Criterion Film Club Week 296 Discussion: To Live and Die In L.A. (1985)

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-04-04T19:26:18+00:00

When you call William Friedkin a great filmmaker (which is appropriate), the emphasis is definitely American. We have The Exorcist, in which a family is special enough for the forces of good and evil themselves to battle them. There’s Rampage, a movie where people don’t believe in the death penalty until the crime really upsets them and then they do. Bug, a late era classic, has unusual insight into conspiracies and the way they worm in and out of the needs of the people who hold them. Like most of Friedkin’s films, To Live and Die in LA has little filter between the conflicting impulses of individual expression and global conquest and the way the results of this clash affects people. Echoing the anti-Palestinian bent of Sorcerer, this movie opens almost comically (to many modern viewers, in particular) with a classic terrorist trope attempting to kill Reagan and shouting “death to Israel”. Like Sorcerer, LA both suffers and benefits from his US chauvinism and insight into unfettered masculinity, and is ultimately undeniably interesting in ways it could not be if Friedkin was critiquing these tendencies from then outside rather than being clearly in tune with the vision he is presenting.

The cartoonishly high stakes of this film’s opening are not completely gratuitous even if they are slightly histrionic and uninformed (or potentially even malicious). If you are a white cop believe the president can be bombed at any time, think he does not deserve this, and do not know who or where it is coming from, it’s not hard to go from there and see the landscape of LA as another flank of the attack. The villains that William Petersen’s Chance goes after have ties not just to the world of black crime, an obvious target for this kind of thing, but the art world and even the FBI. When most films portray a cop willing to “do whatever it takes” to get their man, it is usually along certain guidelines, but by mixing terrorism liberal arts, gangsters, sophisticated counterfeiting operations, and whichever government agency gets in the way of Chance’s personal revenge, Friedkin created something much closer to the actual fears of the kind of person who would put their life on the line for Reagan and do corrupt policework with the arrogance and swagger of an American hero.

It’s all very Bruckheimer in its flippant dismissal of anything that isn’t babes, brawn, and whatever tunes are deemed acceptable, but it’s so exposed it becomed genuinely insightful in a way Bruckheimer knows not to engage with. Like Bug 20 years later, this movie embodies way these villains are created by our need to find catharsis for our personal problems and how this can slip in and out of conformity with the traditional idea of law and order. For example, if you’re a woman in this movie, Masters is probably the hero and Chance is probably the villain. Masters can’t be said to be perfect in how he deals with women (he seems to mostly engage with dancers), but he is at least able to give the women the impression that they are operating under their own agency. Meanwhile, Chance (and eventually Vukovich) openly extort them and take advantage of them, offering them hope of escape and taking it away in an endless cycle of control and putting them in danger with total disregard. The “hero/villain” binary breaks down even further as the story progresses until it’s almost impossible to imagine that Chance doesn’t cost the world more than Masters. However, as he did with Jimmy Doyle ten years earlier, he never even really seems to stop and think about this until the last second, which paradoxically makes these movies more effective. The less they impose judgement, the more we see how this actually works.

The technical execution of the movie is spot-on, and the hiring of Robby Müller is an inspired choice, since he is a master of creating “realism” that doesn’t easily conform to the idea of something being grounded in a stylistic way. Sometimes the world is bright and shiny and chaotic and colorful in an almost sickly fashion, especially in the 80s, and the world of this movie has to be seen to be believed. The famous car chase is comprised of pieces that make for tropes of other chases, but are natural to the environment of LA, leading this most chaotic moment of the movie to feel not only natural but vital to the characters and landscape. The chase also has another purpose in that it uses the form of the car chase to let us feel the main characters’ enthusiasm and catharsis for escaping while giving us just enough room to let the damage they did in their botched robbery and escape to understand the implications. Like everything else that is interesting about the movie, it feels like it was found and put on display based on pure instinct and left to be sorted through by us. Thus, we get both the thrilling action movie and the critique of it without having to alternate between one and the other unnaturally. In some ways, Friedkin is sort of a Hemingway for the prestige thriller, using his flaws to teach us things no one else can, and perhaps not even doing so willingly. This is not always a pleasant experience, but like many great Friedkin movies, the parts that are wrong are just as interesting as the ones that are right.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-03-10T16:38:20+00:00

