Classic Movie Review: King of New York (1990)

King of New York (1990) 
Directed by: Abel Ferrara.
Written by: Nicholas St. John.
Starring: Christopher Walken (Frank White), David Caruso (Dennis Gilley), Laurence Fishburne (Jimmy Jump), Victor Argo (Roy Bishop), Wesley Snipes (Thomas Flanigan), Janet Julian (Jennifer), Joey Chin (Larry Wong), Giancarlo Esposito (Lance), Paul Calderon (Joey Dalesio), Steve Buscemi (Test Tube), Theresa Randle (Raye), Leonard L. Thomas (Blood), Roger Guenveur Smith (Tanner), Carrie Nygren (Melanie), Ernest Abuba (King Tito), Frank Adonis (Paul Calgari).

 

There was always something different about an Abel Ferrara movie – even back in his period working with screenwriter Nicholas St. John, where the pair apparently had a vision of marrying exploitation with something approaching art. Some will call that pretension – and to be clear, that is what it was at times. And yet, at their best, Ferrara and St. John really did come up with some strange visions of violent characters, living outside the law, and yet sticking to some sort of moral code. There is a twisted version of Catholicism running through these films, and there is a tension between all the sin, and the moral viewpoint, however twisted, of their central characters. Where the pair fell out, St. John stopped working – and Ferrara’s career became even more tumultuous than it had been before –with some high points, and some dismal lows, as Ferrara abandoned any hope of anything approaching mainstream success. But many of those films the pair made remain fascinating and one of a kind.

King of New York (1990) is one of those films. It stars Christopher Walken as Frank White, a drug kingpin recently released from prison who sets out to become, well, the King of New York. You can see echoes of The Godfather or Scarface in the film, but it’s also very much its own twisted view of crime. It doesn’t take Frank long to start his plan in motion – he acts as if he is going to make peace with the other gangs, but soon alongside his psychotic right hand man Jimmy (Laurence Fishburne) – he is simply mowing them down, and forcing them out. The body count mounts in increasing ways.

Walken is one of the most fascinating of actors. His weirdness can slip into self-parody too easily – and that is basically all he’s been asked to do for years now, so easy to forget how good he can be in the right role, or how he got that reputation in the first place. His Frank White is one of his most fascinating characters – a drug kingpin with a lust for power, who has all the trappings of decadence, but doesn’t seem to enjoy any of it (Jimmy, on the other hands, enjoys it all too much). Frank isn’t above walking around with an almost nude model on each arm, or driving around in his limo surveilling his kingdom. He already has more than enough, and a keen sense of his own mortality – being in prison has convinced him he never wants to go back to that, so he’s going to embrace whatever time he has left. Yet, he almost feels like an alien – watching humanity with a detached, analytical eye for their weaknesses. In another way, he’s simply a capitalist – he knows that people will never stop doing drugs, hiring prostitutes, etc. so it’s pointless to try and stop them. With him, at least, he plans on giving back to the community – building hospitals, etc. In his mind, that makes him moral – or at least more moral than the other options.

The film could have just wallowed with Frank and Jimmy in their excess – but it does something interesting with the police as well. Bishop (Victor Argo), an older cop who is trying to patiently build a case against Jimmy, but his younger, underlings don’t have the patience. As the bodies pile up, these younger cops (led by David Caruso, reminding you he actually could act at one point, and including Wesley Snipes) – decide to take matters into their own hands. They have more in common with Frank than they’d like to think – as they are going outside of regular morality for what they assume are moral purposes. Bishop is the only one who keeps his hands clean – and yet the film acknowledges that by doing so, he isn’t going to get anywhere. He’s the only one playing by the old set of rules everyone else has discarded.

As with all Ferrara films, there is plenty of excess here – lots of violence, perhaps a little less sex than is typical for Ferrara (but a hell of a lot more than what we see in films today). With some of Ferrara’s films, all that excess can overwhelm whatever is being said. Here, they coexist – you need that excess to see Frank for who he is. He isn’t Jimmy for example – his goals are different. But perhaps that just makes him worse.

