Word: friedkin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only bad news is that two current thrillers by past masters of this now resurrected form, William Friedkin (The French Connection) and Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) do more to send the genre back to the graveyard than they do to set the spirit free. After watching To Live and Die in L.A. and Target, it doesn't take a film critic to see that Friedkin's style, once straightforward, has become hyperkinetic and trendy in this era of music videos, while Arthur Penn's more innovative and personal approach to filmmaking has become increasingly more traditional...
...FRIEDKIN'S "HOT" STYLE, acknowledged to be one of the highlights of To Live and Die In L.A., is not a take-off of "Miami Vice," as some have said. Instead, the director has simply tried to cash in on a technique which he used before rock videos and "Miami Vice" even existed, in underrated films like Sorcerer and Cruising. The "look" in To Live and die in L.A., achieved in collaboration with cinematographer Robby Muller (Paris, Texas) and production designer Lilly Kilvert, is splashy and steamy, a meld of industrial wasteland and high-tech decor with a cumulative presence...
...theme that would have worked better perking just below the surface than splattered all over it. The film may keep you somewhere near the edge of your seat while you're watching it, and there's some good street-smart dialogue and acting, but everything here is subordinated to Friedkin's bad-boy style of the world. It's just not much...
BOTH FREIDKIN'S picture and Penn's boast elaborate set-piece car chases. Friedkin's French Connection- style wrong-way run on the L.A. freeways may be more spectualar, but Arthur Penn's chase scene, dismissed by most critics, is exciting in a precise, stripped-down way. It gets an equal measure of audience applause in the theatres, presumably because of rooting interest in the father-son duo at the heart of the film...
Penn's film is more likable than Friedkin's, but finally less interesting. Personal filmmaking, however shallow, takes the edge over Target's more formidable, corporate approach. In the great scheme of things, if there were a way to combine Friedkin's world view with Penn's compassion for his characters, the two films put together might have made a good picture...