[4:44 LAST DAY ON EARTH
screens Thursday June 21st at 8:00 pm and Saturday June 23rd at 9:15
pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]
Review by Bob
Ignizio
In director Abel Ferrara's apocalyptic
4:44 LAST DAY ON EARTH, not only is the world ending, but we
have to spend humanity's final moments with pretentious New York
artist types. It seems Al Gore was more or less right, as global
warming takes its final toll on the planet. Oddly, the end of the
world is nice enough to wreak its havoc on a precise schedule,
seemingly producing no serious ill effects until 4:44 am on the night
the film takes place on.
One would think there might be some
discomfort and chaos leading up to that moment, but not in Ferrara's
film. However, as artist and recovering heroin addict Cisco (Willem
DaFoe) walks around on his roof, we see New York traffic zip along
the streets in an orderly manner. We do witness a suicide, and the
TV, perpetually on in the loft Cisco shares with his painter
girlfriend Skye (Shannen Leigh), tells us the end is nigh, but
overall people seem to have accepted the inevitable a lot better than
one might expect.
DaFoe is excellent as always, creating
a believable character who feels fully fleshed even if he isn't
necessarily written that way. That's all well and good, but all of
DaFoe's talent doesn't change the fact that there's not much to this
film. Cisco and Skye have sex and talk to a few old friends and
family members on Skype, and at one point have a spat over one such
conversation Cisco has with his daughter and an ex. It's all well
acted and technically well done, but too emotionally distant to
invest in, and the way the characters deal with their impending doom
is neither believable nor particularly interesting.
With
so many filmmakers of late offering their takes on the end of the
world, you have a wide range of Apocalypses to choose from. Lar's Von
Trier's beautiful and morose MELANCHOLIA,
the more comedic and human SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF
THE WORLD, the snarky
supernatural Armageddon of CABIN IN THE WOODS,
and of course any number of zombie and alien onslaughts. And that's
just in the last 12 months. With that in mind, 4:44 LAST
DAY ON EARTH just doesn't offer
enough of a unique and compelling take on the subject to warrant
taking yet another cinematic trip into oblivion. 2 out of 4 stars.
I too see a lot of these end-of-the-world-as-Art-film things coming along, like the Y2K scare never went away. Must the the pseudointellectual equivalent of superhero-comics adaptations. But who told IFC or Magnolia Releasing that everyone would want mass-quantities of high-toned claptrap? Dudes, end the world, get on with it and see if the cockroaches can write more interesting scripts.
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