1996 Directed by Abel Ferrara
The story concerns the funeral of one of three brothers in a family of gangsters that lived in New York in 1930s. Details of the past of the brothers and their families are shown through a series of flashbacks.
Christopher Walken Chris Penn Annabella Sciorra Isabella Rossellini Vincent Gallo Benicio del Toro Gretchen Mol John Ventimiglia Robert Miano Paul Hipp Victor Argo David Patrick Kelly Gian DiDonna Edie Falco Frank John Hughes Dmitri Prachenko Paul Perri Gregory Perrelli Joey Hannon Amber Smith Patrick McGaw Lance Guecia Robert W. Castle Andrew Fiscella Anthony Alessandro Santo Fazio Carrie Szlasa John 'Cha Cha' Ciarcia Heather Bracken Show All…
El funeral, Pomsta, Pohřeb, Das Begräbnis, Πολλοί Νεκροί για μία Κηδεία, Nos funérailles, A temetés, Fratelli, Bēres, Pogrzeb, O Funeral, Похороны, Похорон, 江湖白事
"abel ferrara was on so much crack when i did The Funeral, he was never on set. he was in my room trying to pick-pocket me." - vincent gallo
wanna know how to become one of the greats? take notes, kids. that is how you do it.
a gangster movie trimmed of any and all bells and whistles, nothing but the doom and guilt. what an ending jesus.
84/100
A home clustered with history, feuds, relationships, beliefs. Daytime soon fades into a seemingly eternal night, and it is in the shadow where Ferrara begins to play with flashback; time unknowingly revitalized and depicted. Character details illuminate and cower as swiftly as their present selves wander the world; frustrated criminals searching each corner for their own angel of death. And while The Funeral protrays an entire family structure lost in grief but employed in loss, Ferrara never molds its figures to be anything other than pieces in an organization.
Alternate title: The House of Weeping Women.
For someone well acquainted with Ferrara's work, this surely seems conventional, but it's really the closest Ferrara ever comes to approximating a sort-of quieter, more nuanced Cassavetes - so much so that it seems Ferrara is almost letting the actors and the script do all the work...or is it that he's letting them? Regardless, this is one of the most resolutely de-romanticized gangster films I've ever seen, relentlessly dour (if almost too much so) but the familiar themes still emerge, even as the film is almost too tied to its easy narrative structure.
I think I can see why Ferrara and St. John split up - their approaches (especially seeing where Ferrara will go after this) seem at polar odds,…
Action! - Stoning Abel Ferrara
When one of it’s members gets shot on the street, the demons and guilt from a crime family would be unveiled in what you could call the Carlito’s Way to Abel Ferrara's Kings of New York, with Christopher Walken back in the skin of a criminal this time with some much more remorse. Each film also has a Penn playing an asshole.
Since I have a phobia to needles and can't stand the sight of blood, it's kind of fascinating to me that I'm always drawn into stories that involve both. Generally speaking, it has less to do with the deaths and more with the suspense, or in the case of films like this, film,…
farouche and recalcitrant, genre lover and yet abnegator. being at odds, railing against, deeply catholic and profoundly pessimistic.
Ferrara lays out a seemingly conventional crime rendition through a gangster landscape, only to subvert the mob yarn with psychological introspection and spiritual lament in "The Funeral", a powerful and overlooked entry in the gangster archives that reaches for the mind, succeeds with sweeping patience, and erupts the tale with an ending that unleashes the condensed moral density built throughout the film.
“i’m ashamed of nothing. i didn’t make the world.”
“but you’re not doing anything to make it better.”
“yeah, and i’ll roast in hell.”
at the fringes of capitalism and the rotting core of masculinity a series of violent traumas perpetually reinscribe themselves through several generations. frigid Catholic dogmatism falls from the characters' lips throughout and yet its promises and vituperations seem a world apart from these lives of mundane and solipsistic brutality, made tangible only in the inscrutable encroachment of their own mortality. futurity is rejected at the end, but with the same violent means it was once destructively enforced, and the women are left to stitch the semblance of a life back together
Ferrara's most classical film. The best and the worst of every family movie can be found within, like a Christmas-Eve-Comedy but set after a life-shaking event, minus the comedy part: Abel just lets this tragedy coalesce in reverse order, tracking people who are merely parts of things larger than themselves. You will no longer be a part of their machine!