Movie Review: Pasolini

Pasolini ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Abel Ferrara.

Written by: Maurizio Braucci based on an idea by Abel Ferrara & Nicola Tranquillino.

Starring: Willem Dafoe (Pier Paolo Pasolini), Ninetto Davoli (Epifanio), Riccardo Scamarcio (Ninetto Davoli), Valerio Mastandrea (Nico Naldini), Roberto Zibetti (Carlo), Andrea Bosca (Andrea Fago), Giada Colagrande (Graziella Chiarcossi), Damiano Tamilia (Pino Pelosi), Francesco Siciliano (Furio Colombo), Luca Lionello (Narrator), Salvatore Ruocco (Politician), Adriana Asti (Susanna Pasolini), Maria de Medeiros (Laura Betti). 

 

I cannot help but wonder if I would have been a bigger fan of Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini, if I was more of a fan of its subject – Italian filmmaker/writer/intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini. I should clarify that I’m not not a fan of Pasolini’s – just that he isn’t a filmmaker I know particularly well – having only seen two of his film – The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964 - one of the best films about Jesus Christ ever made, probably in part because it was able by an atheist, who doesn’t try and undermine Christ’s divinity, but takes the text literally) and Salo: or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) – his final, and most infamous film – which debuted shortly after his death and has (rightly) earned the reputation of one of the most “extreme” films ever made. I don’t particularly like Salo – I admire the hell out of it, but at a certain point, it is simply a parade of misery, a parade of one extreme scene of humiliation, sexual violence, etc. after another. That was Pasolini’s point after all – and the final moments of that film are brilliant – but I cannot help but wonder if it’s worth going through all of that just to get to those moments.

 

Anyway, back to Ferrara’s film. It is a film about the last day of Pasolini’s life – leading up to his murder, which still has many questions surrounding it, and no one quite knows what to make of it – even if there was someone convicted of it, that person later recanted – and the what really happened is murky at best. In a strange casting choice, Ferrara cast one of his favorite actors – Willem Dafoe – to play Pasolini. Why Pasolini cast an American to play the Italian Pasolini, I don’t know. I also don’t know why it works as well as it does, other than the fact that Dafoe is a great actor. He doesn’t really try and change his accent in the film – where he speaks mostly English. The other actors – mostly Italian – speak in their accented English. When the movie is in Italian, and Dafoe speaks it – he doesn’t speak it well (it’s not Brad Pitt in Inglorious Basterds level Italian – but it’s noticeable even if, like me, you don’t speak Italian). And yet, Dafoe has something that works for Pasolini. He has the air of someone who thinks the thoughts of an intellectual like Pasolini – and can say them, out loud, and sound actually intelligent, and not like a pompous ass. I’m sure Ferrara could have found an Italian actor to play the role if he wanted to – he just clearly didn’t want to.

 

The film drifts – purposefully – from one thing to another. Salo is finished, and will be coming out soon – so Pasolini is doing interviews in support of it – although they are not the kind of hollow, empty interviews with associate with junkets – the movie is barely mentioned. They are going for something deeper here. There are scenes of Pasolini with his friends and family. And there are scenes that Ferrara has filmed that are from the film Pasolini was planning to do next – and never got to make. Pasolini was relatively open about his homosexuality throughout his life – a rarity for that time – and the movie doesn’t shy away from it either, When the murder arrives – and arrive it does – the homosexuality is the reason given (although, of course, that is debatable). Ferrara, or course, doesn’t shy away from showing the violence in that scene – that once again, shows Dafoe suffering on screen.

 

If there’s one thing clear about Abel Ferrara at this point, it’s that he is going to be true to himself no matter what. It’s crazy to think this guy used to make movies in Hollywood – like King of New York (1990) or his very underrated Body Snatchers (1994) – he wouldn’t get close these days. The film is very much an Abel Ferrara film – so if you’re more of a fan of those than I am, you may like it. But I find that it’s a film that didn’t really fulfill its purpose for me. After it was over, I found myself wishing that Ferrara would just go ahead and make the full version of Pasolini’s next film – it was fascinating, and Ferrara is as good as choice as anyone working these days to make it. Otherwise, I wish I had just caught up with a Pasolini film instead – Teorema probably. I think I’ll do that anyway.

Classic Movie Review: The Driller Killer (1979)

The Driller Killer (1979)

Directed by: Abel Ferrara.

Written by: Nicholas. St. John.

Starring: Abel Ferrara (Reno Miller), Carolyn Marz (Carol), Baybi Day (Pamela), Harry Schultz II (Dalton Briggs), Alan Wynroth (Landlord), D.A. Metrov (Tony Coca-Cola).

 

Abel Ferrara is a difficult director to get a handle on. On one hand, he has made his career making fairly sleazy, exploitation movies – and at the same time, there is a real artist inside there, that is looking to get out in those films. His best film is probably 1992’s Bad Lieutenant – a film that was rated NC-17 for all the sexuality, nudity and violence in it, but there is something beautiful in its ugliness – which is something you could say about most of his best films – from 1981’s Ms. 45 – where a mute seamstress goes on a killing spree after being raped twice in one day or Body Snatchers (1994) – where he took the infamous story and made it into an AIDS allegory or The Addiction (1995) a vampire-as-addict tale, or even his most recent film, Welcome to New York, in which Gerard Depardieu grunts like a pig in extended sequences in which he either has sex, or is raping someone (strangely, I’ve never seen King of New York – one of his best known films). I’m not sure you can realistically say it is there in his debut film – 1979’s The Driller Killer – and yet watching it, you can tell this isn’t an average exploitation, grindhouse film from the 1970s.

 

The film stars Ferrara himself as Reno Miller – a painter living in New York, with two female roommates – Carol (Carolyn Marz), who is loosely Reno’s girlfriend, and Pamela (Baybi Day), who is Carol’s lover. Neither of them have a job, nor is Reno making very much with his painting – although he does know a gallery owner (Dalton Briggs) – who has previously given him advances for his latest work. The rent is due though, the phone bill is high, the electric bill is high, and they have nothing left. To make matters worse, a band called The Roosters has moved into the building, and play day and night, which drives him crazy. We also meet his estranged father, a bum living on the street – who Reno denies knowing. All of these pressures build and build on Reno, until he snaps one day, and heads out into the streets with his drill, and becomes the title killer – murdering a series of homeless people in brutal fashions. Eventually, he is unable to hide his increasing violence – and those close to him become targets as well.

 

This plot outline, probably makes the film sound like an exploitation flick – and to be fair, in many ways it is. The violence in the film is bloody and extreme – in the way that 1970s movies are, meaning it’s tough to take most of it all that seriously, because it’s so over the top – although to be fair to Ferrara, he finds a lot of interesting ways to shoot a man killing bums with a drill. The movie pretty much stops all forward momentum at one point to have a sex scene in the shower between Carol and Pamela – for no other reason than because a movie like this needs to have a sex scene to help justify its existence – and if it’s a lesbian sex scene, all the better (you then may even be able to claim your movie is progressive, as it doesn’t judge this relationship – which is true – even if much of the rest of the movie borders of misogyny – also true – and if the depiction of a gay man – the art dealer – is downright offensive). The Driller Killer ended up being one of the so called “Video nasties” – films banned in England in the 1980s – which, of course, helped its notoriety.

 

Yet, one of the interesting things about The Driller Killer is even when Ferrara is making an exploitation film, he cannot fully commit to that – and finds various excuses to follow his characters into dark places, and various subcultures. He spends more time then you’d think with that band – The Roosters – and its various groupies and hangers on – literally just watching them rehearse. He seems to like to spend time on the streets of New York – the dirtier, the seedier, the better.

 

I’m not going to argue that The Driller Killer is a very good movie – it really isn’t (and apparently, if you were to listen to Ferrara’s DVD commentary, he makes fun of the film throughout). IF the film wasn’t directed by Ferrara – who went on to make several very interesting films, and wasn’t included in the Video Nasties banning in the UK, then the chances are The Driller Killer would be forgotten today. Yet, it’s an interesting little movie – one that shows that there was a real artist in there, struggling to get out. Sometimes, I still feel that Ferrara is a real artist, still struggling to get out of his nastier side, but even if that’s true, he’s had at the very least an interesting career – one that started here.

