Live and Die in LA was directed, produced, written by, and stars Attila Korosi as an ER doctor from Eastern Europe whose sister (Anita Korosi) comes to America and is promptly arrested for selling pirated video games. His teacher buddy (Ishaan Bahri) suggests they make some extra cash to pay her fine so she can get out of jail (?) by doing a job for crime boss Robert LaSardo. On the other side, rival crime boss Carlos (Michael Flores) has a son, Daniel (Daniel Hovey), who wants to be an astronaut when he grows up, and he's encouraged by his teacher (the same Ishaan Bahri) to follow his dreams. But what happens when Bahri's job for LaSardo puts him in direct opposition to Daniel's Father?
After the credits there's a seven-minute featurette where we get Attila Korosi's backstory, plus some insight into the people who starred in the film, and that featurette was much more compelling than this film was. And I get it, you're making a movie, you want to tell the story you want to tell, but we've seen crime dramas like this before, and the Sliding Doors/Choose Your Own Adventure/Butterfly Effect element isn't enough of a twist for me to make it special. On the other hand, how Attila Korosi grew up in the war torn former Yugoslavia with dreams of being a movie director, and earned an athletic scholarship to come to the US so he could make it happen, that I wanted to know more about; or when he talked to actors in the film behind the scenes and they talked about their real lives, one of them saying he had to join a gang when he was 13, give me more of that. We don't get a lot of character development in this, especially with the Sliding Doors element, but it felt like that was something Korosi was really in touch with after watching that featurette, so for me it felt like a missed opportunity. For example, we get this seed of something with Daniel wanting to be an astronaut, but beyond that, we don't know how he feels about what his father does for work outside of a comment here or there; but perhaps even more importantly, we don't know how Carlos feels about what he does for work and what he wants for his kids. Carlos didn't just appear as a fully formed gangster in East LA, at one time he was Daniel too. How did he get there? And what does he want for his sons? The other thing is, I think this wants to be a more character-driven drama with some action elements, but then we have scene where a guy is chopping another guy's hand off, from which there's kind of a sense of what am I watching? There was also a lot of animal brutality, between some actual scenes and these animation interludes, and as someone who loves animals, because I was on the fence about this film, that makes it a pass for me, but reading some other reviews, they didn't seem to mind that part of it, so you may be okay with it. In that sense it works as a crime drama 80-minute time killer that you can stream on Tubi.
I want to be clear though, whether I liked this movie or not, the story of Attila Korosi coming to the US and successfully making movies is fantastic, and should be applauded. Where does that leave you, the viewer, though? In the post-credits featurette, Korosi said he wanted to make something that rivals the big studios, but this has a vanity project feel that hurts it in that endeavor. I'm not sure why Korosi's character is in the film, he's almost getting in the way, like a character that one of the producers or money people insisted on being written into the film and played by their son or daughter who wants to get into the business. This isn't to say that just by starring in a movie that you wrote and directed makes it a vanity project, but when I think of the movies that do this right, the character played by the writer and producer is either a secondary character, or if they are a lead character, they generally don't have it all together; whereas the vanity projects, that character always has the right answers and always knows what they're doing. This might not be full-on Alexander Nevsky or Neil Breen vanity project, but it's not Nate Hill or Nate Shepka, who are able to do this right, either. There's still enough here that I want to see Korosi's other films, and again, just the fact that this was not only made, but competently made, is an accomplishment unto itself.
The big name in this is Robert LaSardo, who has a small role as the big gangster. It's what you want from him when you're making a movie like this and you're putting a lot of budget behind getting him cast so you can use his name and face on the tin. The thing is though, because Korosi used a lot of inexperienced actors, LaSardo stands out as this natural in every scene he's in. I wonder about that, is that a LaSardo problem, or a Korosi problem, or maybe a me problem because I'd always taken LaSardo for granted and never really considered how great an actor he really is. I also hadn't ever really seen him in a situation like this, I usually catch him in something that has other big names, but even then I should've recognized that he was value-add in those circumstances. I will not make that mistake again, here's to you Mr. LaSardo, you're one of the great ones. The other two names you may recognize are Richard Cabral and Cesar Garcia, who both have a lot of acting credits in high-profile productions, and who were both in the post-credits featurette and talked about how the subject matter in this film really hit close to home, but, again, their personal stories were more compelling than the film itself for me.
The animal brutality thing is worth mentioning here, because it is a recurring theme throughout the film. It starts with these animated sequences where a caterpillar was making her way through the forest so she could become a butterfly or a moth. In one of these, she moves a branch out of her way, which causes a kitten to inspect what happened to the branch, and a snake eats the kitten while she's away from her mother. I'm sorry, what? I know that's what I'm looking for in my entertainment, snakes eating kittens! And the thing is, I didn't see this mentioned in any of the other reviews I checked out, so maybe animations about snakes eating kittens aren't the turn-offs for them that it is for me--or maybe Korosi was able to find a group of likeminded reviewers that enjoy the idea of cartoons where snakes eat kittens. Beyond that, we have a real life cat menacing, and probably eating two mice in a cage, and then LaSardo messing with a rat before he feeds it to a snake. As you can imagine, there was no "no animals were harmed in the making of this film" disclaimer at the end, but I think, put simply, if you can't properly simulate animal violence in your films and have to do it for real, then you shouldn't be making them, so hopefully those scenes weren't as real as they looked.
Finally, this was a shot of Ishaan's phone while he was waiting for Korosi to complete his transaction with Carlos on behalf of LaSardo's character. The deal was, if Korosi was in for more than ten minutes, then Ishaan was going to come in after him. Let's breakdown what we're seeing here. First, he was looking at Instagram before this. Did he get a Stopwatch notification while he was scrolling? Does that even exist? How else would that button to go back to Instagram appear in the upper right like that though? Also, he has his alarm set. Was he worried about falling asleep during the deal? When was the alarm set for? 11 minutes into the future? The other thing that's interesting is the dots instead of bars to show signal strength. I believe the switch from bars to dots was an iOS that I couldn't get because I was holding onto my i4 at that time, and by then I'd stopped getting new iOS updates, and by the time I got a new iPhone, they'd switched back to bars. Does that mean this scene was shot five or six years before the film came out, or was this an old phone like mine that used an older iOS? Finally, he only has 30% battery left. If it were me, and I were pulling off some job like this and I'd never done it before, you know I'd have had my phone charged because I'd be afraid to leave anything to chance. Ishaan wasn't as concerned I guess.
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi, which is actually what I did too because I had trouble hearing the dialog, and the screener didn't have captions. If you're looking for a crime drama and want to support indie creatives, I think streaming this on Tubi would be a good way to go. Be sure to stick around for the post-credits featurette though, because that was some really great stuff, the best stuff in the movie for me.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8878716/
No comments:
Post a Comment