Rant of the Day: The Blackout - dir. Abel Ferrara - 1997 - USA/FranceYuck. I really hate it when I find myself liking a film as shamelessly awful as The Blackout. Yeah, it's true, I am a sucker for eccentricities of Dennis Hopper and Béatrice Dalle. And I do think Ferrara's The Addiction is kind of wonderful. But, The Blackout sucks. And... I like it. Matthew Modine plays a cod actor, purposefully unlikable -- and he's got a secret; he just doesn't know what it is. We, the audience, figure it out long before he does. There's a real seediness about the whole production: Dalle was arrested for cocaine charges while filming, which later resulted in the French government denying her a visa for a role in The Sixth Sense; Hopper looks just as fucked up as he did in Apocalypse Now. It leads you to wonder if there might be some authenticity to the characters' obsession with coke. All of this translates well on the screen; after all, this is an Abel Ferrara movie. I really wish I could properly defend my liking of this trash, and since I can't (and since just about everyone I know who's seen it, hates it), I can't really suggest this outside the Dalle, Hopper, or Ferrara fanatics (of which, I'm sure, there are few).
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