Classic Movie Review: Ms. 45 (1981)

Ms. 45 (1981)

Directed by: Abel Ferrara.

Written by: Nicholas St. John.

Starring: Zoë Lund (Thana), Albert Sinkys (Albert), Darlene Stuto (Laurie), Helen McGara (Carol), Nike Zachmanoglou (Pamela), Abel Ferrara (First Rapist), Peter Yellen (The Burglar), Editta Sherman (Mrs. Nasone), Vincent Gruppi (Heckler on Corner), S. Edward Singer (The Photographer), James Albanese (Nick).

 

Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981) has been described as a feminist exploitation film, and while that would seem to be an oxymoron, it’s actually a very apt description of the film. It has all the elements of what was already a well-established sub-genre in 1981 – the rape/revenge film, where at first the female lead is raped and abused by one or more men, and then he slowly enacts her vengeance on it. This is probably exemplified by films like I Spit on Your Grave (1980) – and others of its kind. Those films seem to want to have their cake in eat and too – they linger over the rapes, taking in every inch of skin imaginable, even eroticizing them – and then it goes onto punish the perpetrators, just so that you in the audience knows the filmmakers are on the “right side” of things. The films, at worst, encourage the rapes, and then encourage the violence right after. You can defend those films if you want – some consider I Spit on Your Grave to be a genre masterwork – but the Rape/Revenge genre has always been a troublesome one for me – unless the filmmaker shows that they have some differing take on it – like say Gaspar Noe with Irreversible (2002), which takes place going backwards in time, so that the revenge comes before the rape, and everything in the film is seen as clearly being horrific.

 

Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 is perhaps a little bit more problematic than that film – which has issues of its own – but I do think it’s also clearly wrestling with those issues, not merely exploiting them. The film stars the multi-talented Zoe Lund as Thana – a beautiful young, mute woman who works for a piggish fashion designer. One day on the way home from work, she is attacked in an alley and raped. She stumbles home in shock, only to arrive there, and find a burglar has broken into her apartment, who then proceeds to rape her as well. She is able to get the upper hand on him – bashing his skull in with an apple statue (a too-on-the-nose symbol). She then proceeds to chop the man up, and start leaving his body parts around New York in bags. The burglar had a .45 on him – which she takes, and starts to exact revenge on the men around her. It starts with a man whose actions are admittedly creepy, and possibly threatening – spreads to a violent pimp, and some (mixed race) street gang members – but will eventually include nearly every man she comes in contact with – some who are clearly sexist pigs, although perhaps nothing more than that (to be clear, being a sexist pig is bad – but it doesn’t deserve a death sentence) – and some who we have no information about at all to decide whether or not they even “kind of” deserve what they get.

 

Ferrara is an interesting director – and one who has always seemed to float between B-movie exploitation, and the art house circuit, never quite fitting in anywhere. If you look at the plot summary of many of his movies – including Ms. 45, but also his best film, Bad Lieutenant (1992), in which Harvey Keitel plays a perverted cop investigating the rape of a nun (which was, by the way, co-written by Lund, the star of Ms. 45), they sound very much like sexy exploitation films. Yet few films are less erotic than Bad Lieutenant – or the most recent of his films that I have seen – last year’s Welcome to New York, where Gerard Depardieu plays a hulking, sweating French diplomat in New York, who starts out having an orgy, before he progresses to raping a hotel maid. In Ms. 45, Ferrara doesn’t linger over the rape scenes either – in I Spit on Your Grave for instance, the first hour of the film is pretty much one rape scene after another, until she starts getting her revenge in the last 30 minutes. In Ms. 45, the rape part is over fairly quickly – maybe 10 minutes in total (and most of that isn’t the actual rapes) – and by having two, completely unconnected rapes happen to the same woman in such rapid succession, Ferrara is, I think, pointing out the absurdity of this plot convention in the first place.

