If you happen to live in a neighborhood with no Jehovah?s Witness ladies around to remind you that we?re living in the last days, wackadoodle director Abel Ferrara?s latest, 4:44 Last Day on Earth, is here to drive that truth home — or at least make you think about it just a little bit. Willem Dafoe plays an actor, Cisco, facing what he, and everybody else, knows is the Earth?s last day, thanks to an ozone layer that dissolved faster than anyone expected. He spends that last day writing in his journal, watching video footage of some fake-inspirational guru-dude, reaching out to his daughter and assorted pals via Skype and, most importantly, making sweet, crazy, soft-core love to his dishy, much-younger girlfriend, painter Skye (Shanyn Leigh), in the couple?s artsy, faux-ramshackle Manhattan loft. What a way to go!
And yet, for an Abel Ferrara movie at least, 4:44 Last Day on Earth is surprisingly restrained. It doesn?t have the loosey-goosey dress-up-box vibe of the director?s 2007 Go Go Tales (also starring Dafoe), or the lackadaisical silliness of his 2005 Blessed Virgin thriller Mary (which featured a post-Big Fish, pre-La Vie en Rose Marion Cotillard, though I don?t remember a thing about her performance). 4:44 is, like the aforementioned movies, often laughable — watching the excessively craggy Dafoe and the excessively nubile Leigh roll around on their pre-Apocalyptic mattress was certainly good for a giggle. But the picture is also weirdly compelling, maybe most notably for the way Dafoe?s character — who is, in this respect, perhaps a stand-in for the Bronx-born Ferrara — seems to be grappling less with the idea that the world is ending than that the city is ending.
Ferrara integrates lots of — perhaps too much — found TV footage of people around the…
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