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Thread: Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara, 2007)

  1. #1

    Go Go Tales (Abel Ferrara, 2007)

    I just finished watching this, and since I noticed there wasn't a thread specifically devoted to it, I thought what the hell.

    Any who, I can't say I was as wowed by it as the reviewers who praised it from Cannes and the New York Film Festival. Just as filmmaking, it seemed very sloppy: the camera is always moving and it's always in the wrong place, so you can never quite see anyone's face, except sometimes Willem Dafoe. (Apparently, it was shot with multiple cameras all recording at the same time.) For the most part, the camera just glides past pale, malnourished bodies illuminated by neon lights. Manolha Dargis, in a postcast from the New York Film Festival that I found on GreenCine, defends it from charges of misogyny by saying she likes to look at young, beautiful, naked women at the movies, but I didn't find the women in the film especially beautiful.

    As storytelling and as comedy, this is uneven to say the least. There's one scene where a girl working in the club sells a script to a lecherous producer, which is an obvious idea to begin with, and it's not elevated at all by the clumsy execution. The bitchy Jewish landlord who wants to turn Dafoe's club into a Bed, Bath and Beyond fares somewhat better ("Bed, Bad and Beyond, motherf---rs!!!"), but apparently her character--who wears huge sunglasses and has just returned from a weekend in Bocha, natch--has nothing better to do on a Thursday night than hang around a strip club she wants to close down. It's a film that you remember as being better than it actually is, once you filter out of your memory all the stuff that doesn't really work--yet now that I think about it, it's hard to recall anything in the film that was especially great.
    Just because...
    The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022) mild
    Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) mild
    The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) mild

    The last book I read was...
    The Complete Short Stories by Mark Twain


    The (New) World

  2. #2
    Ferrara's filmmaking has always been pretty sloppy, probably cos of drug-fuckery. Also, what's inherently wrong with sloppy filmmaking? Sometimes amateurishness can translate into conviction. Apparently he called the film a cross between The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and a Cheers episode, which is why I'm waiting for it.

  3. #3
    Not a praying man Melville's Avatar
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    That actually sounds pretty interesting. The gonzo messiness of The Bad Lieutenant was one of the things I liked about it.

    But more importantly, how many movies have you seen on the They Shoot Pictures Don't They Top 1000? Russ and I have a vegetable garden riding on the answer.
    I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?

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  4. #4
    Quote Quoting Boner M (view post)
    Ferrara's filmmaking has always been pretty sloppy, probably cos of drug-fuckery. Also, what's inherently wrong with sloppy filmmaking? Sometimes amateurishness can translate into conviction. Apparently he called the film a cross between The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and a Cheers episode, which is why I'm waiting for it.
    I don't think Ferrara's sloppy filmmaking stems from his drug abuse but rather a lack of preparation. From what I've read, he gives his actors a lot of freedom to improvise, so rather than coming up with a precise shot list, he'll cover a scene from several different angles at the same time (a bit like an episode of Cheers) and figure it out in the editing room. However, this places constraints on where he can put the camera and where he can put lights. The former, combined his with taste for constant camera movement, results in these poorly framed images where it's hard to know where to look. Also, there are times where you can't even see the actor's faces because Ferrara has to rely entirely on available light (see attached photo). Also, this is a minor quibble but it's indicative of the film's sloppiness the way that Asia Argento (in a kind of extended cameo) disappears and then appears whenever she's needed, so we don't see her dancing at tables like we do the other girls, which undermines the authenticity of her character, who (like everyone else in the film) is very thinly conceived to begin with.
    Just because...
    The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022) mild
    Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) mild
    The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) mild

    The last book I read was...
    The Complete Short Stories by Mark Twain


    The (New) World

  5. #5
    Quote Quoting Melville (view post)
    That actually sounds pretty interesting. The gonzo messiness of The Bad Lieutenant was one of the things I liked about it.

    But more importantly, how many movies have you seen on the They Shoot Pictures Don't They Top 1000? Russ and I have a vegetable garden riding on the answer.
    Of the top one hundred, I've seen all of them but Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (#73), Ophuls' Madame de... (#78), Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (#79), Ford's Stagecoach (#83) and Rossellini's Voyage to Italy (#86). Also, I should mention that I've only been able to watch the shortened version of Visconti's The Leopard all the way through (on several occasions, I've turned off the Criterion DVD after an hour or so), and I've just seen the theatrical version of Bergman's Fanny and Alexander.

    EDIT: Of the second one hundred, I've seen all of them but Gance's Napoleon (#101), Spielberg's Jaws (#106), Welles' Chimes at Midnight (#124), Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (#126), Rossellini's Paisan (#133), Dovzhenko's Earth (#134), Renoir's Partie de campagne (#153), Angelopoulos' The Traveling Players (#155) although I have it on my computer, Ford's The Quiet Man (#160) which I got for Christmas, Ray's The World of Apu (#165), Sturges' The Palm Beach Story (#168), Eustache's La Maman et la putain (#172), Vidor's The Crowd (#178), Dreyer's Vampyr (#183), Visconti's Death in Venice (#184) and Rocco and His Brothers (#185), Ray's The Music Room (#192), Freidkin's The Exorcist (#193) and Camino's The Deer Hunter (#200).
    Just because...
    The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022) mild
    Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) mild
    The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) mild

    The last book I read was...
    The Complete Short Stories by Mark Twain


    The (New) World

  6. #6
    The Pan Qrazy's Avatar
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    Just give a number man.
    The Princess and the Pilot - B-
    Playtime (rewatch) - A
    The Hobbit - C-
    The Comedy - D+
    Kings of the Road - C+
    The Odd Couple - B
    Red Rock West - C-
    The Hunger Games - D-
    Prometheus - C
    Tangled - C+

  7. #7
    Not a praying man Melville's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    Spielberg's Jaws (#106) and Camino's The Deer Hunter (#200).
    Crazy. I thought every budding cinephile would see those. Not that I'm a big fan of either one (though they both have a few really spectacular moments: Quint's monologue and the crew's singing in Jaws, the Russian roulette scenes and most everything with Walken in The Deer Hunter).

    Quote Quoting Qrazy (view post)
    Just give a number man.
    Extrapolating wildly from the first two hundred, I'm guessing he's seen 703.
    I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?

    lists and reviews

  8. #8
    Quote Quoting Melville (view post)
    Crazy. I thought every budding cinephile would see those. Not that I'm a big fan of either one (though they both have a few really spectacular moments: Quint's monologue and the crew's singing in Jaws, the Russian roulette scenes and most everything with Walken in The Deer Hunter).
    I actually started watching Jaws, but I found it too morbid to watch more than the first twenty minutes. First, the hippy chick gets eaten, and then the little boy, and then there's a shot of Roy Schneider holding up the boy's arm. I just thought: "This is sick. I don't want to watch this." So I turned it off.
    Just because...
    The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022) mild
    Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) mild
    The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) mild

    The last book I read was...
    The Complete Short Stories by Mark Twain


    The (New) World

  9. #9
    Not a praying man Melville's Avatar
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    Quote Quoting baby doll (view post)
    I actually started watching Jaws, but I found it too morbid to watch more than the first twenty minutes. First, the hippy chick gets eaten, and then the little boy, and then there's a shot of Roy Schneider holding up the boy's arm. I just thought: "This is sick. I don't want to watch this." So I turned it off.
    But that's all buildup to a story that's more adventure-oriented than horror-oriented, and which is more about humanity's response to the possibility of death—and camaraderie and bravery in the face of it—than it is about giant hippie-eating sharks. Although I don't think you'd like it even if you got past the initial barrage of horror. It definitely doesn't seem like your kind of movie.
    I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?

    lists and reviews

  10. #10
    Quote Quoting Melville (view post)
    But that's all buildup to a story that's more adventure-oriented than horror-oriented, and which is more about humanity's response to the possibility of death—and camaraderie and bravery in the face of it—than it is about giant hippie-eating sharks. Although I don't think you'd like it even if you got past the initial barrage of horror. It definitely doesn't seem like your kind of movie.
    I suppose I'll give it another look one of these days, as I generally like his work (despite all the gratuitous father-figures popping up in his films of late, which I don't recall in Raiders of the Lost Ark or E.T.), but it's not a high priority. Actually, I'm much more interested in seeing The Deer Hunter (especially after it turned up on the Cahiers list of the one hundred greatest films), even though I wasn't a huge fan of Heaven's Gate.
    Just because...
    The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022) mild
    Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) mild
    The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) mild

    The last book I read was...
    The Complete Short Stories by Mark Twain


    The (New) World

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