THE FUNERAL (1996) * Deglamorizing the mafia is no doubt a worthy activity but it doesn't make for good cinema. These guys have pretty wives but fornicate with ugly hookers, inauspicious houses in downtrodden suburbs, bars where they serve cognac in soda glasses. Abel Ferrara shoots it all in depressed, understated earth colours and the result probably isn't exactly what he was shooting for: your main goal is leave the film as far behind as possible, though it's also true that it leaves one with little interest in joining the mob. It didn't have to be this way: it's remarkable to shoot a film so dull with Christopher Walken, Isabell Rossellini and Annabella Sciorra, but the road to doing so is easiest when giving lines to Chris Penn, and sticking his big ol' haid in the frame too much (at all). Every 20 minutes or so the script, such as it is, interrupts itself with a series of nauseating sex scenes involving the fat, the bad and the ugly. This film peripherally asks the interesting question, "How did the mob become so Republican instead of Communist?" The answer is that the short term money was in selling out the common guys, but unfortunately it's dealt with neither at length nor particularly effectively. Best line is when Vincent Gallo says, "The capitalists have the cops, the workers can have us." "Johnny was a Communist."