Abel Ferrara

[nowhereisaplace]

therewillbeblus, I'm looking forward to your thoughts on Driller Killer. I am myself in the midst of a complete Ferrara rewatch, though he has always been one of my favorites. This time around, it was Driller Killer that gained the most esteem in my mind - I more or less dismissed it the first time I saw it and on the rewatch was completely taken aback by the power it has, which stems from the very obvious personal nature of the project (Ferrara plays the lead, the apartment is the film was his own, etc). It's a testament to Ferrara that he could accomplish this in an exploitation movie shot on a shoestring budget over an extended period of time and the film represents a major jump from 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy!

[therewillbeblus]

Driller Killer is the last Ferrara narrative feature I have left with a single-star rating from my first viewing, so I definitely need to revisit it (especially when his follow up jumped to the other side of the spectrum in my esteem). New Rose Hotel was the other- I'm still not convinced that it's the masterpiece some think it is, but it's at worst an interesting failure and at best a complementary film preceding demonlover's cyberpunk meditation on existential isolation, with a disturbing physicality infecting the emotions resting in the margins of its characters' literal and psychological worlds. Maybe another watch will be a home run.

Lots of interesting detours in Ferrara's career. The free streaming channels have carried several of my own Ferrara blind spots, specifically that weird period between Ms. 45 and King Of New York where Ferrara seemed to be attempting to carve out a more 'mainstream' career for himself. Or maybe he just wanted to pay the rent and eat while he got other projects off the ground. Fear City is probably the most entertaining of that lot, though I haven't watched his TV movie, The Gladiator, yet.

I'm making my way through this period, and have located all the films with the exception of the pilot for The Loner, which I can’t find anywhere. I’m not sure how entertaining I found Fear City, but Ferrara captured New York with such a smooth aesthetic of eclectic pizzazz that I was won over on a completely visual level. Some of those shots -like the one of Melanie Griffith near the end as she’s breaking down in her room, about to venture out- felt like the primary inspiration for how Sam Levinson shot Odessa Young in the party backrooms of Assassination Nation. Gorgeous and unnerving, on and off, across the spectrum and sometimes occurring simultaneously. I can’t confidently recommend the film, but I enjoyed it purely as an exercise in style.

[Forrest Taft]

Can anybody speak to the quality of the Canadian, Spanish, or French blus of Ms. 45? The Drafthouse blu looks great, but I'd rather not pay OOP prices for it

Quoting myself from another thread:

My favourite recent purchase is this Abel Ferrara collection, that came out last year. It includes Ms .45, Fear City and China Girl, none of which I had seen before. It's always a gamble whether or not the subs can be removed on French releases, but here they are removable on the films themselves, though not on the special features, which includes the unrated version of Fear City. All three discs have input from Brad Stevens, and there is also a good Ferrara interview on Ms .45. Recommended!

[nowhereisaplace]

The French blu for China Girl looks great; however, I will give a quick word of warning on their Fear City Director's Cut (the same can be said for the Shout Factory) - it isn't quite the complete director's cut; it splices in the footage excised from the theatrical by using an SD transfer of Ferrara's cut. But there is a scene at the very end where they retain the producer's cut -

SpoilerShow

when Billy Dee Williams is arresting Tom Berenger, he asks him if he thinks he's a hero. Tom Berenger tells him no (or something to that effect). In the producer's cut (which remains on the disc), Billy Dee Williams says "Maybe you are a hero", with a chuckle. Ferrara's cut has him respond to Berenger by saying "Get him outta here!", thus cutting out any sentimentalism and false sense of friendship and respect that never really developed between the two.

It's a small but important difference for the ending. The full director's cut exists only on an old French DVD with the title New York 2 Heures Du Matin.

[DarkImbecile]

Thanks to twbb for the long overdue work of making this a dedicated Filmmakers thread!