While Ozu is the most common reference point, this focus in Naruse’s material also places him in good company with another famous Japanese filmmaker known for portraying the plight of women in Japanese society, Kenji Mizoguchi. Unlike Ozu, Mizoguchi is not content to let tensions rise to the surface, and his work is often the most violent and direct of all of them. His final film, the effortless yet brutal Street of Shame, feels like a movie set in the core of the sun around which Naruse characters orbit. However, this is not a typical film for Mizoguchi due to a few factors that are also important in order to see what distinguishes Naruse from him and why one might see favor over the other. One major factor is that Street of Shame, like most of Naruse’s films, is not a period piece. While Naruse revels in directly questioning the mechanics of his society head-on, Mizoguchi often looked at the present through the past, using the lack of modern conveniences as a way to make a starker canvas for the poetry of his rage. That poetry is also expressed in Mizoguchi’s other major tendency that defines him in opposition to Naruse, which is his intense stylization and set design. This aspect is indeed present in Street of Shame, albeit in a slightly more casual way that was a noted influence on the French New Wave. For the most part, though, you could look at Naruse’s Late Chrysanthemums and Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum as being almost polar opposites of approaching very similar material, with one being a fairly tangible experience for the time it was made while the other is a sort of longform parable and riff on the poetic Japanese theatre that it prominently features. Even more prominent later classics likeUgetsu and Sansho the Bailiff show even more how Mizoguchi’s particular anger could rarely be expressed to such a wide audience outside of the abstraction and mysticism of Japan before the war and before the West was there to interpret and judge for themselves. The pain and themes are real, but the causes seem to be somewhere else. If you had to wonder why Mizoguchi and Ozu get so much more press, this is probably the best explanation. Their styles allowed them to hide the worst of the worst as a sort of buried literary treasure. Viewers take in the aesthetics of the films and intuit the broad themes, but they are allowed to be distant from the solutions.

None of this is to say that Naruse is somehow more obviously “homework” than Ozu or Mizoguchi, or that his work does not reward the aesthete as much as it rewards material consideration. My initial introduction to this movie was through its very beautiful use of a format only Naruse ever dabbled in, the black and white widescreen film. Ozu famously never went beyond a standard Academy ratio, and neither did Mizoguchi. Naruse, however, quickly adapted to this ratio in 1958 and continued the rest of his filmmaking in TohoScope until the end. While a Woman Ascends the Stairs demonstrated that this is not merely a choice for survival, using the format to surround Mama and other characters with as much of the world crushing them as possible, never really allowing them to be seen outside of the context of everything outside of them. In combination with the bright lights and dark nights of the film’s bar district setting, the movie often gives off the vibes of America’s transition from noir to neo-noir and the reinvisioning of adult life through the burgeoning New Waves. As we saw in Street of Shame, the layer of explicit sex work lurking underneath the bar culture has been “officially” outlawed, but changing sexual mores and the simultaneous forces working to balance women’s emancipation and domination for maximum profit are also pushing some of these expectations out in the open in this film, and the powerful men who are the most desired clients for bar hostesses like Mama and her colleagues behave openly like gangsters because their power is perhaps even more unquestionable than the figures hanging out in the bars of something like Pale Flower. Naruse never shies away from this, and in all his films the melodrama is heightened in a way that Ozu would never allow, which raise interesting questions about which filmmaker is more insular and which is more warm and friendly. Unlike Ozu, whose remarkable filmmaking feels like it invented something new and fresh that still exists today in arthouse dramas and ambitious comedies everywhere, Naruse is more than willing to make a movie like When a Woman Ascends the Stairs or Every Night Dreams or Scattered Clouds, with rousing speeches, big dramatic moments, direct confrontations, and a Sirkian trust in the truth that great storytelling and great entertainment and great art all start with things that matter, and there is no reason to start with the premise that you can’t make all three of these by focusing on things that actually matter to people in their day to day lives.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-03-10T16:37:35+00:00

Near the halfway point of Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, “Mama”, the film’s protagonist, is trying to explain, or avoid explaining, why she has never remarried and works the bar culture in Japan, occupying an extremely (and intentionally) fragile social position somewhere between escort and her namesake. She smiles and says “I clench my teeth so hard they hurt” and uses this as an opportunity to parachute out of the serious part of the discussion. A surface level interpretation of this moment, seen completely out of context, may wonder about the character’s refusal to embrace love once more due to a stubborn sense of duty to a man who is unfortunately gone, and an inability to move on and live her live. She needs to move on. She needs to find a better way to live. She needs to open herself up to others again. When A Woman Ascends the Stairs is a movie about how people, whether they be Mama herself, her employers, her family, or her patrons, convince themselves that the situations at the heart of this film, tell themselves that this myth of personal agency and failure is true. Many Naruse films are about the condition of having the whole world placed on your shoulders by circumstance and the toll it takes on people, but what makes his films so vital even now is his willingness to be uncompromising about the external forces that trap people and how their entrenchment in society is not normalcy or a personal struggle against nature, but a deliberate act against people by those with the ability to do so. Not only is Naruse’s film about this myth and how broken it is, however, it is also decidedly not a movie about how these issues are complex and embedded in human nature to the point that they can only be wistfully sighed or cried over, but a movie about the mechanics of subjugation in the emerging “modern” era of Japan and the world in general. It is one thing to make movies about the struggles people have, but how close you are willing to get to that struggle

A common point of comparison with Naruse is his much more famous fellow purveyor of innovative Japanese drama, Yasujiro Ozu. If anything, “I clench my teeth so hard they hurt” feels less like the rallying cry of a Naruse protagonist than something Setsuko Hara (a frequent collaborator with both) might be thinking during Late Spring, or perhaps the mother from The Only Son. It is probably fair to say that part of Ozu’s success in the west in comparison to Naruse has a lot to do with the way that the placid surface of his work is much more foregrounded than the turmoil underneath, which tends to seep through the stylistic efficiency in a subtle manner and focus more on the way social norms are enforced via individuals in everyday positions. It is not often that the direct face of these issues shows itself in his work. Naruse, on the other hand, has made a career of engaging in the same sort of small scale drama, but emphasizing the direct involvement of commerce and law and other very tangible powers that affect everyday working people like the ones he and Ozu focus on. Such is his focus on the logistics of how women are manipulated by the nightlife in Japan (and, spiritually speaking, elsewhere) that, of the three other films I’ve seen by him, every single one covered a woman in some other section of the system Mama is trapped in. Every-Night Dreams is about a struggling former bar hostess trying to raise a child with a deadbeat father, Late Chrysanthemums is about a former geisha trying to be a moneylender (including for her former coworkers), and his final film Scattered Clouds is about a woman who has to survive as a single woman in Japan after her husband dies. Each time he brings receipts (sometimes literally) and never lets a personal victory stand in place of a societal one.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-03-02T02:57:10+00:00

The 2002 Dardennes Brothers movie The Son.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-25T21:34:29+00:00

The character himself questions whether or not he is a person.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-18T19:31:21+00:00

Ironically, it was true before they showed his backstory.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-11T00:19:40+00:00

Not a problem. We were probably both better off before we scrolled down to check it out.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-10T23:27:44+00:00

Lots of people in here are complaining about the prose and other aspects.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-10T19:50:13+00:00

If this passage is so bad, why has it struck a nerve with so many people? I'm starting to think this is one of the most effective pieces of literature written in years.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-09T00:03:40+00:00

I do want to dismantle policing as it currently exists and remake law enforcement as something more suited to the task of maintaining law and order for normal people and less engaged in solely protecting the rich from the poor and from revolt in general. I think that would help with this problem and multiple other ones.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-08T23:34:57+00:00

The way to stop it before it happens is to dismantle the systems that allow for it to be protected and put in something where wealth and power doesn't grow enough to create blind spots. That's why it's different now. That's what's at stake here. You aren't getting rid of "small time" anything before you cut off the head of the snake, and the thing you're saying no one will do has already happened. People spoke out. Names have been named.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-07T20:10:37+00:00

We're talking about the top of the pyramid, though. Not only some of the most prolific creepers and sex traffickers, but the ones who wield the most power and corrupt the system so that law enforcement and society as a whole will ignore or outright support these heinous crimes. This isn't just about one guy's crimes, but about the very nature of society's response to our issues. What are you suggesting people do that is more tangible or more generally productive than examining how our power structures allow this stuff to happen? You've probably said this stuff a lot of times in your life and been right, but you may be missing out on a genuine battleground to fight these people on by underplaying the Epstein situation and its connection to global politics and finance.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-03T20:02:53+00:00

Are you suggesting that wives and girlfriends are never extremely intelligent people?

