Review: Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth
4:44 Last Day on Earth should have been a great film; or, rather, should have fit custom with my esoteric (read: weird and bitchy) standards for film. It has Willem Dafoe (Boondock Saints! Platoon! Movies that don’t star Toby McGuire!), the kind of guy who sits around waiting for touched-in-the-blood projects. It was directed by Abel Ferrara, who made Scorsese blush with Bad Lieutenant, who came from porn and then did The Funeral and King of New York. It was shot (lovingly) in my own Lower East Side – the neighborhood of New York City where I feel most at home, where all three of my favorites bars are, where I can eat upscale in my pajamas – and pretends (equally lovingly) that the LES is still the artist’s haven it was two decades ago before the NYU grads and trust-fund babies shuffled in. It even has Paz de la Huerta, my hands-down favorite actress from the demolition derby (played at both the corporeal and spiritual level) that is the Tribeca scene (Paz and I go back, but that’s a different story – about banana chocolate-chip muffins, amongst other things – for a different time).
And, since I’m reviewing the film – although stalwart Anobium readers know we don’t so much review works as combine them with common household chemicals at strange gravities, speeds and temperatures – I might as well tell you: the plot synopsis sounds suspiciously custom-built too, as if Ferrara had done a stalker’s due-diligence on me via Google and Facebook and then written the screenplay. Let me sum up and deflate excitement, simultaneously:
