Wang Chung's "To Live and Die In L.A." soundtrack - C/D

I'd sooner place Wang Chung alongside more ambitious bands that the tepid likes of those no-mark losers. i'd say Wang Chung were more akin to Re-Flex (as in "The Politics of Dancing") and maybe Modern English that lumpen Survivor.

why in the name of god wasn't the remake of MIAMI VICE *anything* like this movie?

i was just thinking about this movie. shotgun to the face so painful!

the most shocking offing of the lead character since PSYCHO.

anyone who doesn't like this soundtrack is a nutter.

great movie, great soundtrack

it must be the weather that keeps bringing me back to this.

Just got this over the wknd after catching it on cable -- I'd totally forgotten the shotgun to the face! Anyway, I'm really enjoying this and agree the Bangalter remix should be forthcoming (and re the Daft Punk "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" cover -- you could be sure the "Everybody Wang Chung tonight would have major vocoder). Wonderif there's a "complete" boot of this w all the incidental music as well.

I'm halfway through this film.

it's rad.

Title track = ACE AS SHIT

i saw this movie last night on 35mm. when "shotgun to the face" happened at the end, the crowd was silent for a few seconds and then up near the front there was one girl who just quietly said "oh no!"

Still the best "breath" pad eva. Movie hasn't aged a day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8s42fbKjtM

If I dig up the review I wrote of this record for my high-school newspaper, will post here ASAP.

haha I did one, too

that sucker is lost to the sands of time tho

also I'm pretty sure I own this soundtrack on vinyl

^ I have two copies, one mint/plastic sleeved, the other a water-damaged Salvation Army 50-cent pickup. Geffen pressed ridiculously high-quality vinyl pre-DGC.

William Friedkin liner notes:

“It will come as no surprise to anyone who has listened to Points on the Curve that Jack Hues and Nick Feldman are two of the move innovative musicians around.

It might also come as no surprise to listeners of their music that while their sound is contemporary, their musical orientation is classical….Strauss, Wagner, Schoenberg, Stravinsky.
Their work stands out for me from the rest of contemporary music, which is why I asked them to create an original score for the film To Live and Die in L.A.

What they finally recorded has not only enhanced the film — it has given it a deeper, more powerful, dimension.

While mixing the sound track I was struck by the inseparable flow of one musical piece into another.

Listening to the album, just now I discovered, to my surprise, that each track also stands out on its own — and delivers its own statement.

For me this is not only an exciting film score, but a fine piece of modern music.”

I still love the title track, I listen to it often.

just watched this on canks rec and the car chase is so good, it's like one half if kafka made a car chase, one half video game with endless baddies

you think you lost the tail but then baddies show up everywhere people running around with assault rifles, you start going the wrong way down the highway, your partners in the back seat ready to hurl, questioning his very existence...

William Friedkin = better composer of film than liner notes.

Good score tho.

The synth-pop thread bought me back to this ace album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7SwJ2bTAwc

Wait is such an earworm that the first time I watched the film I went a full week with it in my head when I fell asleep and still there when I woke up in the morning.

I think of this album and 1984: for the love of big brother as great examples of a band creating a soundtrack through songs, and landing somewhere between pop songs and something more experimental.

Fuckin incredible movie

innit.

I've owned the soundtrack for years but unbelievably I hadn't seen the movie until last night. I love that even if you take away the 80s tropes, it's still a great gritty b-movie crime noir: hammy/overwrought acting, killer soundtrack, moral bankruptcy, no movie stars. A bigger budget would have ruined it.

it's like one half if kafka made a car chase, one half video game with endless baddies

^^^^^

My only issue is that there isn't a 20min long remix of the title song, but even then I'm afraid that it would be too short.

watching this again tonight and goddamn robby muller is a total fucking genius, so much of this movie looks incredible

real talk tho: has there ever been a leading man as bandy-legged as william petersen? motherfucker would have no chance of stopping a pig in a passage

Fucking classic & this thread reminds me I have a copy of TLADILA and might watch it tonight

do it, let’s be tladila buddies

"hold it right there fella!"

also psyched to see To Live and Shave in LA here in a week and a half

wait sorry

"Right there fella!"

this script is great, moment to moment it's kind of stupid in terms of dialogue but the overall arc and characters are so incredible that it works.

willem dafoe is so perfectly reptilian in this

One of my fav films ever

Evening viewing sorted, thanks brahs

this movie hits you like a shotgun blast to the face

The money making sequence is great. I don't know if that is exactly how it is done, but it looks authentic.

yeah, it’s gorgeous to look at and it’s great procedural filmmaking a la the safecracking in thief

(and this movie is better than anything michael mann ever did imo)

it’s gorgeous to look at

Its best feature IMO. Cinematography by the great Robby Müller

yeah between this and repo man muller shot two of the greatest los angeles movies ever

two L.A. movies that specifically avoided the usual L.A. cliches except for the “brave heroes” opening scene in Beverly Hills, which the movie walks back so far on that by the end the brave hero is revealed as a legitimate psychopath.

