William Friedkin
Vivere e Morire a Los Angeles

Metropolitan noir (perhaps the greatest crime film of the 80s) tense and pessimistic, nervous and feverish, Friedkin does not reassure us because he is a lone wolf (remember Cruising?), Friedkin's Los Angeles is semi-deserted and fiery red, a city that today could never be photographed and explored as Friedkin managed to do in 1985, the director doesn’t get lost in the most rhetorical simulacra and fetishes like a statuesque blonde’s ass wandering around Santa Monica Blvd, but instead explores its fringes, such as truck depots, desert warehouses, and the enormous highways that surround.

It starts as a film within the canons of the crime genre, only to gradually become a disillusioned experiment of delirium. About three-quarters of the way through, an unpredictable plot twist occurs which I will not reveal out of respect for those who have yet to see it, but this unexpected twist will manage to alter the classic patterns of this heavily overused and clichéd film genre, at least in the big productions, thus bestowing immortality upon this film, but the film is all like that, fucking cynical, with no idealists, neither good nor bad, just people (including the FBI) who are literally at the mercy of the epidermal shocks of violence and transgression. It’s hard to imagine today’s Hollywood’s benevolent industry tolerating the firm grip of Friedkin, yet the same director now sadly languishes in oblivion.

Extraordinary gem: the craziest, most interminable, and infernal chase (3 adjectives before the object, wow, I should’ve added a fourth and resembled that son of a bitch ndr) on four wheels in cinema history, at least for me. If I'm not mistaken, it’s the first wrong-way chase in cinema history, and it's like "WHAT" I shoot hectoliters of kite-crack into my frontal lobes, Friedkin parodies himself (remember the chase in his other masterpiece "The French Connection" from 1971?) there you go, he improves it, sure I miss Gene "fuck dub" Hackman a lot but here we don’t have the usual super-blockbusters brawlers, instead we have unprecedented filming solutions that alternate between hyper frantic cuts and limp subjective shots, managing to say something new in the apathetic genre of "car chase" in American cinema (tarantino grindauzzz trivial stuff dieee!!!), a scene that could remind anyone of their past. It reminds me for instance of when we used to steal wine from a farmer, I had an XT 400 that did about a hundred ('I did' the PX in third gear on one wheel), or when we almost always sped at 160 km/h with the Yamaha FZR 1000 and I popped wheelies almost from a stop by adjusting only with the rear brake (continuing for meters) and then stretched its neck on the expressway at 150 km/h at night.

To Live and Die in L.A. is nothing but the last days of no one, it is the echo of a period born and died together, it's the shadow of the shadow of the shadow. Whoever directs knows there's not much to say. And indeed, the film doesn’t conclude, Why should life conclude?? How can it end if it’s a bullshit that never took off, feeling bland as farts, now that’s a meaningful feeling, what remains is just a generation of barefaced morphinomaniacs, and death is a lighter click that takes everyone without distinctions of cachet and primadonnas (eheheheh) indeed, there are no protagonists in this damned film, only extras, reappearing several times, then disappearing, no immortal soul, just shards of glass, although some are mephistophelian: Sir Willem Dafoe white forger as black, the lord of laundering.

To live, to die, and not to rise again.