To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

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General		Extras
Category	Action	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1985
Running Time	111:07
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (51:58)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	William Friedkin
Studio Distributor	MGM	Starring	William L. Petersen Willem Dafoe John Pankow Debra Feuer John Turturro Darlanne Fluegel Dean Stockwell Steve James Robert Downey Sr. Michael Greene Christopher Allport Jack Hoar Valentin de Vargas
Case	?
RPI	?	Music	Darren Costin Nick Feldman Jack Hues

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Polish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English for the Hearing Impaired German for the Hearing Impaired French Italian Spanish Dutch Swedish Finnish Norwegian Portuguese Greek Slovenian Croatian	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	Yes, brief focus on Coke and Miller beer.
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, a quick repeat of a shot of Peterson.

   Peterson is Richard Chance, an on-the-edge, base-jumping US Secret Service agent hell-bent on catching Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe), the counterfeiter who killed his partner. Teaming up with new offsider John Vukovich (John Pankow), Chance starts putting the squeeze on anyone he can find: Masters’ tough-talking courier, Carl Cody (John Turturro); smooth lawyer Bob Grimes (Dean Stockwell); even his own girlfriend/snitch, Ruth Lanier (Darlanne Fluegel). And as the hunt goes on, Chance and his partner find themselves going further and further off the rails… Directed by William Friedkin, whose The French Connection had redefined the modern police thriller, TLADILA was critically acclaimed but commercially shunned on initial release. It’s easy to see how audiences might have been turned off by the unsympathetic protagonists, the gruesome violence, and the occasionally even more gruesome nudity. And yet that very non-commerciality is a big part of what makes TLADILA so good. Comfortable expectations are thwarted regularly in this movie; there are plenty of twists, and I didn’t see many of them coming. Friedkin was clearly striving for something more than entertainment: an inquiry into the fine distinction between fearlessness and psychosis, perhaps.

   Thanks to Friedkin’s own fearlessness (as the director of The Exorcist, he was no stranger to shock) and to a hefty jigger of arty crosscutting, TLADILA is indeed something out of the ordinary. Also helping to make it so are strong performances by the three central figures. Peterson shows us the cold blankness that lies behind Chance’s hyper-macho swagger. Dafoe is mesmerisingly ruthless as the brilliant, feral, pansexual Masters. And Pankow goes through a startlingly credible psychological transformation under the pressures of the plot. Supporting actors also do well – although Turturro, admittedly hugely talented and trying manfully, is difficult to buy as a tough guy. Even in more conventional cop-movie terms, this is a standout: the big car chase, for instance, is one of the best I’ve ever seen, and completely insane to boot. TLADILA is not a movie to watch with your aged parent, nor your young child, nor anyone with a weak stomach for blood, pasty bottoms, or New Wave music. But for just about everyone else, this one’s a winner.

Video

   The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, and is 16x9 enhanced.

   Sharpness is adequate; not great, but adequate. Shadow detail is not very good; a lot gets lost in dark scenes, although if your setup is good enough you will see William’s Peterson at 43:30. There is no low level noise.

   Colours are relatively muted; TLADILA takes place in a dirty, smoggy, industrial LA, not pools-and-beaches LaLaLand, and was filmed with an eye for grit and naturalism. When there are clean, pure, well lit tones, as on the titles at 6:00, they come across pretty cleanly. A flaming room at 101:26 looks simply gorgeous, in a scary kind of way.

   No MPEG artefacts were evident, but aliasing afflicts those ever-troublesome blinds at 43:45. The main image problems come from a whole lotta grain, which lends a slight shimmer to everything, and from a simply enormous number of film artefacts – dots and blotches and hairs and assorted crud all over the picture. Some scenes are much dirtier than others, exteriors especially, but no part of this film is as clean as it should be.

   The subtitles were excellent, slightly but wisely compressing dialogue for readability’s sake.

   This is an RSDL disc with the layer change at 51:58, reasonably well placed on a scene change.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

   There are six audio tracks on this disc: a default English Dolby Digital 5.1 track at 448 Kbps, a French Dolby Digital 5.1 track at 384 Kbps, and German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks at 192 Kbps. I listened to the English track, and sampled the rest briefly. The Polish track features a guy reading the lines over, and slightly after, the still-audible original dialogue. It's terrible! But who really cares?

   Dialogue was quite clear, very faithfully rendered, and directed almost exclusively to the centre channel, just as it should be. There were no instances of detectable hiss or crackle, except for just the tiniest bit of distortion on a blaring truck horn at 79:29.

   Dialogue sync was not really a problem, but it was obvious that a lot of dialogue had been looped in – probably because of so much of the film was shot at loud, public locations. Mouth movements almost always matched, but the dialogue had that studio-recorded quality to it.

   Most of the soundtrack was composed and performed by New Wave band Wang Chung, a trio of Brits who made it somewhat big in the States with their synth- and drum machine-heavy music and ambiguous looks. It’s way 80s, and dates the movie(or carbon dates it, as Buffy would say). But on the other hand, it’s quite good for what it is, and has been well integrated into the film. The music has been cleanly transferred, but doesn’t seem to make intelligent use of the potential of 5.1 audio; it’s not so much spread across the speakers, as smeared: a lot is in the centre channel, most of the rest in the fronts, and just a tiny echo in the surrounds. Not a heck of a lot of musical data goes into the .1 bass channel.

   Despite the remix to 5.1, and all the gunshots, and the extraordinary car chase sequence, this is not a very active surround track. In fact, the surrounds barely seem to be there; they just get a little trickle of echoes and background sounds already present in the other channels.

   The subwoofer, which should have had a field day here with roaring engines and cordite booms, instead found itself with an anemic data stream.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

   Not even a pretence of a special feature is to be found here. Why? There’s a ton of loot on the US release. How hard could it have been to stick it on here? Gah!

Menu

   The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;

• Director’s commentary by William Friedkin
• 30 minute Counterfeit World making-of documentary
• Alternate ending and related featurette
• Deleted scene and related featurette
• Still gallery
• Theatrical trailer
• Bonus trailer

• Nothing

   Image and sound quality seem to be no better in the Region 1 release, but in the extras department it beats the pants off of the Region 4 contender.

   The video quality is bearable, but should have been better.

   The audio quality is fine, but disappointingly unambitious.

   The extras are aggravatingly nonexistant.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall