4:44 Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara)

[B-side]

IMDb

[B-side]

4:44 Last Day on Earth is an audacious film. An apocalypse fiction without grandiose scaling or quivering masses staring into the source of their demise. It's a slice of life just before the end of the world. Cisco is a man trying to suffocate his emotional outbursts and Skye pours all of herself into her final piece of art. In doing so, she leaves something behind. Ferrara grants brief glimpses into the contextual drama around the central couple, carefully letting seep in the verisimilitude necessary to make Cisco and Skye into humanistic figures entrenched in real world drama. The media-fueled collective conscience of the film feels too familiar; like an inkling that the real apocalypse is playing out in our real lives in which we communicate more and more through computers instead of in person. There's a disconnect between the solipsistic boarders of New York apartments and the community that exists without, but the apocalypse thrusts newfound appreciation for love, family and genuine human interaction into the lives of its victims. A former drug buddy friend of Cisco's argues for ethics in the face of certain doom. A refusal to resort to drug use to numb the pain of the inevitable, but rather to witness the fireworks with clear eyes and a clear conscience. If Ferrara has made a more uplifting film, I've not seen it. Though that description seems contradictory to a film about the end of the world, the ending erases all doubt, a stunning affirmation of the finite nature of existence and the beauty therein. For my money, between this and Melancholia, this is the better doomsday drama. Trier's film has the aesthetic, but Ferrara's has the mood and the pathos.

[NickGlass]

Hmm, well, that was awfully earnest...

[number8]

Did you at least enjoy the Pat Kiernan cameo?

[NickGlass]

Did you at least enjoy the Pat Kiernan cameo?

Of course.

[B-side]

Al Gore is the face of climate change, like it or not. A desperate news anchor concedes to his celebrity in a time of crisis. I don't understand how that scene is of such controversy.