Go Go Tales (2007)

Good old Abel Ferrara, his films are never the easiest to watch and no easier to review. Always worth watching, however, and this little number had completely passed me by before I picked up an Italian DVD, with an English audio track fortunately. A failing strip/lap dance joint a lost lottery ticket and owners threatening to foreclose. Sounds a little uninspiring but the Ferrara is not interested in some glossy, happy go lucky enterprise and what we get here is a very well shot, edited and filmed impression of more behind the scenes than anything else. Most of the guys are aged, bossy and freeloading as the ship goes down while all the nubile ladies give it their all, because that's what they do. Asia Argento is very impressive, as is the ever dependable William Dafoe in the lead. Roy Dotrice was a nice surprise and even Bob Hoskins is fine. Sylvia Miles, who I haven't seen since Paul Morrissey's Heat, is a little over the top but just about does the job. More than a little echo here of Cassavetes' Killing of a Chinese Bookie, but nothing wrong with that.

I am losing my faith in director Abel Ferrara.He made a lot of excellent movies (for example:Bad Lieutenant or Ms.45) with very little resources.But,he's not having luck with his most recent works.New Rose Hotel and R Xmas were let downs on his career but ,in spite of being failed experiments, they were interesting. But,more recently,Mary and,now,Go Go Tales resulted to be two craps.Go Go Tales is the lowest point in Ferrara's career.The story is uninteresting and boring.Willem Dafoe and Bob Hoskins are two excellent actors but they do what they can with the poor screenplay.I am very disappointed with this movie and I can't believe that a talented director like Ferrara was behind this mess.By my point of view,Go Go Tales is a crappy film and a waste of time.I honestly hope Ferrara will back to his best on his next film to make us forget of this pathetic movie.

I do not remember for a long time seeing such a bad film. The story itself might not have been very bad for a quirky comedy, however, nothing in this movie is done anywhere near well. The dialogs are God awful, not funny and hardly understandable. The girls do not even know how to move or dance, so there was no visual pleasure either. It was hectic, very plain, extremely predictable and as I said the whole idea of doing something for the soul and being one big nice warm family within the simple strip club, would not have been so bad had it been done tastefully with humor, the real one, not the one that is based on curse words alone. In short it was boring, badly developed, not funny at all, did not make much sense until the very end, where the viewer sort of understands what was going on, who are those people and how they related to each other and that sort of things. I know that I have said here that it was predictable and at the same time did not make much sense,I fully understand that this is controversial; however that exactly how it was - partly this partly that - imagine!

Here is a movie that Ferrara calls his "first intentional comedy." Its protagonist, Ray Ruby (Willem Dafoe), runs a joint where girls with other ambitions strip and dance around on a stage and lap-dance for a sparse crowd of men. He has a couple manager-bouncers, including Bob Hoskins. The shrill, dirty-mouthed landlady (Sylvia Miles) comes and sits at the bar blaspheming and demanding four months back rent and threatening to bring the marshals. The girls are constantly demanding to be paid. One of them is Asia Argento. Another one comes and declares that she's pregnant and Ray tries to talk her into continuing to perform. There's an Irish bookkeeper who has a file showing where all Ray's lotto tickets are stashed. He and Ray watch the drawing for an $18 million prize and they've got the winner—only they can't locate it. Then Ray's brother Johnny (Matthew Modine), a highly successful hairdresser, who bankrolls the joint, appears and announces he's going to pull the plug. Some young doctors come in who saved one of the guys with the Heimlich Maneuver, and they enjoy the girls—till one of them discovers his wife on the stage dirty dancing, and there's quite a fracas.That's about it, really. This sounds like a stage play. It nearly all takes place indoors either in the club or Ray's office. However, it's not a play because it was shot at Cinecitta in Rome, where they built the set. a club with its own lighting that, as Abel Ferrara tells it, never had to close. And the shooting, which in part is a homage to Cassavetes' Killing of a Chinese Bookie, was done with a couple of DV cameras—with their capacity to go on and on and on shooting a scene—as well as some surveillance cameras to add in the occasional Super 8 effect—and with a very clear-cut screenplay but a great deal of leeway for improvisation. The cameramen were not at all neglectful of the nearly naked girls, whose work is constantly in evidence whenever the cameras are rolling in the club. All of which is unlike any play you're likely to see. The movement, the level of improvisation, the complexity of the set, are movie stuff. And the cast too is a movie cast, even if these actors all have good stage experience, notably Dafoe, who was present every day of the shoot and managed that as his character manages the club.These are chaotic and grim and desperate circumstances, but they're handled with a sense of the absurd throughout: hence the "intentional comedy." Modine comes in with a pod of swept-forward, bleached hair and carrying a little dog. There's also a cabaret sequence when some of the girls perform their "art": one plays classical on an electric piano, a guy does a totally garbled recitation of Antony's funeral oration from Julius Caesar; another does a peculiar "magic" show; and so on. And Sylvia Miles' over-the-top shrillness sets a tone of ridiculous excess. Some of Dafoe's improvisations have an amusing sense of grasping desperation about them—especially when he confronts the suddenly pregnant dancer and even when he defends his club as if it were as important as life itself. Melodrama is replaced by intentional bathos.Still, as was plain at the New York Film Festival press screening when Ferrara, Dafoe, Miles, and several others talked to FSLC director Richard Pena and answered questions from the audience, this is a movie that's probably more fun to talk about than to watch. Not in a New York Film Festival since King of New York, which started a great row at the time, Ferrara is a character whose biography is best read in his films and his explanations together. For Go Go Tales, his parents are John Cassavetes and Robert Altman, but there's something uniquely disreputable and hilarious about his version of their styles.