Genesis introduction:
The monthly Cult Classic Collective screening with Nick Walker of Rochester Kino returns to the Genesis with Abel Ferrara's King of New York. The screening will be introduced by Nick and will be followed by a salon discussion upstairs at the bar where you will have a chance to discuss this great film with fellow fans and first-time viewers!
Film Comment review:
The relation between images, politics and morality is explored with aplomb by Abel Ferrara in King of New York. Beyond good and evil indeed: Ferrara’s film doesn’t necessarily ask us to identify with its irredeemable crooks, but it does make painfully clear how, when God is dead and the almighty dollar rules, the supposed “good guys” are often just as bad as their villainous counterparts. King of New York screened at the 2016 Vienna Film Festival in the context of a tribute to Christopher Walken, and his performance here as fresh-out-the-joint hipster kingpin Frank White lives and dies on Walken’s unparalleled capacity to play low-key menacing and enticingly lively. His sauntering—across the floor of a crowded, expensive restaurant; right past the hood standing guard outside a mafia-run card game; from the living room of his room in the Plaza Hotel to the balcony where he can survey his kingdom-to-come—radiate an infectious, weirdo gracefulness, and Laurence Fishburne chips in a career-best turn as White’s most trusted trigger-man, a swaggering volcano of lewd disses, glimmering gold caps, and remorseless killings. To see King of New York on celluloid unlocks its startling alternations between warm, honey-gold interior scenes suffused with lavish, late-’80s Manhattan decadence and ice-cold, dark and dank exterior scenes with a vacuum-like atmosphere (the unnerving backdrop for the film’s climactic chase/shootout, with amoral cops David Caruso and Wesley Snipes trying to cover their own asses by rubbing out Walken and Fishburne). A dialectical masterpiece that’s even better and less silly than I remembered, King of New York is anchored by a complex moralism with a dash of fatalistic cynicism that cuts awfully deep in a year of police shootings, dashed political dreams and, of course, more of the same ol’-same ol’.
Dan Sullivan
The relation between images, politics and morality is explored with aplomb by Abel Ferrara in King of New York. Beyond good and evil indeed: Ferrara’s film doesn’t necessarily ask us to identify with its irredeemable crooks, but it does make painfully clear how, when God is dead and the almighty dollar rules, the supposed “good guys” are often just as bad as their villainous counterparts. King of New York screened at the 2016 Vienna Film Festival in the context of a tribute to Christopher Walken, and his performance here as fresh-out-the-joint hipster kingpin Frank White lives and dies on Walken’s unparalleled capacity to play low-key menacing and enticingly lively. His sauntering—across the floor of a crowded, expensive restaurant; right past the hood standing guard outside a mafia-run card game; from the living room of his room in the Plaza Hotel to the balcony where he can survey his kingdom-to-come—radiate an infectious, weirdo gracefulness, and Laurence Fishburne chips in a career-best turn as White’s most trusted trigger-man, a swaggering volcano of lewd disses, glimmering gold caps, and remorseless killings. To see King of New York on celluloid unlocks its startling alternations between warm, honey-gold interior scenes suffused with lavish, late-’80s Manhattan decadence and ice-cold, dark and dank exterior scenes with a vacuum-like atmosphere (the unnerving backdrop for the film’s climactic chase/shootout, with amoral cops David Caruso and Wesley Snipes trying to cover their own asses by rubbing out Walken and Fishburne). A dialectical masterpiece that’s even better and less silly than I remembered, King of New York is anchored by a complex moralism with a dash of fatalistic cynicism that cuts awfully deep in a year of police shootings, dashed political dreams and, of course, more of the same ol’-same ol’.
Dan Sullivan
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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