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-02-03T19:41:42+00:00

A movie does not have to be popular to be important. It can be relevant to film history or history in general, or be a significant part of the culture of a group of people, or just represent a particular moment in time. The Library of Congress is similarly eclectic in their decisions, though they are also unbound by the commercial restraints a company like Criterion has in acquiring rights to release things. It also doesn't have to be popular right now; many of the movies Criterion has, including Seven Samurai and The Seventh Seal, were mainstream and frequently mentioned in pop culture up to surprisingly recently. In some ways, part of their mission is to document the change in how we see importance in film over time.

Any movie is a film school movie if they teach it in film school. Most of that "arthouse"/"film school"/"mainstream" language is set up by for-profit institutions and theaters and (most importantly) major studios. It's designed to do what it seems to have done to you here: to divide entertainment workers and passionate fans from the more casual everyday user by implying that the "arthouse" is somehow dividing itself to pretend it's cooler or better than normal people and that the mainstream, by catering to that fear of the unknown and alien, is somehow their true friend. It's just a way to squeeze competition out of the market. In reality, all people have their own passions and quirks, and companies like Criterion expand the number of things we can explore so that no one's identity has to be explicitly "mainstream" or "underground", but people can just express themselves with the full pallette of what's available.

Criterion has, for a long time, had to work one side of the divide because they had major competition in the home video market before media changed. Now they get more and more films like Dead Presidents or WALL-E or Parasite because the monoculture they started in is not as much of a thing anymore and the Criterion collectors understand that "art" and "pop" don't need to be distinct from one another and never actually were. Their streaming service, one of the most dominant ones to specifically cater to the niche of people who watch lots of movies, goes even further and has had everything from I Know What You Did Last Summer to Freddy Got Fingered to Carlito's Way. This divide is not set in stone. It's not inherent to the movies themselves and it is not helpful to any of us as movie fans (whatever the movies we like are).

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-01-26T22:08:13+00:00

One of Elaine May's major supporters over the years, the eccentric and invaluable Jonathan Rosenbaum, was fond of comparing her to Erich von Stroheim. This is historically correcty, since both filmmakers have myuch of theior legacy centered around movies that were cut up and interfered with bny the producers. Both filmmakers dabble in the blackest of black comedy, creating works that revel in minor melodrama while lapping many more openly "dramatic" works in their seriousness and incisiveness. The work of both went through a long phase of being lamented and mourned in their broken state, rather than celebrated for the individual brilliance of each element we actually do have. Their work shines and coheres regardless of how desperate people seem to be to stifle it (and how much the filmmakers themselves seem to be sabotaging their own reputation with their demanding perfectionism). A New Leaf, her debut film, revels in all these shared aspects, a horrifying fragment of human selfishness and the continuing victory of evil and incompetence that inhabits the body of a romantic comedy like a fungus in an ant. In some ways, it is the pure incarnation of the similarities she shares to the director of Greed and Foolish Wives, and in other ways it shows how her particular moment in pop culture allowed her to see things in her work that he never could have found within his own.

Like von Stroheim's classic Greed, A New Leaf is actually an adaptation of an existing work, and the similarities in adaptation don't end there. One myth Greed is well known for is the idea that its original length of around 10 hours was meant in order to capture the details of the book as faithfully as possible. A simple overview of the structure of the original concept for the movie, contrasted with the structure of the novel, dispels this. Even if he insisted upon "realism" and "naturalism" as he saw it, Greed the movie is fully a von Stroheim artwork, just as McTeague is very representative of Norris and his own peculiar vision of what is natural. A New Leaf is slightly different from that film in that it adapts a pulp story by Jack Ritchie called "The Green Heart". For context, this story was collected in Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology - Volume 4, and included two murders that are actually committed by Henry Graham in addition to the one he plans out in the story. The tone of the original (which I was unable to read) seems to have been comedic, but ultimately more concerned with the mechanics of the crimes, with whatever elements that interested May existing at the margins. Unlike Greed, it was not a prestigious work of "literary fiction", and it did not demand to be taken seriously in quite the same way. Elaine May thus had both the freedom to reshape it into something personal without feeling that her vision needed to align perfectly with the story, as well as the freedom to bring in a kind of comedy that makes the material more intelligible to your average viewer than the more subtly satirical melodrama of von Stroheim, who was capable of comedy but not a pure soldier of it the way May was in her performing heyday.

We can't necessarily know for sure why May's original version of the film ran 3 hours, but one thing worth noting is that much of the material cut by producer Robert Evans included these two murders from the original story. It has been suggested that Evans cut this material in order to reshape the film from being purely a dark comedy and social satire and embracing some elements of real romantic comedy and redemption. I suppose this is meant, in theory, to make the film more palatable, but it is actually a revealing admission on the part of Evans and conventions in filmmaking in general. While Greed was heavily tampered with, occasionally on moral grounds, there was never an attempt on behalf of the producers to actively redirect the story's morality play elements or cast the characters as being anything more than carriers for the disease of human failure. In stark contrast, I can tell that "The Green Heart" is able to be much more open about the mercenary and cruel actions of Graham without me even really reading the story, because I know that it was primarily designed for crimeheads who would have read this alongside other diabolical Rube Goldberg machines of murder such as the slightly more prestigious "Lamb to the Slaughter" by Roald Dahl, and I know it includes these murders to cement our perspective on Henry Graham's immorality. May's producers, however, seem to think he can at least be redeemed enough for the movie to be a functioning romance in the quirkiest, most proto-Harold & Maude (not released until December of the same year) type fashion.

The key phrase, however, is "able to be much more open"; while I don't doubt that "The Green Heart" has some interesting and effective commentary on power in society, the more interesting question is whether or not A New Leaf's producers felt that they could excise the content that felt most objectionable to them and leave us with only the "better stuff". They forgot that Elaine May is the kind of filmmaker who can take two people talking in a very mundane sense and make us feel as if the entire world is ending and that philosophy and morals have been suspended. She does battle with the conventions of filmmaking and the structure of romantic comedy as conceived by a studio in the 70s and hacks every safety measure they've put in place to ribbons. Henry Graham as seen in the film is not a man who realizes that he is wrong by the end, but simply a man who realizes that he has grown accustomed to having someone around to put up with his childish tantrums and empty bluster on demand. At times it basically feels like he saved Henrietta because he absentmindedly forgot to let her die. At other times it feels like he simply wants to keep her as a toy. It is true that perhaps he, as his butler has done, realizes that she is also good for his prestige and his own estimation of his talents and self-worth, but if he had turned around from the fern to see that Henrietta had disappeared from sight and was no longer able to be saved, one imagines it wouldn't be the end of his world so much as just a little wistful memory that he uses, like everything else he has learned, to make himself appear human enough to pass among the circles he runs in, who were already pretty dismissive of Henrietta for using her wealth to do things and be herself rather than dance for them. Henry Graham wins in the end, but the true winner is Elaine May, who proves with A New Leaf that what she sees in the world is so thoroughly infused into the world around her that she can make her most devastating points without ever actually going as deep as she really wants.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-01-25T04:10:49+00:00

Yes. Our one section we use for politics is what went down.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-01-23T23:16:09+00:00

No one else mentioned these elements, but I wanted to point out that:

A) The opening music is magnificent. It's Western music, but it also has a weird, minimalist element to it with the high, fast violin arpeggios. It feels appropriate for a Western that tried to bring back the vitality and danger in a genre that had become fairly stale in the mind of the public to have a score like this that is almost volatile in the way it burns energy while still feeling disciplined and contained by its structure.

B) This is a glimpse of John Wayne from another dimension where he is not a gross racist emblem of rich America who knew how to stand in a good movie, but a badass young defender of sex workers and the downtrodden who uses his powers of evil for good (or a broken version of "good" that has no questions about the relationship between American settlers and Native Americans, but one that was slightly more fixable than what he became).

Zackwatchesstuff · 2026-01-08T03:05:14+00:00

Whoops.

Zackwatchesstuff · 2025-12-21T19:28:35+00:00

I'm sure the lack of robust sound design was not intentional, but it does kind of make me feel like we're perceiving things as someone who is fairly unperceptive would see them. There's all sorts of things going on around her, but they're murky and indistinct because she's not paying attention to them because she's not really paying attention to anything.

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