 

Lund is great as Thana – the rape victim turned avenging angel – she makes the most of all of close-ups Ferrara gives her, which is really our only insight into her thought process, as she never says a word throughout the film (well, until the last moment). Lund’s face moves from mute terror, to icy cold fury throughout the film – and seemingly every time she heads out into the streets to kill, she gets more and more dressed up – attracting worse and worse characters. In the show-stopping finale – a massacre at a costume party – she dresses up as a nun, and takes aim indiscriminately at any man in her sites.

 

What are we to make of Ms. 45? Thana really isn’t a vigilante killer, since she ends up targeting men as a gender, not just criminals. This isn’t really a female led version of Death Wish for instance. Why does Ferrara cast himself as the first person who rapes Thana? Should we continue to feel sympathy for Thana – in the opening, surely, but what about when she goes on her rampages? Are men, and a society that is run by them, responsible for her actions – or is it all on her? Does the film exploit Lund’s undeniable sexuality – she was 19 when the movie was filmed, and drop dead gorgeous, the camera never tires of looking at her – or does it use it to make a larger point about how women are perceived?

 

How about all of the above? As with nearly all of Ferrara’s films, the film isn’t as clear cut as it appears on the surface – the sexual politics on the surface of the film are blunt, but are deeper than they normally would be in other films. A sequence that has Thana follow home a young couple, when the man picks up his girlfriend at his job and walks her home, clearly casts Thana as the villain. This man seems perfectly nice – and even if he isn’t, we – and Thana – have no way of knowing that. We’re actively rooting against her at that point.

 

Ms. 45 doesn’t make anything easy for the audience. I understand why critics – and audiences – pretty much dismissed the film back in 1981 – it looked like a lot of other films at the time, and Ferrara wasn’t a known director yet – they didn’t really know what exactly to expect from him. Ferrara is, if nothing else, always an interesting filmmaker. He has directed some truly awful films in his career – and a few truly great ones as well. He never makes it easy on the audiences – and his films are often rife with contradictions. Sometimes, those contradictions sink the film. In the case of Ms. 45, it is responsible for its lasting power.

Movie Review: Welcome to New York

Welcome to New York
Directed by: Abel Ferrara.
Written by: Abel Ferrara & Christ Zois.
Starring: Gérard Depardieu (Devereaux), Jacqueline Bisset (Simone), Marie Mouté (Sophie Devereaux), Pamela Afesi (Maid), Drena De Niro (Executive Assistant), Amy Ferguson (Renee), Paul Calderon (Pierre), Paul Hipp (Guy), Ronald Guttman (Roullot), Anh Duong (Livia), Natasha Romanova (Russian Yelena), Anna Lakomy (Anna), Shanyn Leigh (Female Journalist), Lucy Campbell (Roxanne), Raquel Nave (Russian Desiree), JD Taylor (Josh), Emmanuelle Vill (Emmanuelle).

Note: This review is based on the original 125 minute cut – not the 108 minute cut released in America. See the note at the bottom of the review for more information.

The brief opening scene of Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York shows its main character, Devereaux (Gerard Depardieu) in an interview – where he is articulate and intelligent, talking about politics. It’s really the last time for about an hour he has anything intelligent to say – or really anything save from some grunts and a few shouted “Do you know who I ams” – directed at various people. From that brief opening, we move to a scene of Devereaux in his office, when his security chief walks in and tells him about his trip back to France – and what will happen there. Devereaux doesn’t care – apart from him and his security chief, the rest of the people in the room are attractive, young women – who are all over Devereaux. They offer the security chief a blowjob, which he politely refuses, although they don’t listen. From there, we see Devereaux walking into a fancy New York hotel – converse politely with the staff, and then head upstairs to his room. Already there are two other men, and three, young attractive women. Devereaux will engage in forceful sex with one of these women, then the party retires for a cocktail of “whiskey, ice cream and Cialis” – and more sex. Eventually, everyone else leaves, walking off into the night, and Devereaux collapses onto his bed like a beached whale. But he isn’t alone for long – soon two new young prostitutes arrive, and he’s back at it again.

