Dangerous Game [Blu-ray]

Director: Abel Ferrara Abel Ferrara

Overview

Celebrated indie filmmaker Eddie Israel (Harvey Keitel) heads to California to shoot his latest movie, Mother of Mirrors, an examination of a marriage in which the wife pressures her husband to abandon their formerly mutual sex-and-drugs lifestyle and seek the same kind of religious conversion she has experienced. Leaving behind his own wife Madlyn (Nancy Ferrara) and his young son, Eddie explains the impetus of his latest project in a series of behind-the-scenes interviews. Meanwhile, Sarah Jennings (Madonna), a TV actress, has taken the wife role in Eddie's film, and her first item of business on the set is to sleep with Francis Burns (James Russo), who is set to play her husband. Things go sour between the two players and their conflicts spill onto the set, adding even more tension to a shoot in which Eddie alternately bullies and cajoles his actors to elicit more authentic performances. Perhaps Eddie manipulates Sarah onscreen because he's ashamed of having bedded his "very L.A." star just minutes before his wife and son arrived early for a weekend visit. Eddie soon finds the existential dilemmas of his film seeping into his own life, forcing him to question the compulsive adultery he practices. One of the first movies overseen by the film arm of Maverick, the record label and media company Madonna founded in the early '90s, Dangerous Game was produced by the singer's longtime manager, Freddy de Mann, alongside Mary E. Kane, who produced several earlier Ferrara efforts.

Product Details

Release Date:	11/17/2015
UPC:	0887090110402
Original Release:	1993
Rating:	R
Source:	Olive
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Sound:	[DTS 5.1-Channel Surround Sound]
Language:	English
Time:	1:48:00
Sales rank:	15,904

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Harvey Keitel	Eddie Israel
Madonna	Sarah Jennings
James Russo	Burns
Nancy Ferrara	Madlyn
Reilly Murphy	Tommy
Victor Argo	Director of Photography
Leonard Thomas	Prop Guy
Christina Fulton	Blonde
Heather Bracken	Stewardess
Glenn Plummer	Burns' Buddy
Lori Eastside	Party Guest
John Snyder	Party Guest
Adina Winston	Party Guest
Dylan Hundley	Party Guest
Julie Pop	Morton's Waitress
Anthony Redman	Swinger
Randy Sabusawa	Producer,Producer
Bill Pope	Camera Operator
Jesse Long	Script Supervisor
Richard Belzer	Cameo appearance
Annie McEnroe	Cameo appearance
Martin Schaer	Camera Operator
Hiram Ortiz	Hair
Sammy Jack Pressman	Cameo appearance
Niki Munroe	Girl in Trailer
Juliette Hohnen	Bar Patron
Lili Barsha	Flight Attendant
Robyn B. Ashley	Flight Attendant
Noga Isackson	1st AD
Linda Murphy	Boom Operator
Marta Bukowski	Video Tap Monitor
Jim Fitzgerald	1st Assistant Cameraman
Mindy Eshelman	Wardrobe
Steven Albert	Boxing Announcer
Joe Delia	Composer

Technical Credits

Abel Ferrara	Director
Freddy DeMann	Executive Producer
Mary Kane	Producer
Ron Rotholz	Executive Producer
Randy Sabusawa	Casting,Casting

Editorial Reviews

Although it's a bit of a self-indulgent mess and its philosophical debates aren't written well enough to truly engage, this reteaming of bad-boy director Abel Ferrara with his Bad Lieutenant star, Harvey Keitel, is notable for the surprising strength of Madonna's performance. As Sarah Jennings, a television star striving to forge a career as a dramatic actress, Madonna -- a pop star who's been striving for years to forge a career as any sort of actress -- seems less mannered, more off-guard, and more affecting than she ever has before or since. Dangerous Game's self-referential structure -- big-name celebrity known for bedding her leading men stars in film about big-name celebrity who promptly beds her leading man -- could probably keep an assistant literature professor churning out post-structuralist analyses for an entire semester. Nonetheless, there is some fun in speculating how much the lines Keitel's character spits at Madonna's character stung the performer in real life. "You'd still be selling toothpaste if it wasn't for me," Eddie barks as the camera rolls, and it's hard not to substitute the phrase "making music videos" for "selling toothpaste." In interviews, Madonna complained that the final edit was nothing like the original pitch Ferrara gave her, which perhaps explains why her company underpromoted the film upon its release. Ultimately, though, it's Keitel who stands in for Ferrara and gives the film its nasty center; the director even cast his real-life wife in the role of Eddie's wife, further blurring the line between the real and the cinematic. In the end, despite Ferrara's pretensions that both his film and its film-within-a-film get at deeper issues of spirituality and self-determination, Dangerous Game can best be appreciated as an exercise in celebrity exploitation with just the thinnest veneer of art-house cred.

All Movie Guide - Brian J. Dillard