Can you guys name any other great-looking “L.A. in the ’70s/’80s” movies off top of your head? I once had a thread on this topic on the IMDb messageboard for “The Driver,” but they deleted their boards. There were surprisingly few suggestions...

The Driver is a solid one. Night Moves is half-L.A. but it’s pretty great. Very Rockford Files-type location shooting.

Hardcore, Straight Time, The Long Goodbye — all good L.A. films from this period, the former is great if you’re a Paul Schrader fan. The latter two are great, period.

The Hidden is an outstanding eighties L.A. film, great locations throughout Hollywood, works as both a cop thriller and horror/sci-fi flick.

body double? the long goodbye?

and if we’re defining 70s as the era the movies were made in rather than set in, chinatown

two votes for the long goodbye!

kinda feel like die hard counts

Thanks, that's helpful! Haven't heard of and/or seen most of those.
(xp - I've seen Die Hard, ha ha)

the 1982 film Vice Squad w/Season Hubley and Wings Hauser, with the latter as a psychopathic pimp, is really something else. Outstanding Hollywood locations, extremely sleazy low-rent vibe.

Masters burning his painting dissolving into clear blue sky

i think about this shot like once a month

oh yeah miracle mile is a good call - it’s a kind of weird companion piece to this now that I think of it

both have the walls closing in on the main characters until a bummer of an ending

night of the comet is another good la movie imo

MM is an all-time favorite of mine

i think about this shot like once a month

― flamenco blorf (BradNelson), Wednesday, June 20, 2018 3:27 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i wrote it into a pitchfork review once lol

miracle mile is a real marvel of genre-mashing, there’s not much else out there in the nuclear-nihilism romance category

Haven't seen it probably since the 80s, but I remember "52 Pick-Up" being pretty good. Finally got around to reading the Elmore Leonard book a few years back and wanted to see it again, but have not re-watched it. It's a pretty grim story.

I'd think you could stretch to include "Less than Zero" for 80s dark and glitzy LA.

It's not LA noir, but for trashy 80s crime movies I have been wanting re-watch "I, the Jury", "Body Heat" and "Year of the Dragon" again. I loved crime movies like that as a teenager. There are a couple of others already mentioned like "Body Double" and "Into the Night" that I would like to see again too.

"Black Rain" is another one that looks really amazing, even if the movie is pretty pulpy too. That movie would be good for people that are doing all that 80s synth soundtrack music to cut up as a video with the big motorcycle sequence and the crazy rain used in that movie.

"Into the Night" is one of my favorite movies that no-one usually knows. The scene with David Bowie and Carl Perkins as hit men facing off against each other is a classic.

52 Pick-Up is a nice choice, that movie is extremely trashy in the best sense. And very sweaty. Everyone in that movie sweats off ten pounds.

It's kinda wild that Ann Margaret is in that role.

The Outside Man is a great 70s L.A. crime film. Jean-Louis Trintignant as a hitman who can barely speak English double-crossed and left stranded in L.A., chased all over the city by a manic Roy Schneider ("Where's Frenchie?!!"). Great locales, lots of funny bits with a surreal edge - Jean-Claude Carrière was co-writer. The climatic shoot-out in a funeral home is memorable, and the final shot, while not as shocking as the climax of TLADILA, is even more agonizing and downbeat.

Ann Margret's in it too!

To Live and Die in LA will always be a classic to me. Pitch black darkness. Touching that brings out interesting shit in a person.

Shifting gears, Mann's Manhunter is good for the toll it takes on someone getting into the heads of psychopathic serial killers. I've had to do that in my own professional work, wouldn't recommend it!

They don't make enough "REAL" movies anymore. Always about fantasy dudes who face no consequences for facing the horrors of life.

Can you guys name any other great-looking “L.A. in the ’70s/’80s” movies off top of your head?

I remember the movie Angel being kind of popular in the 80s. High school honor student by day. Hollywood hooker by night.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_(1984_film)

Just saw this movie in the theater tonight. What was the point of the whole subplot with John Turturro's character, Carl Cody? Chance gets him out of jail so Cody will help him get to Rick Masters; Cody tricks Chance and escapes; Chance eventually gets him back... and that's it? Quite a bit of the movie is dedicated to all this, but it doesn't seem to lead anywhere. The person who actually connects Chance and Vukovich with Masters is Masters's crooked lawyer. What am I missing?