It’s almost become a cliché for critics to say that any movie with a lot of sex in it “isn’t really sexy” – sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it’s not. But it definitely isn’t true in Welcome to New York. The sex scenes are disturbing for any number of reasons like the animalistic grunts of Depardieu emits throughout. But mainly, they are disturbing because Devereaux never even sees the various women as people at all – merely as sexual playthings there for his own gratification and amusement. The first sex scene in particular – with the rough oral sex – is downright disturbing, particularly the way that director Abel Ferrara never turns away from it. It just goes on and on and on. Eventually Devereaux’s view of women merely as servants to his sexual desires will get him in trouble – the night after the debauched party, an African maid comes in to clean up – and although he clearly doesn’t want his advances, he advances anyway (his defense of his actions in this scene late in the film is horrific). A complaint is filed, he’s pulled off a plane, and arrested and processed – the various police officers, prison guards and fellow inmates don’t know who he is, and don’t care. If he saw women as merely pieces of meat in the first half hour of the film, everyone sees him the same way for the next half hour.

The film takes a turn at the hour mark into its second half, which isn’t nearly as effective as its first. The first hour of the movie is almost all visual – there is not a lot of dialogue spoken, and even what is, isn’t all that important, save for a crude scene with Devereaux, his daughter and her new boyfriend. It’s here that the movie makes it best points – and drawing the line between how Devereaux treats women, and how he is in turn treated by the criminal justice system. Both are chilly and impersonal – neither cares about the people themselves, just what they need to do. Depardieu has always been a good actor, but it’s been a while since he has been this good. His performance in the first hour is all physical – and it’s brilliant.

The second half of the film doesn’t work as well – even though it contains some of the best acting I’ve seen out of Jacqueline Bissett in years. She plays Devereaux’s wife – the heiress of a wealthy family, who has grand ambitions for her husband. Already the head of the IMF, he was well on his way to becoming the President of France – but this scandal permanently derails those plans. She is privately humiliated, while maintaining the supportive demeanor in public. The scenes between Depardieu and Bissett are the highlight of the second half of the film – as they rip into each other, with hurt feelings and mockery (he tries to blame the whole thing on his sex addiction, which, of course, he cannot control – she isn’t buying it).

The rest of the second hour doesn’t work as well. We see another few younger women enter Devereaux’s life and bedroom, one willingly, one definitely not, who once again he refuses to see as people. We already got that in the first hour. And Devereaux’s pretentious ranting to himself – about how idealism turned to cynicism and how he hates the world simply underlines and makes explicit ideas that were already made – more effectively before. The second hour of the film, to be honest, is more than a little bit of a slog.

Co-written and directed by Abel Ferrara, the director has found the material he is best suited for – and has made the best film of his since his early 1990s heyday (King of New York, Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral and the grossly underappreciated Body Snatchers). Ferrara has always been drawn to dark, lurid subject matter – and at his best, he deftly walks the line between art and sleaze. He is one of the few directors you would want making this thinly veiled Dominique Strauss-Kahn movie, about the real life scandal that ended the political career of one of France’s rising stars. Welcome to New York is not a pleasant experience to say the least – in fact, for the most part it’s downright repellant (as it should be). And yes, the film drags at times, and probably could have used a little bit more judicious editing (but by Ferrara, not without him). Still, Welcome to New York is not an easy movie to forget or shake off. That’s the first time in many years I can honestly say that about a Ferrara film.

Note: This film has been subject to much controversy between director Abel Ferrara, and IFC, the distributer in America, and Wild Bunch, the European studio who funded the film. For release in America, Ferrara’s 125 minute film was cut to 108 minutes in order to secure a R Rating– and he’s none too happy about that. Most of the reviews I have read – from the one on Rogerebert.com to the one on The Dissolve, say that they reviewed the 108 version, and that the 125 minute version was “unavailable” to them – as the 108 version is the only one going to theaters and On Demand. Oddly, I rented the film off iTunes Canada this past weekend – and they had the 125 minute version. I am not sure, but this looks like one of those rare cases where Canada actually gets something better that our American counterparts. Rejoice fellow Canadians, and remember this the next time we have to wait nearly 6 months longer than Americans to see a film like The Babadook.

