Abel Ferrara - C/D

A couple of his lesser-known movies, The Addiction and Body Snatchers (which I remember being pretty good, though I still prefer the 1978 Donald Kaufman version), are streaming for free on Hulu now.

For a minute read the bump and thought Ferrara had a new movie about Joseph Kony (KONY2012). Which, location aside, would be in his wheelhouse.

monthlong NYC retro in May! Uncut European versions!

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5065

Also, Kino Lorber has picked up his latest movie, which stars Willem Dafoe as Pasolini.

Saw it at NYFF in 2014 (see above). Took almost five years...

He's finished another with Dafoe since, also 3 documentaries and a short.

never seen king of new york before maybe now is the time

jeez yeah

totally outstanding cast, Walken is great of course, there's nice work from Lawrence Fishburne and Wesley Snipes, and an actually extremely good supporting performance by David Caruso of all people.

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

KONY is fairly easy to see anytime, ie who cares

Thought for second there that Ferrera made a Joseph Kony bio pic that he now considers fascist.

Sat evening MoMA screening of King of NY will feature discussion w/ Ferrara and the Safdie brothers.

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

― son of a lewd monk (Dr Morbius), Saturday, June 21, 2014 10:00 AM (four years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao of course

ms. 45 one of my favorite movies of all time

fair that you were surprised by the overt camp though

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.