Go Go Tales

I was excited to see this brilliant ensemble cast do their magic in Go Go Tales, but I found myself unexpectedly being served a gourmet hot-dog from actors who are capable of playing much more challenging characters. What makes a gourmet hot-dog anyways? Is it made from the lips and a**holes of kobe beef? Is there fois gras blended in with the questionable parts of top-shelf carcasses? I don't think it is an accident that right in the middle of Go Go Tales there is a scene with gourmet hot dogs being cooked the gourmet way - in microwave ovens, while the beautiful go-go dancers cook themselves in a faulty tanning bed.

This isn't to say that Go Go Tales was badly acted - it was very well acted for what it is - a meandering vignette of a failing second rate strip joint; a metaphor for how even the most exotic dreams and aspirations are subject to blandness like anything else. It plays out like a cabaret stage production, a bit of aimless vaudeville salted with an undercurrent of subtle existential humming: A page out of Cassavetes' Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Like 'Chinese Bookie', this film offered more pleasure for me in the thinking about it afterward than it was to watch.

I can't say that I didn't like it, and I can't say that I want to watch it again. But for a gourmet hot-dog, it wasn't terrible; it was mostly just a regular hot-dog made with some Hoskins, Dafoe and a dash of Modine, thrown in a microwave and served in the bawdy atmosphere of a musky strip club.

Well no, Mr. Ferrara. I've admired (not necessarily liked) but admired his "Bad Liutenant" The uncomfortable world of guilt and darkness can translate into real cinema. Abel Ferrara is a talented filmmaker. So, what's going on? I'm in Cannes in its 60th anniversary. As a movie nut of the first order, I just had to find the way to be here, at least for a couple of days. It was worth it. I saw Sidney Poitier and Martin Scorsese, Sharon Stone and many more. Go Go Tales was a bad move, not just for me for Abel Ferrera as well. Not that it's a bad movie, although it kind of is, but it looks like a quick commercial operation and when i say quick I mean quick. It looks made in two minutes without a great deal of thought. It all takes place in one place. Lap dancers, if you please, and other assorted. desperate attempts to make it markable and it may have succeeded in some areas. The film couldn't have cost more than two bucks and that in itself is not condemnable, what is, is the intention and I felt that the intention was the one thing that came across. What a pity.

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!

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.

If you speak French, you'll find looking for inconsistencies in the subtitles more entertaining than what's going on on screen. For any good film, I take well over a page of notes. For this one, I took less than half a page. 'Nuff said? Perhaps not. How can a film with Willem Dafoe as a strip club owner, and with Bob Hoskins, be boring? Well, this one is. How disappointing. Dafoe does more acting (and we learn more about his character) in the first scene of To Live and Die in L.A. than he does in this entire film. Dafoe as Ray Ruby, owner of the Paradise Club; Hoskins as the Baron (greeter / maître d' / bouncer); and Matthew Modine as Johnnie Ruby, the Salon King are nothing special here. On the other hand, Sylvia Miles as landlady Lilian Murray; and Stefania Rocca as Debby, a dancer who is also a screenwriter, are decent and believable.

As to the plot, there isn't much of one—nothing out of the ordinary happens here, nothing unexpected. There's no more conflict, no more actual heartfelt emotion at Ray's Paradise Club than there is at your own neighbourhood bar or pool hall. When a hundred seconds of plot are stretched out to a hundred minutes of film, that is NOT 'a good thing.' Likewise when any five minutes of a film look essentially the same as any other five minutes.

The sole exception is Selena Khoo as Leila, a dancer who is also an accomplished pianist. She should've been on screen a half hour more than she was. Oh well, maybe in the sequel. Oh, whom am I kidding? There isn't going to be a sequel. God, I hope not.