William Friedkin

Abel Ferrara has a similar vibe to TL&DILA, but he obviously predates Tarantino. Trying to think of something else post 1994.

End of Watch had it both ways: All Cops Are Good and They Are Also The Biggest Street Gang In LA

Listening to Siskel & Ebert episodes from the early '90s, I was shocked to think that this was my world for a long time: choosing from forgettable thrillers and shit SNL comedies. Stuff like Malice and Guarding Tess hit #1 at the box office.

Also one year before Tarantino: Mike Figgis' Internal Affairs.

Disclosure, With Honors, On Deadly Ground, The Specialist

There's a Friedkin program going on here at the Waterloo rep: The Exorcist/French Connection/Sorcerer. Hour-long drive, not sure if I'll rouse myself for anything.

All those Joe Eszterhas things.

Maybe I'm misremembering how the storyline goes, but I recall Q&A maybe having some very very superficial similarities with TLADILA. Just in terms of the nolte character, and how his storyline plays out. I forget if he was quite obviously a villain at the very start.

I took a date to see a preview screening of Jade. That one didn't go as well as I hoped.

xp - my favorite tidbit about With Honors was where they had to dress up the University of Illinois campus to look like Harvard:

The exterior of Winthrop House appears, but the interiors pictured are not that of actual Harvard houses, and the last scene of the movie was shot at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The buildings and surroundings were dressed up to look as if it were Harvard and many of the people in the final scene are Illinois students. The graduation scene was shot while the local climate in Illinois had not allowed for the trees to bloom leaves and so artificial branches and leaves were stapled on.

I think Q&A--which didn't hold up all that well last time I saw it; some of it is really heavy-handed--is closer to Internal Affairs, with the Gere/Nolte characters very similar.

Yeah obv TLADILA is more of an action film, which maybe makes the story arc even more startling to an extent.

I think the Johnnie To film Drug War shares its cynicism and bleakness and brutality, and the ostensible hero being a destructive force is there too. But it's not the same type of movie at all, it's more an indictment of the system and the drug war.

Watched The Exorcist for the first time this weekend. It was quite an achievement from a technical standpoint but I didn't find it scary at all; I guess I'm 100% not a Catholic anymore. (The scene where the doctors tell Ellen Burstyn that Catholics still believe in exorcism, like they're trying to keep from laughing in her face, was pretty amazing.)

think sicario attempts some level of the amoral ambiguity of TLADILA?

There's a Friedkin program going on here at the Waterloo rep: The Exorcist/French Connection/Sorcerer. Hour-long drive, not sure if I'll rouse myself for anything.

― clemenza, Monday, 18 September 2023 17:16 (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

id drive an hour and back for any one of them on the big screen tbh

My local theatre's doing Sorcerer, Cruising, TL&D, Killer Joe, The Guardian, and The Exorcist - I'm hoping to go to them all.

They also showed The Wages of Fear the same week as Sorcerer, which... cool idea, but I couldn't fathom wanting to watch that story again so soon.