criterionforum.org

Had to post a link to this excellent page dedicated to Ferrara's new movie.

A great resource for what is sure to be one of the year's best (you'll have to forgive me my enthusiasm as it appears based on stills that Abel has finally merged with my beloved Zalman King). As much as I love Dafoe, I regret that casting Chris Walken didn't go through. The mind boggles at the thought of him in "a screwball comedy centered on a Manhattan go-go dancing club". I wonder how many of the performance scenes will be indebted to Chinese Bookie. I wonder if this could possibly play Cannes...

"Go Go Tales or Ballon Rouge? Why do they have to be scheduled at the same time?!"

Fresh reviews served up straight from the Cannes.

This movie looks AWESOME.

I'm really excited. What an awesome line-up at Cannes this year... hope this one finds U.S. distribution a lot faster.

Manohla Dargis loves it, for what that's worth:

[quote]Sleaze rarely looks as lovely and plays with such sentiment as it does in Abel Ferrara's “Go Go Tales,â€

Cinema Scope interviews Ferrara about the film.

Steven Shaviro posts his thoughts at The Pinocchio Theory:

[quote]Abel Ferrara's Go Go Tales is both sweet and exhilarating. It's almost Ferrara's version of a Capraesque 1930s comedy, a pomo update of one of those films that was designed to make people feel good despite the Great Depression. It even risks a kind of old-fashioned corniness: since its theme is that, if you hold on and follow your dreams, there is always hope. And Ferrara pulls it off, with a panache that is all his own, but also with a kind of warm-hearted sincerity and sense of conviction reminiscent of the old movies: something that Hollywood today is utterly incapable of, being way too cynical, and way too driven by market research and special effects. Of course, nobody would confuse Go Go Tales with the old Hollywood, not when it is set entirely in a strip joint, and when it includes such scenes as the (already notorious) striptease by Asia Argento, in the course of which she French-kisses her Rottweiler.

Willem Dafoe stars as Ray Ruby, the proprietor of a strip club, and an obsessive gambler who blows all his money on the lottery. He's beset by, among others: a landlady (Sylvia Miles, absolutely hilarious) who wants her back rent, but also threatens to close Ray down in order to rent out the space to Bed, Baths, and Beyond; a jealous medical student who has just discovered that his wife is one of the dancers; the dancers themselves, who are mad that Ray has fallen behind on paying them their wages; Ray's brother Johnie (Matthew Modine) a successful hairdresser from Staten Island, who is tired of bankrolling Ray's money-losing club; and many others. The film has almost no plot; Ray wins the lottery early on in the film, but then spends the rest of it looking frantically for the winning ticket, which he has somehow misplaced. Meanwhile we get a series of acts and vignettes, with various dancers, customers, sleazeballs and wise guys and befudddled passers-by. Pras from the Fugees plays the club's chef, who is mad that Asia Argento's Rottweiler has gone after his gourmet organic hot dogs; Bob Hoskins lurks around, as one of Ray's tough-guy associates and general-purpose fixer and bouncer; and so on and so on.

So the film is really a frantic, never-ending series of vignettes, some of them things that are happening to, or between, the characters, and some of them explicitly presented as stage acts, the female dancers writhing alluringly for the benefit of the male customers (who are allowed to watch but not to touch, and who are never seen jerking off, but only sticking twenties (or hundreds?) into the waistbands of the dancers' thongs. Ferrara has long been obsessed with strippers, who appear in many of his films (e.g., Fear City, Blackout, etc.), and with sex-as-exhibitionist display (e.g. Bad Lieutenant, in which Harvey Keitel does jerk off to an exhibitionist act he has coerced from a teenage girl, and New Rose Hotel), but here that whole obsession no longer feels sordid (or sinful, given the lapsed-Catholic twist of Ferrara's obsession) — instead, it has been sublimated, beautified, so that both Dafoe's character, and Ferrara himself via the camera, simply seem to be (respectfully, if you can believe that) worshipping beautiful women's flesh.

In an odd way, I wouldn't even call Go Go Tales voyeuristic, because the camera doesn't isolate the dancers or their acts, but lovingly pans over them in the course of its restless, almost ADD-fueled (or cocaine-fueled?), explorations of the space of Ray Ruby's Paradise. The dancers embody the little fantasies of the male clientele, but these dancers also have their own little fantasies, as is accentuated in the last part of the film, when the club is shut down and converted to a (non-sexual) cabaret, so that the “girlsâ€