Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

xxxneon If you speak French, you'll find looking for inconsistencies in the subtitles more entertaining than what's going on on screen. For any good film, I take well over a page of notes. For this one, I took less than half a page. 'Nuff said? Perhaps not. How can a film with Willem Dafoe as a strip club owner, and with Bob Hoskins, be boring? Well, this one is. How disappointing. Dafoe does more acting (and we learn more about his character) in the first scene of To Live and Die in L.A. than he does in this entire film. Dafoe as Ray Ruby, owner of the Paradise Club; Hoskins as the Baron (greeter / maître d' / bouncer); and Matthew Modine as Johnnie Ruby, the Salon King are nothing special here. On the other hand, Sylvia Miles as landlady Lilian Murray; and Stefania Rocca as Debby, a dancer who is also a screenwriter, are decent and believable.As to the plot, there isn't much of one—nothing out of the ordinary happens here, nothing unexpected. There's no more conflict, no more actual heartfelt emotion at Ray's Paradise Club than there is at your own neighbourhood bar or pool hall. When a hundred seconds of plot are stretched out to a hundred minutes of film, that is NOT 'a good thing.' Likewise when any five minutes of a film look essentially the same as any other five minutes.The sole exception is Selena Khoo as Leila, a dancer who is also an accomplished pianist. She should've been on screen a half hour more than she was. Oh well, maybe in the sequel. Oh, whom am I kidding? There isn't going to be a sequel. God, I hope not.

jnrx I was excited to see this brilliant ensemble cast do their magic in Go Go Tales, but I found myself unexpectedly being served a gourmet hot-dog from actors who are capable of playing much more challenging characters. What makes a gourmet hot-dog anyways? Is it made from the lips and a**holes of kobe beef? Is there fois gras blended in with the questionable parts of top-shelf carcasses? I don't think it is an accident that right in the middle of Go Go Tales there is a scene with gourmet hot dogs being cooked the gourmet way - in microwave ovens, while the beautiful go-go dancers cook themselves in a faulty tanning bed.This isn't to say that Go Go Tales was badly acted - it was very well acted for what it is - a meandering vignette of a failing second rate strip joint; a metaphor for how even the most exotic dreams and aspirations are subject to blandness like anything else. It plays out like a cabaret stage production, a bit of aimless vaudeville salted with an undercurrent of subtle existential humming: A page out of Cassavetes' Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Like 'Chinese Bookie', this film offered more pleasure for me in the thinking about it afterward than it was to watch.I can't say that I didn't like it, and I can't say that I want to watch it again. But for a gourmet hot-dog, it wasn't terrible; it was mostly just a regular hot-dog made with some Hoskins, Dafoe and a dash of Modine, thrown in a microwave and served in the bawdy atmosphere of a musky strip club.

Argemaluco I am losing my faith in director Abel Ferrara.He made a lot of excellent movies (for example:Bad Lieutenant or Ms.45) with very little resources.But,he's not having luck with his most recent works.New Rose Hotel and R Xmas were let downs on his career but ,in spite of being failed experiments, they were interesting. But,more recently,Mary and,now,Go Go Tales resulted to be two craps.Go Go Tales is the lowest point in Ferrara's career.The story is uninteresting and boring.Willem Dafoe and Bob Hoskins are two excellent actors but they do what they can with the poor screenplay.I am very disappointed with this movie and I can't believe that a talented director like Ferrara was behind this mess.By my point of view,Go Go Tales is a crappy film and a waste of time.I honestly hope Ferrara will back to his best on his next film to make us forget of this pathetic movie.

Chris Knipp Here is a movie that Ferrara calls his "first intentional comedy." Its protagonist, Ray Ruby (Willem Dafoe), runs a joint where girls with other ambitions strip and dance around on a stage and lap-dance for a sparse crowd of men. He has a couple manager-bouncers, including Bob Hoskins. The shrill, dirty-mouthed landlady (Sylvia Miles) comes and sits at the bar blaspheming and demanding four months back rent and threatening to bring the marshals. The girls are constantly demanding to be paid. One of them is Asia Argento. Another one comes and declares that she's pregnant and Ray tries to talk her into continuing to perform. There's an Irish bookkeeper who has a file showing where all Ray's lotto tickets are stashed. He and Ray watch the drawing for an $18 million prize and they've got the winner—only they can't locate it. Then Ray's brother Johnny (Matthew Modine), a highly successful hairdresser, who bankrolls the joint, appears and announces he's going to pull the plug. Some young doctors come in who saved one of the guys with the Heimlich Maneuver, and they enjoy the girls—till one of them discovers his wife on the stage dirty dancing, and there's quite a fracas.That's about it, really. This sounds like a stage play. It nearly all takes place indoors either in the club or Ray's office. However, it's not a play because it was shot at Cinecitta in Rome, where they built the set. a club with its own lighting that, as Abel Ferrara tells it, never had to close. And the shooting, which in part is a homage to Cassavetes' Killing of a Chinese Bookie, was done with a couple of DV cameras—with their capacity to go on and on and on shooting a scene—as well as some surveillance cameras to add in the occasional Super 8 effect—and with a very clear-cut screenplay but a great deal of leeway for improvisation. The cameramen were not at all neglectful of the nearly naked girls, whose work is constantly in evidence whenever the cameras are rolling in the club. All of which is unlike any play you're likely to see. The movement, the level of improvisation, the complexity of the set, are movie stuff. And the cast too is a movie cast, even if these actors all have good stage experience, notably Dafoe, who was present every day of the shoot and managed that as his character manages the club.These are chaotic and grim and desperate circumstances, but they're handled with a sense of the absurd throughout: hence the "intentional comedy." Modine comes in with a pod of swept-forward, bleached hair and carrying a little dog. There's also a cabaret sequence when some of the girls perform their "art": one plays classical on an electric piano, a guy does a totally garbled recitation of Antony's funeral oration from Julius Caesar; another does a peculiar "magic" show; and so on. And Sylvia Miles' over-the-top shrillness sets a tone of ridiculous excess. Some of Dafoe's improvisations have an amusing sense of grasping desperation about them—especially when he confronts the suddenly pregnant dancer and even when he defends his club as if it were as important as life itself. Melodrama is replaced by intentional bathos.Still, as was plain at the New York Film Festival press screening when Ferrara, Dafoe, Miles, and several others talked to FSLC director Richard Pena and answered questions from the audience, this is a movie that's probably more fun to talk about than to watch. Not in a New York Film Festival since King of New York, which started a great row at the time, Ferrara is a character whose biography is best read in his films and his explanations together. For Go Go Tales, his parents are John Cassavetes and Robert Altman, but there's something uniquely disreputable and hilarious about his version of their styles.