Ben Gazzara

Tale of Ordinary Madness

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Ben Gazzara in stained white T shirt

Tales of Ordinary Madness is a snappier title than the book it’s based on. Charles Bukowski’s Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness is the source of Marco Ferreri’s semi-doomed attempt to get the beat poet for guys (always guys) too young for Kerouac et al onto the screen. It doesn’t work and it can’t work – Bukowski is all about the voice, the words – but Ferreri at least gives it the college try in his second American movie. Oddly, like the first, Bye Bye Monkey, it’s a bitty affair with not much in the way of plot to hang onto. But that’s what you get when you adapt a … Read more

Illuminata

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Katherine Borowitz and John Turturro

Bold and unusual and entirely itself it may be, but Illuminata isn’t entirely successful as a film. Strange as it may seem, maybe writer/director/producer/actor John Turturro wants it that way. This was only his second movie behind the camera and, being an actor of some renown, he was able to call in some of the finest talent of the day (1998) to help him get this love letter to thespianism, and in particular the live theatre, off the ground. All the world’s a stage and the stage is a world in this busy adaptation of Brandan Cole’s play Imperfect Love, a Shakespeare in Love meets Noises Off backstage farce following the comings and … Read more

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

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Cosmo meets the mob

The world is at Peak Ben Gazzara and Peak John Cassavetes in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a neo-noir from 1976 full of techniques – handheld camera, sparse (if any) lighting, crash editing, semi-improv – that seemed weird at the time but have since been absorbed into mainstream film-making. Cassavetes had worked on the early stages of the film with Martin Scorsese (a protĂ©gĂ©) and there are parallels with the style and content of Mean Streets – a “hey we’re just guys talking” aspect to the storytelling and a loose shooting style which Cassavetes pushes a lot further than Scorsese. Here, the camera often becomes more obviously subjective and emotional, the image swinging … Read more

Stag

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Stag

So, anyway, the guys are having a surprise blow-up dolly, drinks, strip-o-gram sort of stag night for their best buddy (John Stockwell), when something goes horribly wrong and things start to unravel badly. That’s the first 25 mins or so, the “interesting” bit, of this otherwise predictable drama whose most notable feature is its cast – Ben Gazzara and Mario Van Peebles in the same film? Strange. Kevin Dillon, William McNamara? Plus a couple of people you might not know (John Henson, Taylor Dane). They certainly don’t feel like a “brothers to the death” stag group of old buddies. But that’s because the cast has been hired for its ability to suggest a … Read more