[therewillbeblus]

This time around, it was Driller Killer that gained the most esteem in my mind - I more or less dismissed it the first time I saw it and on the rewatch was completely taken aback by the power it has, which stems from the very obvious personal nature of the project (Ferrara plays the lead, the apartment is the film was his own, etc). It's a testament to Ferrara that he could accomplish this in an exploitation movie shot on a shoestring budget over an extended period of time

I decided to bump this up in my queue and definitely appreciated it more this time around as well. From the opening scene in the church, we are suffocated right alongside Ferrara with aggressively paranoiac sensations of the stimulant addict reconstructed into acute guerrilla filmmaking. The way he's accosted with psychosis-inducing intrusions by the mere engagement of another vehicle occupying the same space is powerfully oppressive, and this is in the most vacant space in the milieu- a relatively abandoned church acting as an island off the coast of an urban jungle! I can't say I really enjoyed the film a whole lot, but it's definitely firing on all cylinders to feed its tone. I love all the distorted guitars being played by people throughout seemingly all spaces of the film, incorporating a diegetic soundtrack in both expected and completely ridiculous circumstances. That silly element only services the fluidity of consciousness, blending surrealistic delusion and stark reality together in a waking nightmare of environment-swallowed alienation and cravings to assert control to fight from a place of isolated fear. The slasher devices don't feel as clever, but their muted impact just further aids the themes of impotence and pathetic insanity infecting Ferrara's identity in and outside the film's world. This is very much a reflection of where he's at during this time of life, and that in and of itself is quite affecting, in hindsight having known more about his story and his struggles.

[therewillbeblus]

I feel like I've hit a bit of a Ferrara wall, having not seen anything that moved me much in about a week. With only four narrative features left, I've come to believe that Ferrara is a filmmaker who often excels in striking powerful ‘moments’ rather than crafting consistently-engaging projects, with obvious exceptions to this observation when his films gel along a desired ethos for their runtime. Dangerous Game has a few strong moments that cut through the rest of the sloppy film-within-a-film structure (mostly with Madonna acting fearlessly, if you can believe it) but most of the rest sputters out. 4:44 Last Day on Earth paints instances of sensational (even more intimately tactile than emotional) intelligence, like the first lovemaking scene, or the last supper conversation with old friends about relapsing before death that's all about 'feeling' rather than the philosophies being discussed, or the act of inviting the child in to video chat with his family without cutting back to some impact of self-fulfilling morality on the central couple (these omissions mute charges often lobbed against Ferrara of weltering in self-pity; charges I've made, and ones that can be fair at times, but only as a self-conscious symptom of his life as a human being, based on the acknowledgement of character defects founded in stepwork for an addict in recovery- rather than some faux-'rule' about his rigid character). Unfortunately the in-between blips of coping with impending doom fall flat, and the melodramatic hysterics exhibited don't feel earned even under the conditions presented. Zeros and Ones has some excitedly puzzling segments as well, but then the film around it is so nonsensical and banal in its nebulosity that it’s hard to care about something that it doesn't relay whether artists particularly do either.

Contrarily, a film like Siberia is a series of metaphysical ‘moments’ that layer and intersect to form a powerful, if not exactly cohesive whole, while Tommaso constructs itself similarly, only more focused on all shades of imperfections living a hybrid corporeal/spiritual experience in recovery. I was hoping that a revisit of Bad Lieutenant would yield a reversal of my dismissive impression like returning to Ms. 45 did, but it still plays out like a frustrating failure to me. The film is not pretending to be much more than a series of fragmented moments, but I don’t think it’s as successful as many do along these lines, which is not to say that I don’t ‘get’ it. I’ve read and heard many reasons why it works for people, and I can understand the arguments, but the episodic aching doesn’t translate to any accumulated power without the proper film grammar to encourage an interpretation or respect for accreting value by pronouncing pain. I find Herzog's spiritual-reimagining to be far more impactful, fleshing out the raw agony and projected toxicity in a more nuanced and interesting manner. What Ferrara's film lacks is a compressing of these indulgences, which makes for a film seemingly disinterested in its own buildup. While the spiritual purging that bookends the nun arc is somewhat compelling in theory, in practice it doesn't merit the intended effect, given the reflexive apathy in detailing this man as a character at all beyond his surface-level compulsions. I really enjoy looking below the iceberg, and I can see what's there, but I just don't think Ferrara successfully locates and allows Keitel to deserve the introspective analysis Travis Bickle might, great as he is with the material he's given. Maybe I'll change my mind on this in another ten years, but I imagine it's not exactly a film even its biggest fans eagerly revisit.

