist who unfortunately went for the money. And he burns for it. 

Petersen's Chance is a much more recognizable character. His determination, grit, and uncompromising attitude puts him in line with any number of memorable 70's cops, and as anyone who has seen The French Connection can tell you, Friedkin does this kind of character better than anyone else. But what makes this film better than the others is that he not only creates a character with Petersen that fits all of the genre necessities, but he allows a reflexivity that comments on the character. 

After his partner is killed, Chance goes off the grid in his attempts to get revenge. We've all heard this plot many, many times. When he tells Vukovich, "I don't give a *beep* how I do it," we're coached enough in this type of cop movie to know that he's probably going to do some improper off-the-books kind of policing. And around the time he is taking undercover feds hostage and stealing money from them to make a counterfeit deal with Masters, you're fairly sure he has gone off the deep end. 

In other words, he too works outside of the system of money and procedure that drives the capitalist wonderland in 1985. In this sentiment, he and Masters are doppelgangers to a degree. Both work (and die) inside of the system's confines, but both seem to have deeper motivations than money or the upholding of the law. Masters would really like to express himself as an artist, and Chance upholds an older honor, that of vengeance for a fallen brother-in-arms. Masters ultimately fails because he decides to put his artistic talent in service of the capitalist wonderland. Chance ultimately dies because he pays heed to the underwritten law. Had either character gone all the way with his intention, things may have turned out positively. 

Then again, there seems to be a distinction between the characters, and Friedkin does place evaluative judgment on the value of their actions. This assessment comes primarily through the characters' interactions with their girlfriends. There's really no niceties or tenderness between Chance and Ruth (Darlanne Fluegel). She acts as an informant and as a lover with Chance, but he sees her through his work and her position in the corrupt business world. 

When he visits her at a strip club where she works at the door, she has to take a break from their conversation to admit customers. As she does so, Chance turns around, and the camera takes his point of view as to see the strippers at work on the other side of the room. After a moment, he turns back to Ruth and continues his business. Taken as continuity, this scene implies that Chance sees his girlfriend as a prostitute. After all, the shot of the strippers is from his point of view. In this relationship, the transaction of information has about the same levity as the transaction of sex. This view might explain why our protagonist can pretty much rape Ruth after the film's big car chase without moral reflection. 

This relationship compares unfavorably to Masters' relationship with performance artist Bianca (Debra Feuer). If nothing else, the relationship remains Masters' one connection to his true calling. Besides scenes of Masters destroying his art and counterfeit money, the moments he spends with Bianca round out his character. Dafoe inflects a certain sadness with his admiration as he watches his love at work as if he wishes he could be so true to his artistic intentions. 

But he also possesses her image on video. However, unlike Chance's control over Ruth, he does not use it for his own devices but as a playful addition to their love life. Later, he uses the same video to capture his sadness at his own demise and leaves it for Bianca, the one person that understands him as more than a soulless counterfeiter and a member of the soulless society that envelops the characters. After Masters' death, his attorney asks Bianca how she could stand to stay with him for so long. She asks him why he represented Masters. He replies, "Cause that's business." Without smiling, she nods, leaves the house, and takes off with her new girlfriend, a fellow dancer whom Masters had set her up with. They drive off into the sunset. 

Immediately afterward, we find out how Chance leaves Ruth. Evidently haunted by his partner's death, Vukovich has taken on his persona. In "Chance mode," he visits Ruth at her home and finds her packing up, ready to blow town. When asked if she knew Chance died, she says, "I'm busy." He tells Ruth that he knows she set them up earlier in the murder of an undercover agent. He then lets her know that she works for him now. Because Chance's relationship with her was based upon the system and its prostitute-client relationships, she doesn't have a clear future, and no one really mourns Chance's memory. He's simply a part of the city and its money-drunk corruption. 

Friedkin does ultimately have pity on Chance. The ending credits never play against black but to a changing series of tracking shots from a car. The sequence changes locations from the city to a bridge and ultimately to a sunset in the country. Friedkin then cuts from that sunset to an earlier shot of Chance in his apartment. Dead as a victim of the system, Chance is finally taken out of the squalor and horror of that scene and given a pastoral resting place outside of the film, after its ending credits. 

Through this often innovative and unexpectedly insightful use of character types and rewriting of traditional protagonist-antagonist roles, Friedkin really makes To Live and Die in L.A. a masterpiece of 80's cinema. The way the film looks, feels, sounds, talks, and moves is ahead of its time, so much so that to see it 24 years out probably makes it seem comprised completely of cliche. However, hardly content to do a cross between The French Connection and Miami Vice (Michael Mann sued him for copyright infringement for perceived similarities between the film and the then-hip TV show), Friedkin presents an earnest and subtle criticism of 80's consumer insanity, a sophisticated statement that helps the film age much more gracefully than any of its more famous counterparts. 

Taken (08, Pierre Morel)

"You come to this country, take advantage of the system and think because we are tolerant that we are weak and helpless." Liam Neeson tosses this line at a group of Albanians who specialize in kidnapping American tourists and forcing them into drug addiction and prostitution. Like a sleeping giant, Neeson's ex-military wonderman character comes back to the life of ultraviolence after his daughter and a friend are taken by the aforementioned group. He's told that he has 72 hours to get them back before they disappear into the depths and horrors of (wha-na-nah) Eastern Europe! Naturally, he must beat the tar out of hundreds of Albanians and Frenchmen in order to get his daughter back into his protective arms. From the whooping and roaring from the packed crowd on opening night, you would've thought that it was 1985 and Rambo was winning the Vietnam and Cold Wars all over again. You could almost feel the nostalgia when Neeson needles information out of a criminal by connecting his body to the city's grid (one neighboring viewer even pointed out that our new, wussy, liberal president wouldn't have liked that. What would that communist do if his daughter was kidnapped?).

