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I have a soft spot for this one. I really like the way that it shows the realities of sin in humanity, though its strongest point is in its portrayal of the solution. The last few images of the film illustrate the need for Christ in such a simple and profound way that is both personal and deeply theological. I love it and would hope it makes the cut.

Oh, and I almost placed this in the genre thread because it would seem to even things out by including a horror film.

Here, here, I agree with you. I think it presents a fresh and novel vision of human nature, sin, and grace.

Another one I've long wanted to see, inspired by my high regard for BAD LIEUTENANT combined with the glowing article in IMAGE Journal (Number 20), "Spiritual Subversion: The Films of Nicholas St. John" by J.A. Hanson;

"...one of the most stunningly, overtly Christian films I have ever seen... (Screenwriter) St. John himself is a deeply committed Christian who writes six days a week and exists entirely outside the Hollywood community, apart from his friendship with Ferrara. A devoted admirer of St Francis of Assissi, he left the big city years ago to live closer to nature. Ironically pious while so many of his characters are profane, and gentle while they are violent... He is, in fact, the author of a cinematic style that accommodates religious concerns and questions bertter than any other contemporary American work in cinema. This style, which I might call "spiritual literalism," employs a familiar genre, with all its conventional trappings, and expands the meaning of that genre to include theological concerns. The theological reality then admitted into that genre subsequently subverts the genre, eclipsing its ordinary significance in favor of the deeper significance of the transcendent reality that has intruded upon it... The operative conceit of THE ADDICTION is that vampirism serves as a metaphor for man's sin.... The aim of St John's style is to allow the "real" world to collapse into the spiritual, which in turn is shown to be the ultimate reality... Vampirism is less a metaphor for sin than its visual pretext; the desire for vengeance (in THE FUNERAL) less a metaphor for the tension between free will and predestination than its excuse... "

Maybe this Top 100 hoohaw will be the occasion for me to finally watch this one, just as it was to re-view 13 CONVERSATIONS, and to finally check out Branagh's HENRY V.

*

Any other fans of BAD LIEUTENANT here? There was a piece on the screenwriter in a recent Film Comment or Cineaste, I forget which. I'd sure like to see this one end up on our list: almost unwatchably base at any number of points, but absolutely committed to the power of God breaking into this lost man's life. Probably one of my top ten "spiritually significant" films - but one which I actually recommend to very few people. So ugly, so strange, so disturbing. I like that in a movie.

I hadn't thought of The Addiction but now that i see it on the roster it makes perfect sense and thus gets my horror-shoe-in-spiritual-tie-in-vote. If anyone wants to take it seriously i will send you my VHS copy of it, i was only going to sell it on ebay for like a buck fifty anyway.

-s.

I'll take it. I was going to go see it downtown last week, at some screening that described it as something like a: lesbo-horro fantasy dripping with raw humanity. (Seriously.) But since I skipped that interesting chance, I will settle for your VHS.

That is really strange. I don't remember anything lesbian about it at all. Could be that i've forgotten that element though. What i do remember is that it had a hard edge of philosophical preachiness within it, but preachiness coming from a vampire is as cool as preachiness gets.

OH - and i remember the ending. Holy smokes do i remember the ending.

-s.

Well, I will trade back your Dogville DVD for it.

We have the same number of posts, we must be lovebirds.

Last one to a thousand is a ROTTEN EGG, Doofers!!

-s.

Watched THE ADDICTION while I was on jury duty, and wow.

Here's the first draft of what I wrote in response. Want to keep working on this, but for now it'll do.

THE ADDICTION
Bram Stoker's novel Dracula evokes true horror, a sense of eternal corruption and moral dread. Alas, most of the films the book has inspired reduce that revulsion at spiritual evil to merely mortal terror. They're nothing but more or less scary action movies, Good Guys In Peril flicks where the threat happens to be neck bites rather than gunshot wounds or chainsaw lacerations.

Sure, the blood-sucking is repulsive, and there's often that erotic undercurrent that adds a certain creepiness, but for this viewer at least, the real Horror is to be found in the Vietnamese heart of darkness Francis Ford Coppola uncovers in APOCALYPSE NOW, for instance, or in a Holocaust film like Alain Resnais' NIGHT AND FOG.

Abel Ferrarra invokes both evils in THE ADDICTION, an explicitly theological Horror film that uses vampirism as a stand-in for the contagious and predatory evil that lives in the human heart. He's playing for keeps, he and his screenwriting partner Nicholas St. John, invoking a host of philosophical heavy hitters who've weighed in on the question of evil. ""Sartre, Beckett, Baudelaire - you think they're works of fiction?" The film-makers are utterly serious, linking genocide and wartime atrocities with the more domestic and familiar evils of sexual coercion, inner city decay, addiction and – yes – intellectual pride. There is nothing arch or cynical about this film: it is in earnest about the wickedness of the human heart. Deadly earnest.

Lili Taylor is very fine as a Ph.D. candidate who is violently attacked in a New York passageway and, unable to resist her alluring attacker with sufficient conviction, finds herself as suddenly desperate for a fix as any first-time user of crack cocaine. Except for her, the drug of choice is human blood. More precisely, it is the thrill of overpowering another's will with her own. The actress charts the junkie's affectless downward spiral with precision: it is as compelling a portrait of addiction as it is of moral decay.

Nicholas St. John is a devout Christian, a dedicated follower of Saint Francis, and the story he tells is resolutely human, his focus uncompromisingly personal. He eschews the usual plot mechanics of vampire melodrama in favor of character study, the machineries of despair. No Van Helsings chase black-caped grad students through fog-bound streets, armed with wooden stakes or expending their last ounce of strength to wrestle philosophy T.A.s into the dawning sunlight. (Not that plenty of plenty of grad students couldn't do with a little exercise and some sunshine, God knows...) His story line is starkly linear, his themetic concern single-minded: indeed, the narrative might feel simplistic if not for the ambiguity of the film's final moments. What exactly has become of Kathleen? The academic and theological references are at times heavy handed, but the film maker's unflinching contemplation of human evil grounds those abstractions in undeniable realities, and if the philosophizing is perhaps rendered artlessly, the film 's visual power more than compensates

Cinematographer Ken Kelsch gives us a seductively lensed black and white world, filled with potent visuals. At one point, bands of brilliant light filtered through noir-ish venetian blinds press down upon Kathleen with palpable weight as the sun rises. At another, the black humor of an initially jokey faculty-reception-turned-nasty culminates in truly disturbing high-contrast shots of feeding that are almost entirely black but drained of all humour, and difficult to get out of the mind's eye afterward. The restricted palette lends interpolated documentary footage of My Lai and Dachau congruity with the rest of the film, and other presumably "real" footage of New York City takes on a particular kind of menace: sunglasses on ordinary pedestrians become take on an ominous quality, shielding wearers from the light, suggestive of an omnipresent threat.

THE ADDICTION is not as strong a work as Ferrarra's other very Catholic exploration of human depravity, BAD LIEUTENANT, though it is better looking. The overt philosophizing can feel a tad sophomoric. Viewers who are put off by that, or who don't buy St. John's central argument about the universality of human evil, are likely to have real problems with the interpolation of Holocaust footage, which could seem gratuitous, or at least unearned. And I imagine Jewish viewers could be very troubled by a film that yokes the horror of the Holocaust to the potentially campy mythology of vampirism – especially when the antidote to such evil is rendered in such clearly Christian symbols as crucifix and communion.

But for those of us who see Nazi atrocities, sexual predation and the horrors of addiction issuing from the same dark place in the human heart, the film is a stunning reminder of the Bible's uncompromising assertion that the proclivity to evil is common to us all. I left this film deeply shaken, determined to meet the ever-present temptations to spiritual and moral compromise with a resistance far more passionate. "You think that's going to stop me? Collaborator..."

Nadja was a cool little movie, but it wasn't directed by David Lynch.

It was Michael Almereyda, who directed the Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet.

Sorry, David Lynch was the Executive Producer not the director . . .


The Ethan Hawke version of Hamlet is my favorite one BTW. . . .

(Didn't Lynch have a cameo appearance in Nadja as a morgue security guard ?)

Speaking of Ferrara...

from Philly.com:

AUGH!!!

WHERE in the scriptures does it say that Mary Magdalene--or any Mary--was ever a prostitute?

If anyone can find a better thread for this, feel free . . .

Today is Abel Ferrara day in the film blogosphere. After watching fourteen of his films in the last month-and-a-half, I've posted some comments at Long Pauses that might be of interest to some of you. Or not. I've also provided links to other posts around the web:

Ferrar-a-thon

How can I take your blog seriously when you don't even link to A&F? Sheesh!

Seriously, though, thanks very much for that article. I've just skimmed it now and will go back over it soon. I didn't even realize he had that many films.