Movie Review: 4:44 Last Day on Earth

4:44 Last Day on Earth ** Directed by: Abel Ferrara.
Written by: Abel Ferrara.
Starring: Willem Dafoe (Cisco), Shanyn Leigh (Skye), Natasha Lyonne (Tina), Paul Hipp (Noah), Dierdra McDowell (Cisco's Ex), Triana Jackson (JJ), Trung Nguyen (Li / Delivery Boy), Anita Pallenberg (Diana), José Solano (Javi), Judith Salazar (Carmen), Jimmy Valentino (Karaoke Singer), Paz de la Huerta (Girl on Street), Pat Kiernan (News Anchor).

At this point, I’m not sure what’s more a cliché – the big budget Hollywoood epic about the potential end of the world, that somehow all works out in the end, or the low budget end of the world indies where it doesn’t work out, but the world ends with a whimper instead of bang, and concentrates on just a few people going through a fairly normal day until it ends. I have seen too many of both of those movies. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia from last year managed to seem fresh, because it wasn’t a big budget, but it didn’t treat the end of the world as a whimper either – it was a melodramatic tour de force. Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth on the other hand is the same old indie, end of the world drama. Yes, it has moments that feel fresh and original – mainly because of the improvisational feel of the film, but for the most part it struggles through its slight running time.

Everyone knows the world is coming to end, tomorrow morning at 4:44, give or take a few minutes. The movie doesn’t really tell us why, but it is either because the ozone layer or global warming, or some combination thereof – and essentially, Al Gore was right, as one TV anchor begrudgingly admits before signing off for the last time. The movie takes place almost entirely in the apartment of Cisco (Willem Dafoe), a recovering drug addict and his younger girlfriend Skye (Shanyn Leigh), who Cisco left his wife and nearly grown daughter for. They go through the motions of trying to be normal – Cisco shaving, talking on Skype to his friends, and Skye tries to finish one last painting before the end.

As a filmmaker, Abel Ferrara has had an interesting career – going from exploitation films like The Driller Killer and Ms. 45, into strange, violent genre films like King of New York, Body Snatchers (the most underrated of the many versions that story), and The Addiction into his more improvisational, low budget art films of recent years. Still probably best known for the extremely dark and disturbing Bad Lieutenant (1992), Abel Ferrara has grown as an artist, while still maintaining his dark, dirty roots.

In all honesty, I cannot make heads or tails of Ferrara when I look at his films as a whole – most of them contain absolutely stunning moments, but quite often, they are stranded in a sea of excess. So it is with 4:44 Last Day on Earth, which makes the most of Willem Dafoe, once again showing why he’s one of the most fearless actors on the planet. His performance is great – intense, haunted, creepy, sexual full of remorse, and even hints at something quite spiritual. By comparison, Shanyn Leigh looks like an amateur – perhaps because she somewhat is. She only has 5 acting credits to her name – and 4 of them are in Ferrara films (Mary, Go Go Tales and Napoli, Napoli, Napoli along with this one). Dafoe is so intense, and authentic, that he outshines her.

There are some great moments though – the sex scenes have a rawness to them that is rare in most movies (but not for Ferrara). A side trip that Dafoe makes outside the apartment to visit some old drug buddies gets the improvisational right, that so much of the rest of the movie gets wrong – it feels real, perhaps because the rest of the actors are better than Leigh, and seem to more fully buy into the spirit of the movie. Dafoe carries the movie throughout, but as it goes along, you get a little disappointed that with an actor and director combo of him and Ferrara, two guys who are not afraid of taking chances, play everything so safe – Dafoe’s argument with his ex-wife is like something out of a bad TV melodrama. And Ferrara’s political and spiritual points are made early and often – and quite frankly are far too safe and uninteresting.

 
Ferrara is unquestionably a unique film artist – he is capable of such strange visuals, and is willing to go to dark places that most filmmakers wouldn’t dare. In 4:44 Last Day on Earth, I’m disappointed he didn’t push himself farther – if you’re going to end the world in your film, you might as well go for broke.