[beamish14]

Have you seen Body Snatchers? I think it’s nearly on par with Siegel and Kaufman’s adaptations of the same material. Despite being developed by Stuart Gordon, it doesn’t feel like a work-for-hire piece. Like Cat Chaser, though, it was subjected to significant post-production tampering, which is quite obvious during the final 5 minutes (which are still effective and have a dreamy, elliptical feel that provides a perhaps-unintended narrative ambiguity). Gorgeous photography by Bojaz Bozelli, and probably the best score Joe Delia ever produced as well. The creature effects are amazing-there is one scene in a bathtub that you won’t soon forget.

I remember hearing a quote about it from someone who saw a test screening a year before WB dumped it with little advertising-they said that the final product “feels like an entire trailer for what Ferrara actually shot.”

[The Narrator Returns]

Body Snatchers is my second favorite Ferrara after Bad Lieutenant, if it really was meddled with, then it's doubly remarkable that it's as soul-crushingly bleak as anything Ferrara has made (Meg Tilly in it is close to Keitel's equal as a window into unfathomable evil). It's one of a few movies that's genuinely changed how I view filmic visual grammar, Bazelli and Ferrara do such ingenious work in making 2.35:1 feel claustrophobic that they make everyone else seem like they were using half of the format's potential. This was my first Ferrara and I've loved a lot of his other work since, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed that almost no other Ferrara movie looks anything like this (not even his other Bazelli collaborations).

[therewillbeblus]

I actually watched Body Snatchers a few months back and enjoyed it, but didn't have much to 'say' about the film at the time. I'll plan to revisit it after I wrap up the remaining titles left to see where it lands in my esteem before inevitably ranking a top ten, but since my current ratings on Ferrara essentially boil down to 50/50 on like/love vs. ambivalence/hate, it should easily make my list.

I'm pleased to report that I just watched Mary and was absolutely blown away. Here's a terrific example of Ferrara committing to an organically elliptical yet deliberately constructed meditation on how we attempt to wrestle with our corporeal handicaps toward spiritual pursuits. Part confession of artistic manipulation, part surrender for failing to transcend egoist blockades toward harmony with self and others, and part inspirational declaration of opportunities to achieve bouts of enlightenment by way of social intersectionality- this is an example of Ferrara's ability to draw a comprehensive portrait of ideas together from potent, seemingly disconnected yet broadly thematically-intertwined 'moments'. The intrusive intimacy of his formalism reminded me of Wenders' similarly-vulnerable late-career works of this period like The End of Violence and Land of Plenty that present suffocating souls impermanently liberated yet irreversibly affected by unexpected contact with contrasting personalities from different social contexts; remodeling Altmanesque multi-narratives boiled down into the hazy close-quarters of boundary-definition Assayas plays with in his most destabilizing works.

I love how Ferrara manages to restraint himself into abstract space while simultaneously providing incredibly palpable, acute examples of how we engage with these ideas. The amount of platforms he constructs and deconstructs on the individual will's capitalization on faith is remarkable- we can comprehend why Ferrara is immolating himself with Modine's (and Whitaker's) characters while also validating the drive to participate in repurposing moral absorption into self absorption, just as we can comprehend the fury of other characters in receiving this self-absorption as a sinful affront on their own morality and impotence to achieve the same. The fascinating and complex routes this films takes continuously arrive at tense, dysphoric places that allow each of these characters to become that resentful or resented principal to an other. So Whitaker can be the immoral and self-absorbed vehicle in Graham's life, while Modine can disturb Whitaker's own stability as he defensively copes with powerlessness and engaged in self-destructive Catholic guilt in both shady and authentic ways. It's incredible realistic- we are triggered by those who have what we want- or who possess and show qualities we have, don't like about ourselves, and don't have the power to change. We are the villains in someone's story, and the heroes in others' - art can provide outlets of sublime, but at what cost.

