THE FUNERAL
A film review by Vince Waldron
Copyright 1997 Vince Waldron
The Funeral finds B-movie director turned indie auteur Abel Ferrara returning to the gangster film, the genre that provided the setting for his barely-noticed 1990 B-movie masterwork, "King of New York." But despite the presence of Christopher Walken at the center of both films, Ferrara's latest meditation on murder, morality and the nature of sin bears a much stronger kinship to the director's more recent philosophical tracts, "The Addiction" and "Bad Lieutenant," And, much as I admire the director's efforts to tackle the spiritual and moral underpinnings that lie beneath the surface of such durable staples of the B-movie maker's palatte as gangster films, vampire movies and urban cop melodramas, I'm sorry to observe that thus far I've found the director's genre-bending experiments an uneasy mix, burdened by far too much self-conscious talk and not nearly enough character-driven action. Which is shame, since Ferrara demonstrates as sure a grasp of pulp character and convention as any American director since Sam Fuller, another director who rarely shied from exploring the multiple layers of his pulp subject matter, though rarely at the expense of its relentless momentum. But in age when so many independent film makers seem content to set their sights no higher than emulating the flash and fire of Quentin Tarantino, I suppose I can hardly complain when a director of Ferrara's talent and ambition chooses to pattern himself after Robert Bresson.
-- Please reply directly to me at:
ag644@lafn.org Vince Waldron
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews