Abel Ferrara - C/D

I'm not sure I've ever seen a worse film,

classic for ms.45, king of new york, the addiction. the funeral is pretty good too. but,yeah, spotty. driller killer is mostly good as artifact. i liked the crime story pilot. i even have a soft spot for china girl and fear city. king of new york is the jewel in the dirty crown.

http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/1627/badlieutenantsplsh.jpg

love this film

While some of them saw small or tiny or non-existent U.S. releases, try finding an Abel Ferrara film made from 2002-2009 on DVD. It’s not easy. “The only thing you need to see them is the internet,” he said. “Go find the torrents. That’s my big distributor. You got to leave it to that. They’re all on there. I just don’t want to find the one I’m working on. That’s the only thing that scares me. But just go on the internet for the rest.”

http://www.vogue.fr/culture/portrait/diaporama/abel-ferrara-presente-go-go-tales/7082

Just watched King of New York and was disappointed. What is it that people think is so great about it? Dialogue is cliche. Acting is spotty except for a couple of scenes with Caruso. Some scenes are too long and others too short. Only saving grace is Walken but he alone does not carry the film.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/102

Really liked this as a read for its novelty - a lot of flighty chops which don't make it onto film writing, but I haven't seen it.

what ppl think is so great about King of New York is that it's bad, obv

Biggie Smalls liked it well enough.

yes, Generations Y & Z look to dead gangsta rappers as the vanguard of film culture.

isn't there a Larry Semon Film Festival for you to attend, or something?!?

I have my quota of semen for the week

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/12250

hes got some miles on his for being 60

interesting they touch on a project w/ dafoe playing pasolini

cant imagine this 4:44 movie is good tho

the thing about KONY (whoa, makes you think) is not that it's not good but it's got this brutal momentum w/everyone in the film casting everything aside and trying to kill each other w/o regard for anything else and the actors kinda throw themselves into it really well imo and i love the OTTness and how everyone seems to be doing their own version of how to approach the material w/o much guidance. walken owns here, caruso is pretty exceptional, snipes and fishburne are great, victor argo is really good (as probably the only "decent" person in the entire film.) all of ferrara's films have this kind of energy, but i think this distills everything down to the basics nicely.

the graveyard scene is pretty tremendous, you think the film is going to take it from there in one direction but then walken shows up as if anticipating it and just finishes it there. not quite as awesome as the shotgun to the face at the end of 'to live and die in l.a.' but pretty dope regardless.

I really appreciate that you caught the levels of "owning," "great," "pretty exceptional," "pretty dope," "really good" ... the kind of discernment I expect from the minds of Cahiers du ILX.

done with film threads now I think, cept for the Snob ones

jesus spoilers for TL&DILA tho

SPOILER ALERT xxpost

morbs i really hope you don't keep that promise, you would be sorely missed.

by me especially

if i had a dollar for every time morbz stormed out of a thread (or type of thread) in a self-righteous huff, only to reappear to later to kvetch some more, i'd be in the 1% with enough to donate to another random ILXor to put him in the 1% as well.

EXCEPT I'VE NEVER BEEN OLDER and felt more like this board is a hueg waste of time.

quod erat demonstratum

how do you storm out of a thread?

After reading that essay above I am still unconvinced that KONY has anything to say.

Incidentally I just leared who Joseph Kony is today.

Her bad things about 4:44, except from those that think its amazing.

I'd like to see it, even if I've never been fully convinced of Abel Ferrara's talents.

35mm print in NYC Monday

http://www.ifccenter.com/films/ms-45/

oh sweet. obvs i can't see it but still.

i enjoyed his mulberry st doc.

his Depardieu film, taking off from the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case.

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-abel-ferraras-welcome-to-new-york

it's amazing how ppl have talked themselves into thinking jokey sleaze like Ms. 45 is "great"

which part disqualifies it, the jokiness or the sleaze?

Is Deparnude coming to the U.S.?

it's definitely something, no? it's a mess, and he definitely hasn't developed his talents much yet (not unlike some of cronenberg's earliest stuff in that regard), but i do think it makes an impact that other films don't. the "knowingness" of it isn't very endearing.

i think he's talented and i like a lot of his films (and TV episodes!) but the way that e.g. the french appreciate him gives me pause. that is, as some kind of atavistic modern primitive who represents the soul of urban america or what have you.

As someone who's interviewed Ferrara in person (and likes a lot of his movies—seeing Bad Lieutenant at the Angelika when it was brand new, especially coming in the wake of the comparatively ultra-slick King of New York, was like being punched in the face), I gotta say his public image is exactly that. This Nick Pinkerton column from 2013 kinda sums up how I feel, particularly this bit:

Ferrara’s concern with the relationship between surface and subterranean truths is nothing new. In fact, the director’s greatest creation is a character called “Abel Ferrara,” a shambling, grizzled, reckless, perpetually drugged-up walking staph infection who just happens to have lined up financing for and successfully completed the shooting of twenty-some films since 1976—hardly a likely accomplishment if this persona was the whole truth and nothing but, though Ferrara is careful not to let the mask slip before his public.

he isn't the first director to have a persona that's kind of belied by his films.... i just watched the john milius documentary and the guy comes across as a fabulist and self-mythologizer and asshole. it's hard to take his persona at all seriously. for example, the first thing he says in the film is that he isn't a "pure cinema" guy, that he doesn't care about images, that he just wants to tell a story. which may be true but it doesn't explain the best qualities of his films by a long shot.

I still was not prepared for Ms 45 being a campfest, that's all.

Look at what we have here:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/04/pasolini-review-abel-ferrara-willem-dafoe-venice-film

got a NYFF ticket for it just now

looking forward to this one, although i worry a little about the "last days" vampirish approach to the biopic (last 24 hrs etc.)

pretty much none of his films have played my little town for over a decade, so this is another i'll probably have to see on DVD

ferrara is one of those dudes who took a while to earn the accolades (or just the scandal) he achieved pretty early (esp from the french)

Morbz look forward to anything you say on this.

Be of some interest to see how much space he gives to the various conspiracies surrounding his death and all.

i kinda don't see him being especially concerned w/ that, and i think interviews suggest same

ah got it, frankly I wondered if the Xan Brooks piece might've said anything but I despise him so didn't make it beyond the headlines.

did you guys like the last days on earth one?

not seen anything since Go Go Tales (and before that -- Mary? i think i saw and disliked?)

mary was pretty terrible

i roundly enjoyed the mulberry street doc, he's a born actor really

upset with IFC Films

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/venice-director-abel-ferrara-attacks-730624

got tickets to the thursday screening of pasolini. now the question is, to what ferrara films should i subject my sensitive and empathetic wife in preparation?

Saw The Addiction for the first time in ~24 years last night, better than I remembered. Lili Taylor is really committed... and Edie Falco! Julian Schnabel also showed up to extemporize about seeing them shoot the Walken scene in his loft.

If you attend a Q&A during this, be ready for some rambling.

Ferrara says his longtime writer, Nicholas St John, would send him the scripts in the mail totally unaannounced. He quit the biz after Dangerous Game and now teaches special-needs kids.

Having interviewed the man in 2003/4, yeah, no thanks.

His DP was remembering having a rough time being newly sober during Bad Lieutenant, and AF grinned "What, you don't like shooting up with the director?"

btw last night's aud was full of friends/sycophants who applauded every credit

Fear City is a pretty entertaining bad movie. Billy Dee Williams' detective has a lot of invective vs Italians I will not quote here.