We are all searching for answers and all troubled by our inability to find them- and for a man like Modine's ignorant director, is he the one we should pity, because he's closing his mind and heart to new perspectives, or is he embodying part of what we all want and should strive to achieve: a confident and determined path-forger who creates a vision and refuses to compromise that agency? Though he too receives a wake-up call through a spiritual experience when he least expects it, in spite of the hardheadedness he exhibits in attempt to remain unteachable and thus protect his sensitive core from being exposed to anyone, especially himself. In the end, we receive a crescendo of mini-catharses that range from the melodramatic (bomb threat!) to banal (hospital bedside talk) to sublime (Binoche sending us off landing on the beach from sea), and the result is ephemeral vulnerability, forgiveness, divine ascension. It's peculiar how absent Binoche and Modine are from this film until the themes finally click together- they represent two souls on either side of the purgatory line, where Whitaker and Graham exist and must struggle for the bulk of our attention. Modine eventually arrives back in the spotlight to have his humbling experience, and Binoche remains in the margins of the film after her initial existential crisis, since she's found her calling. She serves as the axis of the film, from beyond the clouds Ferrara is granting the deserved attention, so these characters, and we, can get closer to where she is.

It's a travesty this film is virtually absent from the physical media market.

[Matt]

I had this on laserdisc (way back when I was trying to decide whether to write my capstone thesis on Ferrara or Jean Rollin). Meg Tilly’s line reading of “Where you gonna go?Where you gonna run? Where you gonna hide? Nowhere. 'Cause there's no one…like you…left,” is forever burned into my memory.

[therewillbeblus]

The Funeral is a bit like Body Snatchers, using the skeleton of a mainstream genre film -here a period family gangster flick- to dissect his typical themes of intersystem conflict and the struggles of locating and actualizing one’s individuality within overwhelmingly aggressive physical and metaphysical institutional forces. The killing that triggered the death of one brother prior to the opening of the film, kicking off its plot, and the final eruption of violence that bookends the last act with devastating irony, is all sourced in the same abstract space of intolerability. These characters do not possess the skills, nor are supported with means to transcend the ubiquitous obstructions barring emotional purging, outside of extreme discharges of fatalistic physicality. An alternative path is presented via communism, and its function within the ingrained ways of thinking and 'being' is critical to understanding Ferrara's vision, as well as his consistent thematic strategy of weaving middle grounds of humility and idyllic prospect into the seams of formidable gloom. It's a deeply tragic movie, but inside the crevices are aching cries of agony that inspire hope for Ferrara and his community through his art.

Occasionally, we're thrown some overstated, but nonetheless potent dialog of characters engaging with and diffusing responsibility, using the mystery inherent in faith as a weapon. Walken’s explanation that he didn’t make the world transforms into a shield of Jansenism so quickly that we can clearly recognize it as a symptom of Ferrara’s own admitted default to defensive spite and protective rationalization. Even if the script isn’t always as restrained as it could be, the acting walks a challenging middle road. The performers offer thunderous expressions, but never descend into hammy cartoonishness. When he’s not overexplaining cognition in the written word, Ferrara shows his strong directing abilities carefully and modestly, in the way he invites us into following his characters’ emotional states. It can sometimes feel like a trick, since we often don't know what's happening until we're 'there', and that absence of handholding and winking aids us in organically opening up as audiences and giving our empathy to the characters who earn it without some logically-detailed background 'reasons' to do so.