It was strange to see this audience reacting so heartily and trustfully to a creative team from France. Generally, anything those anti-American liberals say or create is regarded with a great deal of trepidation, but due to the 80's action plotline and modern action tropes, they were hook, line, and sinker for perhaps the most subversive action film to be released in America since big daddy Reagan had his day.

It's easy to see why the film's done so well here. The essential plot couldn't be more familiar. Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a former CIA(?) operative, who's retired from the horror of the service in order to reconnect with his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace). At the start of the film, she lives with Mills' estranged wife (Famke Janssen) who has moved on from an honest life with our hero to live the easy life as a rich housewife. Against Mills' better knowledge, his daughter and a friend leave for a few weeks of Euro-hopping only to find themselves at the mercy of our sadistic ethnic minority in a country that we're iffy about anyway. Fighting both the Albanians and the French, Neeson comes out the victor and now can introduce his daughter to a pop star that he did security for (oh yeah, forgot to mention that Kim wants to be the next Britney Spears).

Essentially, we're looking at a plot about as deep as Commando or Out for Justice. In another writer or director's hands, the film could easily resemble either of those movies due to Mills' constant righteousness as he goes about his business. When he shoots the innocent wife of a dirty French cop, we understand because he wants his daughter back so so much. I mean, he only has 72 hours. The clock's ticking. He's got no time for the Geneva convention! He needs that info now!

But the fact that the audience buys this crap is perhaps the biggest joke of all. Through their combination of these 80's action cliches, the ridiculous self-awarded virtue of Mills' cause, and the rampage that ensues, director Pierre Morel and writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen weave a remarkable parody of the American action film and subtly emphasize some hypocrisy in American moral standards and foreign policy. And they do it with a film that channels its social commentary through a spot-on variation on the 1980's American action film.

Although Morel owes much to a fantastically insidious script, his direction of this material is spot-on. The tacky father-daughter relationship, the stock dialogue, and typified characters all come through so earnestly that I'm still a little unsure that the film doesn't take it seriously.

Perhaps this can be attributed to Morel's top notch action sequences, which, even after cuts for a PG-13 rating, have more impact and finesse than your typical Bond or Bourne movies. They don't spring up nearly as much as they should nor are they as inventive or modern as his previous work in District B13, but the film uses the action sequences not just as rewards for sitting through the sometimes trying dramatics but also as a reflection of its main character. Mills' expertise in the area and his motivation are completely sold by his cold, efficient performance of the individual action beats.

But the film also presents the ugly side of such efficiency. Throughout the film, Jean-Claude (Olivier Rabourdin), a French police officer and a former colleague of Mills', attempts to persuade Mills to allow the authorities to handle the situation. Naturally, Mills declines, knowing that he is better suited to the job. At one point, he has dinner with Jean-Claude and his wife in their home. Incensed that Jean-Claude is on the take, Mills shoots his wife in the arm to get information, despite her ignorance of her husbands' corruption. He then threatens to murder the whole family if Jean-Claude refuses him the information he needs. But "stuff happens" in these situations, right?

This moral equivocation allows Mills to support his righteous cause. Jean-Claude's poor wife will recover, and his daughter will be found. Besides, the evil Albanian slave traders deserve to be punished, and the world's better off without them. Mills is doing the world (and the "wussy French") a favor. Then again, with such a noble cause, why doesn't Mills attempt to help or save any of the other girls stuck in this slummy hellhole? Mills manages to convince himself that his work has a sort of moral superiority that makes shooting an innocent woman okay, but he never bothers to solve any of the social problems or save any of the gang's other victims. Even after he finds his daughter's friend, Amanda (Katie Cassidy), dead from a heroin overdose, he just plugs along after his daughter, remaining unaffected by all the helpless women awaiting the same fate.

This apathy expresses the character's fundamental hypocrisy. He does horrible things to people innocent and guilty alike, but he manages to create and maintain an illusion of moral superiority and righteousness by balancing his actions against the evil Other. Unfortunately, these notions don't hold up in the big picture. After his daughter is saved, Mills' work in this area is over, and he never attempts to pursue the bigger operation or to dismantle it. He simply gains personal revenge for wrongs inflicted to his family. This cavalier attitude may be said to reflect the greater portion of America's recent war in Iraq. The target goal, as expressed by our previous administration, was to assure safety for American citizens, but this dubious reasoning for an invasion/occuptation, of course, comes courtesy of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi's. The torture, the reassurance of moral intentions, all of these things are in the film. Oddly enough, most of the audience members applauding Mills' battles also supported the expansion of our war on terror into a tangentially related country.

This joke's pretty good, exposing the faults of a stance while roping along those taking the stance. But that joke has nothing on the film's last roarer. Safe at home, Mills is finally able to jumpstart his daughter's music career, courtesy of some security work he did for a Shakira-type pop star. As anyone who has seen Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story can tell you, what Mills basically does is to take his daughter out of a situation in which she would be a sex slave and put her into a profession that would morph her from a person into a sexualized property, no doubt, of a corporate conglomerate. That the film frames this profession with the danger of being assaulted by an oversexed fan only reemphasizes the irony of taking his daughter out of a whorehouse and putting her into a common sex culture. It's Mills' last failure, and Morel's greatest success, a matter made all the more frustrating considering how many smartass newspaper critics called it another dumb actioner.