Las Vegas Weekly

Go Go Tales

Abel Ferrara’s “Go Go Tales”

Courtesy of CineVegas

Things are not going well at Ray Ruby’s Paradise. Ray (Dafoe) is four months behind on his rent, to an obnoxious landlady (Sylvia Miles) who keeps threatening to turn the strip club into a Bed, Bath & Beyond. The number of customers seems to be dwindling (“A business like this goes in cycles,” the club host (Hoskins) keeps explaining). The dancers haven’t been paid on time and are grumbling about a work stoppage. Ray seems to be blowing all of his money on lottery tickers. To top it all off, Ray’s brother, Johnnie (Modine), the real financer of the place, shows up saying he’s going to pull the plug.

Welcome to the world of Abel Ferrara, where the American Dream always seems to be going from bad to worse. Ferrara has described this project as his first “intentional comedy,” but the humor comes in fits and starts. When he didn’t have something funny to put onscreen, he apparently told his DP to shoot the strippers, which actually becomes a bit monotonous after a while. As the title intimates, the film is more a series of vignettes than a full narrative arc, with the camera floating around to meet all the various lowlifes and hear their laundry list of grievances.

Except, these people are not scumbags. Ferrara gives his characters a strange sense of warmth and humanity—these are people with hopes and dreams. They even share a sense of honesty and loyalty; they just happen to work in a seedy industry. There is even hope for poor Ray, in the form of a winning lotto ticket, although thanks to his byzantine filing system he can’t actually find it.

Ferrara had an amazing run in the early-to-mid-’90s, dealing in both crime and horror. But he hasn’t made a truly memorable film in over a decade now (there was buzz for this one at Cannes, thanks to Argento’s striptease act involving a rottweiler, but one scene does not a movie make). And while things may not be going well now, that winning ticket could be just around the corner.