William Friedkin
Vivere e Morire a Los Angeles

Metropolitan noir (perhaps the greatest crime film of the '80s) cruel and pessimistic in a Scaruffian way and a trailblazer in a Pretazzi-like manner for the '90s with phenolic acid, rock and roll, Lenzi, Di Leo, but as we well know apart from neorealism and "mondo cane" there have been no other Italian "academies", only many geni(t)-al explosions/implosions, the current Italian cinema does not exist, you know it better than me, you know I can't live with you I kill myself uuuaaaah, you know it better than me that Grignani's paradise destination was nothing more than a squalid bar toilet where housewives (and a world that has gone away), school teachers, and Gianluca Grignani went to snort cocaine, news from 3 days ago I don't tell fibs, Grignani was caught with coke in the boot, tons, shovels of snowy Ezio Greggio oh you know? Oh, I know they said it on studio aperto, let's close it, that's why Friedkin's bastards are cooler than today's squalid Grignani-like actors, all handsome and screw like gods, all pretty Briatores, ready? Set! Go!(g)with the damn priest!

Friedkin doesn't reassure us because he is a loose cannon (remember cruising?) and then it's like "CHE" I shoot hectoliters of kite-crack into my frontal lobes, coke is the drug of the standardized bourgeois of today, what a happy end trip-hop!, samba!, what a fuck-dub, among subtle pretty funky grooves of hell and Latin American flooding the beaches of Imperia, assembled with stylish pretty hell aftertaste from an ever so lush production.

Art needs rot, and you have to see this film.

You have to see what happens when there are neither good nor bad people but only those literally at the mercy of the violent and transgressive skin shocks, even the cops in this film are like that, because in the '80s coke wasn't like today when even my 78-year-old grandfather and my 16-year-old sister take it.

Extraordinary tidbit: the most crazed and adrenaline-fueled car chase in cinema history, and Friedkin satirizes himself (remember the chase in The French Connection annus mirabilis 1971??) here, he improves it, he self-improves, and then here we don't have the usual super-blockbuster fighters, instead we have original solutions of filming that alternate rapid cuts to impossible subjective shots, that manage to say something new in the apathetic genre of "car chases" in American cinema (Tarantino grindauzzz elementary stuff dieeee), a scene that can remind each of us of the past, to me it recalls, for example, when we used to steal wine from a farmer, I had an XT 400 that did a hundred ('I did it' the PX in third on one wheel :), or when we almost always pushed to 160 km/h with the Yamaha FZR 1000 and I wheelied almost from a standstill leveling just with the rear brake (continuing for meters) and I went to push its neck on the freeway at 150 km/h by night.

To Live and Die in L.A., these are nothing but the last days of no one, it's the echo of a period born and dead together, it's the shadow of the shadow of the shadow. Who directs knows there's not much to say. And indeed the film doesn't end, because does life end?? How can it end if it's a crap-pile that never started, feeling dull as farts, now that's a significant feeling, what's left is just a generation of damn shaved morphine-boys, post-war equilibrium? No baby, it's called lobotomization. Give me anal sex give me Mereghetti's bones ground and smoked in a pipe with some methadone, give me electroshock and biopsy, and let's hope the head doctor isn't there; and indeed there are no protagonists in this damned film, only extras, repeatedly extras, and then gone, for me murky is the hypnotic element that becomes an encephalic vibromassager. Black as the holy father. No Mephistophelian soul. Only glass confetti. Willem Dafoe white colored black lord of laundering, the hidden part of the painting, the emergency exit that isn't there.

Enjoy your viewing.