The best example is how Ferrara takes the Del Toro character -who we know next to nothing about, outside of the two-dimensional caricature the central family sees him as for the bulk of the runtime- and allows us to fully empathize with his trapped position in a certain setpiece, unjustly accused or something he didn’t do and barely able to disguise his fear under a facade of stoicism. It’s this special talent for imbuing secondary players with humanity through film grammar that makes me admire Ferrara so much, and also enhances my frustrated that he couldn’t do the same thing for Keitel in Bad Lieutenant. Penn is more effective in a similar part here, and tracked with the same kind of sympathetic yet fear-driven distance by the camera, allowing most of his torment to occur in the elisions of what Ferrara is silently admitting he can only humbly provide.

[colinr0380]

The Funeral is one of the few Ferrara films I have had the chance to see. It showed on the BBC back in 2002, and was repeated in 2003 but has not shown since that time. One of the most notable things about that 2002 screening is that it appeared to mark the unofficial moment when the BBC's general ban on playing the suicidally-inclined song Gloomy Sunday was lifted, since the song as performed by Billie Holiday prominently features on the soundtrack of the film, for obvious reasons!

[therewillbeblus]

I've finished off the narrative features and find it interesting that Ferrara called Go Go Tales his first intentional comedy, considering that a) it's got a familiar balance of dark humor and desperate circumstances leaning toward moral-bending/sacrifice as his other features do, and b) The Addiction exists, which is a self-eviscerating allegory for Ferrara's soul slipping through his fingers due to gravitational pulls of drugs, narcissism, overthinking, spiritual loss of values, etc. That film was pointedly funny at the very moments it was most brutal, like Taylor telling a victim that her victimization was her own fault with such conviction we laugh and feel sick at once- perhaps especially those of us who can relate, and laugh and cry over the same content in 12-step rooms. Go Go Tales uses the same formula to its comedy, only with lighter stakes because it's about keeping a business open, not saving or forsaking your soul, taking hostages, murder... So Dafoe's interactions that attempt to measure empathy, grace, and congeniality with selfishness and self-preservation are amusing, but the lack of sting yields an equal and opposite reaction of soft laughs.

It's an experimental feature, and breathes as Dafoe, Hoskins, Modine et al. mosey around interacting with interchanging players with muttering dialog that speaks of Altman's high period more than the obvious Killing of a Chinese Bookie aping superficially serving as a schematic influence. The various actresses playing various strippers are particularly terrific, and they bump the film from being a middling success to a genuinely enjoyable endeavor. So many rich personalities flooding Dafoe and co's attention in a relentlessly Sisyphean joke that continuously kicks their agendas off-kilter. The film's final moment is a decent gag that infects the mind and becomes stronger than it appears once we realize that such an oversight is exactly the reason the business was failing to begin with- and the stated solution is as inane as its principal, dictating that he's learned nothing and will continue to live the same kind of semi-ignorant existence 'til... well, things get bad enough that he'll become the tortured protagonist of one of Ferrara's many non-comedies. Who knows, Dafoe has been in enough of his films since then where any number of them could easily serve as quasi-sequels to this!

[oh yeah]

twbb, I'm loving your write-ups on Ferrara. Even though I find Bad Lieutenant a masterpiece, I felt very similar to you on first viewing. In fact, most Ferrara films, from Blackout to New Rose Hotel to Ms. 45 to Mary, just didn't sit right with me on first viewing. It wasn't until I revisited them that I really appreciated the beauty of his approach, which can initially feel ugly and even exploitative or as if it's wallowing in darkness.

I watched Body Snatchers last night for the first time in years, and I was blown away more than ever -- even with the studio interference it's a hell of a horror film with some interesting subtext that points to larger, more tangible/historical horrors. I'd have to rewatch the other Ferraras but at the moment I'd say this is one of my favorites from him. And of course, the cinematography is the most remarkable aspect of the movie -- possibly one of the most beautiful uses of 'Scope since Zabriskie Point. But I was surprised to slowly realize that both the HD version I was watching on Amazon Prime and the Warner Blu-Ray transfer from a few years back are totally off in terms of the color. They essentially scrubbed the movie of its distinctive yellow-orange tint, which was so pervasive in nearly every scene on the DVD (and in 35mm, as I've read). Makes sense considering Bazelli shot King of New York as well and that movie also had a yellow/orange glow to many scenes. It's unfortunate that WB would screw up the transfer so bad. For a visual comparison, see this tweet

[therewillbeblus]

Woah, kinda bummed I just splurged on the Warner blu... I can't even discern if any copies on back channels have the correct color timing?