Nick Pinkerton on Pasolini:

The title role is played by Willem Dafoe, who at the time of filming was five years older than PPP would ever be, and who shares something of the director’s furrowed facial structure. He also embodies Pasolini’s pained intelligence, fingers pressed to his temple as though keeping something at bay. The one big hurdle here is that, while playing one of the major figures of postwar Italian culture, Dafoe is a Wisconsonian with a limited command of Italian. He and Ferrara overcome this problem by not addressing it at all, seemingly making up the linguistic rules as they go along. In the two scenes where he sits for interviews, Pasolini gives his answers in English. He only speaks at length in Italian in the film’s last half hour, during his assignation with Giuseppi “Pino the Frog” Pelosi (Damiano Tamilia), the seventeen-year-old prostitute who is to date the only person to have done time for Pasolini’s death, and who has since testified that there were other parties involved. It’s a strange but ultimately effective choice, for Pasolini aspired to be a transnational figure, and it’s only in his dealing with the boy that the cosmopolitan gives way to the provincial. Pasolini belongs to the world, but it’s Rome that killed him. (Rather more bafflingly, in the version of the film screened at the New York Film Festival, the English subtitling of Italian scenes was somewhat erratic.)

Abel Ferrara has always been more comfortable playing the role of the hood rat than the intellectual—more Pino the Frog than Pasolini—though how much of this act is a hustler’s foxiness is anyone’s guess. His line of BS is obviously effective, as he's traveled Europe with hat in hand to scrape together enough money for Pasolini, which he cowrote with Maurizio Braucci, and the result is recognizably an Abel Ferrara film. The script employs the countdown-to-judgment, death-trip structure that Ferrara has used a number of times before: Bad Lieutenant, ‘R Xmas, 4:44 Last Day on Earth. It’s tempting to attribute this to Ferrara’s Catholicism—the sense that a man is defined by the end of his life, the ritualistic counting down of the Stations of the Cross. Whatever the case, in following his own creative intuition, Ferrara has arrived at something near Pasolini’s own thinking, as per the statement from the latter’s ‘Observations on the Sequence Shot’: “It is only thanks to our death that our life serves to express ourselves.”

http://www.reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/1899/pasolini

King of NY def has the orange-and-blue thing going on

worth a look on Friday it seems

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review-tommaso-both-rues-and-relishes-the-power-of-the-artist/

Pinkerton:

https://www.artforum.com/film/nick-pinkerton-on-abel-ferrara-s-tommaso-2019-83200

pic.twitter.com/B04XUHibfe

— Jesse Hawken (@jessehawken) August 6, 2021

Best of Abel Ferrara's King of New York commentarypic.twitter.com/bgXeTBrR2F

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) September 11, 2021

This is not getting the love here, why not?

"Lookit his hair. That's the star of this film."

Not to stray from that ^^, but didn't realize he'd made another movie with Dafoe, following last year's Tommaso:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KKuxA4sPDk

Shit, according to Wikipedia, he's made six movies with Dafoe.

I posted the Driller Killer commentary video on the old horror thread and it's funny too

He did a documentary called Napoli Napoli Napoli which I saw in Porto at, like, the only edition of some weird film festival. I remember little of it, except a scene where Ferrara puts on a show in a female prison and there's all these middle aged ladies from Naples looking bemused as he goes through a punk rock cover of "King Of New York".

― Daniel_Rf, Sunday, July 16, 2017 6:34 AM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

heres that scene btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2GeLEhfUqo

Was rewatching some Entourage as a pandemic balm, and there’s a great moment when a Herzog-type director has been fired from a major film and Johnny Drama says he could call up Abel Ferrara.

This is one of those threads that makes me worry it's a death revive when it pops up.

A critic I love on a movie I love, even if he misnames her “Thanta.”

https://www.artforum.com/film/howard-hampton-on-abel-ferrara-s-ms-45-45920

They should screen KONY twice - once as is, and once with the DVD commentary track running. Listen to Ferrara call his own work fascist!

― grawlix (unperson), Tuesday, 2 April 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQRzH9BAzks

Handy supercut but it leaves out the last few minutes of this commentary which is um... a vibe?

Not understanding how Keitel found those guys in Bad Lieutenant, I assumed he just picked up two guys and blamed it on them (because he's out of his mind) but wiki plot synopsis says they were the actual rapists

New Rose Hotel was great! Unusual structure; total rethinking of the cyberpunk aesthetic (which turned out to be more prophetic); Walken letting 'er rip. Was uncomfortable w/ A. Argento's presence but the trail of destruction her character eventually leaves has unforeseen connotations now. Glad I finally got around to this one.