I remember seeing 52 Pick-Up on VHS when I was maybe in junior high and being genuinely shocked by how sleazy it seemed. I wanted to see how it held up now that I'm old and jaded, so I bought the recent Blu-Ray edition and...holy fuck, it might even be sleazier than I remembered. John Glover is amazing in it.

this movie doesn't seem to be available to stream or rent online

Not sure if this works for everyone..
https://youtu.be/jAM74dx9u4A
(never saw the film myself, something for tonight :)

Re-watched 52 Pick-Up a few months ago with my wife and I’d say it doesn’t quite hold up the way I remembered. John Glover is still great but the ending is silly and abrupt and the darker strokes about the underworld that really struck me back then seem very tame and drawn too broadly now.

the 1982 film Vice Squad w/Season Hubley and Wings Hauser, with the latter as a psychopathic pimp, is really something else. Outstanding Hollywood locations, extremely sleazy low-rent vibe.

Not sure if this works for everyone..
https://youtu.be/jAM74dx9u4A
(never saw the film myself, something for tonight :)

― willem, Friday, July 13, 2018 12:18 PM (eight months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

willem eh....

Every fibre of my being wants to mention Night of the Comet and Beverly Hills Cop 2 as films that have a particular Los Angeles feel, but I'm months too late. Beverley etc isn't a patch on the original but at the very least it looks awesome. The two films made extensive use of graduated neutral density filters, particularly Night of the Comet, and as a consequence my mental image of Los Angeles is of exaggerated dark red/burnt orange skies. And people wearing mirrored Ray-Bans.

Cobra! Cobra. Mirrored Ray-Bans. Cobra is set in Los Angeles. It was shot at sunset so that everything looked slightly purple. Has there ever been a more iconic single shot in all of cinema than the opening close-up of Sylvester Stallone in Cobra? If there is, I haven't seen it. I've never visited the United States so my only experience of the country comes from films, and when I think of Los Angeles I think of purple sunsets and people wearing mirrored Ray-Bans. I imagine the reality is completely the opposite. Green sunsets and people wearing slippers on their face probably.

Blue Thunder! Another film set in Los Angeles with Ray-Bans. And those storm drains. I will never know how the people of Los Angeles react when they see Los Angeles on the screen. For them it is everyday life whereas for me it is not real.

Happy to find this album is on Spotify...

I've never visited the United States so my only experience of the country comes from films

i live in the states and cobra is basically a documentary.

Just realized how this album and Eurythmics' 1984 (for the love of big brother) relate to each other. Each has a combination of a few pop singles and instrumental scoring.

Also just saw the video for the title song, which makes it look like Wang Chung is editing the movie too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf4x36XKhsM

So the ever great Kaleb Horton posted this yesterday

Finally saw To Live And Die In LA. Robby Muller’s cinematography is astonishing, but more importantly: pound for pound, that car chase in oncoming traffic on the freeway is my favorite car chase ever. It’s every LA driving nightmare I’ve ever had come to life.

— Kaleb Horton (@kalebhorton) September 20, 2019

Which prompted me to dig out my copy (that Shout Factory Blu-ray is a fine, fine thing) and made me realize that the editing really is unheralded. So many scenes that start abruptly, end abruptly and are exactly the length they need to be.

And that further makes me think of the music because of the shots/edits that brutally cut through the score -- which was a great move.

Every time this thread gets bumped I get excited about watching this movie again

it’s so fucking good

This article made me think of the above discussion.... I hadn’t heard of a number of the movies mentioned.

Envying Jim O’Rourke’s TLADILA tee..

prob my fav soundtrack ever...

Why you chasing me?!
Why you running?!
Because your chasing me!

I love this movie so much. Recently watched Heat which is also a force. But where Heat has some towering moments, LA hits the peak at the start and never lets up.

I saw a 35mm print of this recently and the Wang Chung soundtrack is surprisingly abrasive in spots, I was really struck how in a sequence like the airport chase it was just pounding drum machine clatter.

LA is definitely hot orange, room-temp Michelob, cocaine sweating

Heat is cool blue, Lexapro come-down, cocaine sweating

Yeah my film-induced-narcoleptic wife kept waking up whenever the sound track would kick in just to ask me to turn it down. It definitely comes in hard. Going to be rolling some Wang Chung in the background this next week, stunning soundtrack

every moment of the wang chung soundtrack hits like a knife (in a good way)