[oh yeah]

Woah, kinda bummed I just splurged on the Warner blu... I can't even discern if any copies on back channels have the correct color timing?

It's a shame, right? I never bought the blu but assumed it was a fine transfer because nobody seemed to have any complaints when it came out. At least the old Warner DVD does have that yellow-orange look, though.

The movie still looks pretty spectacular, just because the framing and composition is so out-of-this-world. But it's hard to unsee that lack of yellow-orange now that I know they bungled the transfer.

[therewillbeblus]

I revisited The Addiction twice in the last 24 hours just to confirm that it's still my favorite Ferrara after checking off my blind spots in his narrative feature work, and I'm more convinced than ever that this is one of the greatest films about addiction, overthinkers, and spiritual maladies- so much so that I don't think I could adequately explain why (though I've tried in its dedicated thread). Ferrara's best work evades this capability despite posturing at didacticism. I've read a lot of critiques saying The Addiction is too thick with its thematic inferences, but I actually think it's much less clear than it appears. Even if he's spelling out a lot of ideas, the positions on them and the ways they intersect become increasingly more complex and nebulous. It's that sensation of powerlessness- over physical compulsions, mental obsessions, spiritual loss of values, understanding our selves and our relation to our surroundings, history, the struggle to locate and refine correct philosophies, etc. that the film so beautifully and brutally captures. Ferrara's mood weighs us down with its tangible anxieties and exhaustion in how he frames and focuses on Lili Taylor's immensely physical performance, and suffocates us with the aesthetic's inky expressionism that evades the tangible permanence we fearfully pine for to achieve a sense of momentary security. It's this push-pull that keeps any definitive, palpable solution out of reach, just as is the case for the Sisyphean existence of the addict, the overthinking intellectual, the spiritually-conflicted... This is a film simultaneously engaging with tremendous restraint and urgent intrusions of substance flooding at us, inescapable but unobtainable, real and imagined, inspiring and depleting, vitally invigorative and fatally destructive.

[therewillbeblus]

A revisit of Body Snatchers revealed it to be a lot more in line with Ferrara's thematic wheelhouse than it appeared at first glance. Sure, he's reimagining a familiar narrative skeleton for the nth time, but with very Ferrarian touches. The mood is dense, evocative, and formidably oppressive for its characters, framed in a manner that isolates them against the backdrop of their eroded deserts of environments, physical and institutional. When the main family first attempts to escape their imminent demise, the response is one of deterministic defeatism, laying a power impossible to contend with before them as objective truth rather than persuasive threat. There's simply no need to put effort into persuasion and that's the scariest aspect of all.

The 'moments' elicit this feeling of alienation and suffocation, like the camera stalling on the alcoholic mother passed out and turning its head around like Michael Myers, examining this vehicle of harm with equal parts sympathy and dehumanizing fear, as an alien infecting her daughter's life and the lives of those around her even prior to the body-snatching happenings. Then there's Whitaker's obsession with figuring out a tangible reason for the enigmatic psychological regression of his men. The method by which Ferrara approaches and shoots that scene, resting on Whitaker's face in close-up, desperate to achieve some kind of finite solution and impotent to discover it for himself... it's just so devastating, almost as tragic as his own final scene.

The other body snatcher movies are disturbingly fatalistic, but there's something even more unnerving here in how segregated the characters are from each other at baseline- whether before the incident or after, when we see the family sticking together, and Ferrara chooses to shoot them from a distance or in different frames intruded on by the camera. It's all fragmented, ugly stuff, but beautifully shot at the same time, which in a sense mirrors the film's internal logic of characters appearing normal outside but seething poison underneath. Ferrara does so well manipulating the image with style to induce new ways of looking at the world, disorienting us to achieve a sensation of thwarted belongingness, and exploiting our inherent social paranoia that's just waiting to kick in as soon as the socially-constructed rules that give us faux-security in our peers are upended.

