Product Description

Spain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD:it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ),Spanish ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ),Spanish ( Subtitles ),ANAMORPHIC WIDESCREEN (1.85:1), SPECIAL FEATURES: Biographies, Filmographies, Interactive Menu, Scene Access,SYNOPSIS: The stories of Charles Bukowski, the drunken poet of the LA fringe, are the basis for this film, directed by Marco Ferreri. Ben Gazzara stars as Charles Serking, an aging beat poet, a role that is merely a stand-in for Bukowski. Serking travels the seamy side of life, seeking out a collection of bizarre women. As he continues onward in a series of drunken debauches, he engages in various forms of sexual excess with the compliant low-life women.
SCREENED/AWARDED AT: David Donatello Awards, San Sebastian International Film Festival,

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #163876 in DVD
• Formats: Import, PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 101 minutes

Features

• THIS DVD WILL NOT WORK ON STANDARD US DVD PLAYER

Amazon.com
"Style is the answer to everything," intones skid row poet Charles Serking, played by the suitably grizzled and worn Ben Gazarra, to his somnambulistic audience. Serking is, of course, a not-at-all veiled stand-in for beat legend Charles Bukowksi, whose autobiographical short stories were the basis for this film. But Serking, in many ways, comes off more like a gin-soaked fantasy of a skid row Hemingway whose sports of choice are alcohol, women, and sex. Behind the salt-and-pepper beard and rummy eyes lies an actor too poised to allow himself to fully sink into the alcoholic sloppiness that Mickey Rourke so easily brought to the screen in the less pretentious and more concise Barfly, which Bukowski himself scripted. But if Italian-born director Marco Ferreri stumbles over the self-conscious dialogue, he's right at home capturing the seedy atmosphere of dim, run-down apartments and underlit bars in the real Hollywood Serking calls home. When Serking's fling with the stunning, self-mutilating Italian hooker Cass (Ornella Muti, who puts her oversized safety pin to some rather startling uses) becomes too emotional, he takes the anonymous safety of the streets--crashing in a flophouse, passing around a bottle with a listless knot of derelicts. Serking melds right in with the littered streets and lost souls, a real man of the people. Suddenly you see it: he's got style. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Long overdue tribute to Ferreri
While it's long overdue for Marco Ferreri to receive the prestige treatment of a major box set - especially in America where his films are less known - it's unfortunate that five of the eight films are already available in English subtitled dvds released just a few years ago. But for Ferreri completists, the purchase of this set is mandatory due to the inclusion of THE SEED OF MAN and THE HOUSE OF SMILES - both making their U.S. DVD debut, as well as the first time these two films have been available with English subtitles ANYWHERE. And the black and white feature THE LITTLE COACH will be new for most viewers, since it's only previous U.S. release came over 10 years ago in a marginally released video edition. Also the film's bonus documentary MARCO FERRERI - THE DIRECTOR FROM ANOTHER PLANET - is authoritative and surprisingly comprehensive - with rare tidbits like Ferreri's lifelong diabetes and the attempted (and unsuccessful) suicide of actor David Warner during the shooting of Ferreri's film THE AUDIENCE.

But those with an appetite for more Ferreri after completing this set might want to check out the English subtitled editions of HAREM, LA CAGNA and DILLINGER IS DEAD available at amazon.co.uk. Also, dvd.it provides Italian dvds (without English subtitles) of rarer Ferreri films like THE CONJUGAL BED, THE APE WOMAN, WEDDING MARCH, and DIARY OF A VICE. And the Spanish site dvd.es is a source for Ferreri's STORY OF PIERRA, THE FUTURE IS WOMAN, and his final film NITRATE BASE.

strange, disturbed, frightening and facinating
This movie works only if you let your imagination sulk to the very Id of one's being. This is not commonplace material and is only for a limited audience. One needs to understand that madness is more norm than exception, and the beautiful almost lost art of self destruction is just below the surface of many of us.

Tales Of Ordinary Madness
`Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must live'-Charles Bukowski

To understand Bukowski, one cannot separate his life from his writings, you must understand that they both depended on each other and created an insane, incestuous bond that drove his writings to such an incredible level of contained madness. Ferreri understands that, a poet of the excesses of human nature, just as Bukowski was the poet of his own excesses, he is the gutter anarchistic artist, the People's symbolist, whose films are ventures into the darkest parts of man's existence (and eventual self-destruction). His films all have a single theme: man's inability to make the world in harmony with his desires. Bukowski's eternal theme was to live with art, and he argued that banality was the most depressing thing that could happen to someone. In `Tales Of Ordinary Madness' Ferreri does not make a film in the conventional sense but a drunken poem in the form of a film, a venture into complete insanity. Something happens in a Ferreri film, something a little uncertain and inexplicable but ultimately moving, just as something happens in Bukowski's writings, which carry the whole universe with them in unpretentious attempts to describe futile things, the words break through the page, and suddenly art is there, an insane god-like feeling of immortality is present and nothing else matters, it is with the power of a genius that Bukowski can contain nirvana with such simplicity, such straight-forwardness. Just as Ferreri can make important philosophical statements in such un-stylized context. `Tales Of Ordinary Madness' is a masterpiece and the greatest film about the actual process of art ever made because it does not separate the art from the reality, in fact, it unites them, and argues that one depends on the other. Bukowski could not have written what he has written if he had not lived what he had lived, Ferreri understands that true art is born out of despair, demystified and separated of all its futile banalities. When the character inspired by Bukowski, in one of the film's most moving passages, is recruited by an organization to write for them and more or less sentenced to bourgeois acceptance if he settles into the conformity that they offer him, he declines, gets drunk and throws beer bottles at them, forever the anarchist, that scene alone is perhaps the greatest comment anyone has ever made on Bukowski. The film ends, tragically and hauntingly, in an act of utter desperation and eventual rebirth and Ferreri once again uses the sea as a metaphor for man's ultimate destiny, ending so quietly on that deserted beach, dirtied by the universe and carried away to die, forever alone but not dead, not yet, and not forgotten.