Abel Ferrara - C/D

I remember finding The Funeral deadly boring. His version of the Body Snatchers is a snooze too. Dangerous Game is nearly unwatchable and New Rose Hotel IS unwatchable. Fear City is eh sub-Miami Vice level thriller and China Girl is only a little better. Bad Lieutenant is over the top, but great performance by Keitel none-the-less and it sorta works. Ms. 45 on the other hand was great and King of New York is even better.

Not seen Driller Killer (but I've heard goodish things) the Kelly McGillis one and he's got a couple of things on IMDB I'd never even heard of but that don't look promising. Anyway the guy is definitely prolific enough. That's certainly not his problem.

This is the only other movie I've ever seen Jerry Horne from Twin Peaks in (as the Commie speaker at the beginning)

Ha I REALLY REALLY loved King of New York and kept hoping that his other stuff was going to have that same spark.

Wait you are kidding, right? HE'S IN THE WARRIORS!

have been curious about Driller Killer for years, but I don't rent (or buy) many movies

Yeah he's in the kitchen late in the movie, IIRC. It's pretty neglible part (I don't think he even has a line.)

It's sad. KING OF NEW YORK, MS 45 and most of BAd LT are fricken great. DRILLER KILLER has an interesting cranky energy, and for NYCers it evokes a certain perverse nostalgia for the soil of yesteryear, but the rest...like Alex said. Although I really, really like his INVASION version.

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

I like able more and more these days. Wish him luck with this. Fuck those guys.

Aghhhh! ABEL! I like ABEL.

wasn't aware of Pasolini and have just been gifted the DVD. excited.

This is one of those threads that, when it gets bumped, I assume it's because its subject has died, so - good news!

the dsk one wasnt too bad, showed a degree of restraint that i did not think ferrara capable of

also props for depardieu for twice showing his balls

Watched KONY tonight - clearly an anti-Goodfellas/Scorcese (or probably wouldn't make it onto a 'Martin Scorcese presents..' thing). Post-Scarface yet more subdued than that (then again anything next to Scarface is subdued, althoug its to do with its terrific use of night-time) and better than a lot of that - I mean just so much fun and outright bizarro stuff (Caruso giving Snipes first aid LOL, Larry and his gang cutting a deal while watching Nosferatu, those parties and the amount of hip-hop blasting thru, the weird theatre show with the small amount of applause at the end, the singing at the fundraiser). Loved almost all of the cast too.

Those Hong Kong action films have been on my mind a bit lately even before coming to this, and although its nowhere near as kinetic it has a similar level of the disposable to it (Walken just blasting Caruso off after the funeral as some kind of peak).

Caruso giving Snipes first aid LOL

Haha yeah, and shot-to-shit Larry Fishburne going to town a few feet away. It has that hyper-stylised thing where ppl can be riddled with bullets in every vital organ and still kicking, but a single gut shot means death 5 mins later.

I really loved this. Some of the rain shots near the end were gorgeous.

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".

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.

KONY commentary with AF is just extraordinary, the least bullshit-y commentary imaginable. Incredible to think they got multi-million dollar funding from Berlusconi, nowadays he says you couldn't get a tenth of the budget from anyone. Took five years to write. AF is appalled at the suggestion any of it is improvised. KONY is the best truly good-looking sleazy movie ever. For much of the night time shots they used the 'Blue Congo' filter.

Anyone seen Sportin' Life (2020)? Anyone know where to find it?

Director's Statement:
I have been shooting predominately documentaries the past 10 years or so. Whatever the subject—Piazza Vittorio, Padre Pio—we also film the process itself... so our team and I are a part of it. The subject of my new documentary is the relationship I have to my work, to Willem Dafoe, and my music and art. These relationships are the starting point and I could not avoid facing what the world went through this year with the pandemic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLijhoL1_O4

Ferrara hit both NYC and LA for a massive retrospective of his films. It was amazing to see New Rose Hotel in 35mm, which was just a transcendent experience.

Go-Go Tales and Mary were in celluloid as well, and it’s astounding that American distributors were too stupid to pick them up. He mentioned that Silvio Burlusconi (whom he abhorred) financed two of his films, and it was presumably those

recently watched Dangerous Game for the first time and thought it was incredible.

It’s so sad that the brilliant China Girl has never had an HD release. Love it