I realize that the final product was compromised and doesn't match Ferrara's vision, but much of the film's success is rooted in how lean it's presented as: the pace is relentless, jampacking so much information into an adrenaline-fueled journey, spilling forward from setpiece to setpiece that makes up the entire second half. The abrupt finish is sharp, acerbic, and completely in line with the apathetic mental state our heroine has found herself in. Hell, we stopped investing in her beyond a vicarious survivalist psychology when her existence clicked into fight/flight and the camera just compromised in tracking the action! The narrative, characters, and film itself just gradually disintegrate in the wake of this overwhelming threat.

[therewillbeblus]

Abel Ferrara personal list project top ten:

1. The Addiction - The most comprehensive film about coping with existence made by an addict with hypersensitivity to stimuli
2. Tommaso - Perhaps the greatest and most self-consciously confessional film about living the 12-step recovery life
3. Ms. 45 - Either the greatest or second greatest rape revenge film, though its strategy at engaging us in its textures of alienation is quite different from the other!
4. The Blackout - Perhaps the greatest and most self-consciously confessional film about hitting bottom in active addiction
5. Mary - A monstrously dense examination of our spiritual maladies and the 'solutions' we find
6. Siberia - Metaphysical Madness!
7. King of New York - Ferrara having Fun
8. Body Snatchers - A horror epic with all the fat cut off, to such drastic lengths that the second half feels like an animalistic ravaging of both its central characters and the audience
9. New Rose Hotel - Sci-Fi digital wasteland, where the memories of wine can taste like wine.. if we want them to.. maybe
10. Go Go Tales / The Funeral - Coin flip on if I'm in a jovial or gloomy mood

[Mr Sausage]

3. Ms. 45 - Either the greatest or second greatest rape revenge film, though its strategy at engaging us in its textures of alienation is quite different from the other!

So what’s the other one?

[therewillbeblus]

Thriller - A Cruel Picture. Sorry, I felt that I had been excessively vocal about my love for this in a series of posts lately, revolved around declaring it the best rape revenge film ever, but should've specified- I've linked my initial writeup

[oh yeah]

The Addiction and New Rose Hotel are now streaming on CriterionChannel. I haven't checked out how the former looks yet, but I watched New Rose last night and, in HD finally after years of only having that 1999-era non-anamorphic DVD... well, it was glorious and by far the best the film has ever looked (outside of a 35mm print). Felt like seeing the film for the first time again. The opening sequence and the extended scene in the club where Sandii is introduced, in particular, is one of those special goosebumps-inducing moments in cinema for me... just beautiful. I wonder if Criterion would ever have interest in putting out NRH? I'd die happy but the audience for that film is admittedly pretty niche, maybe even more niche than for The Addiction.

BTW, does anyone know the name of the instrumental song at the very start of the film? With the ethereal, clean-toned/reverbed guitar melody. It's gorgeous and I've looked many times over the years to try to identify it but I can never find who it's by or what the piece is called -- I know it's not Schoolly D and it's not "Approaching the Portal" by Gene Newton which is also in the film and is what a quick search usually brings up first.

[hearthesilence]

I just noticed there's a German Blu-ray for New Rose Hotel. Anyone know anything about the transfer quality?

[nicolas]

I just noticed there's a German Blu-ray for New Rose Hotel. Anyone know anything about the transfer quality?

Horrendous label. They're selling ancient DVD / VHS masters as HD and use DNR to death as soon as a hunch of grain is on their masters. Sound is also never lossless, which is telling. I (unfortunately) fell for a few of their releases some years ago and it was horrible even before I knew what DNR was. I don't know for this film in particular but from past memories, I wouldn't give them a cent.