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I challenge you to find a worse movie than Hotel by Mike Figgis. Just give up now. You can’t do it. Not with Turbulence 3: Heavy Metal, not with Leprechaun 5: in the Hood. Nope – when it comes to terrible films, those two gems have nothing on Hotel.

Where Hotel succeeds in sucking, where others have failed is in this: Hotel thinks it’s a smart art film. I also thinks that it thinks it’s funny. It’s not. It is a little sexy, which is the movie’s saving grace. But it’s not nearly sexy enough to make me not regret sitting through the whole film.

The movie is (apparently) about a film crew making a movie version of "The Duchess Of Malfi" while a second crew makes a documentary in the process. You can tell pretty quickly that while there was an outline for the film, there was no script. Some actors thrive in a situation like this: David Schwimmer and Salma Hayek are not among them. But I digress. The crews are staying in a Hotel, apparently staffed by cannibals, or vampires. I’m siding with cannibals on this one, since no one beared fangs or bit anyone on the jugular.

And this might be an interested beginning to the story, if the acting and details has any sense of realism to it. But it doesn’t. At no point in the film could I suspend disbelief long enough to believe this was anything but some kid’s semester project in a community college film class. And it looks like one too, since the whole movie is shot in DV.

I learned a few things by sitting through this film this weekend. And basically, it’s that I think film is dead to me now. Here’s why:

1. Anyone who has many any movie can get someone to say good enough things about it to put on a DVD’s cover. So, quotes and reviews are now meaningless.
2. Saying something did well at Cannes, or was a favorite by Sundance or IFC is also meaningless at this point. In fact, over the past year I’ve treated these endorsements on a DVD’s cover a bit like the message from the surgeon general on a pack of cigarettes. More a warning than an endorsement.
3. I’ve seen three movies in the last few years in the theater that I thought were worth the money: Garden State, Dawn of the Dead, and The Ring. The last one i can remember before that is American Beauty. So I’m just about done seeing movies in the theater and close do done renting DVDs.
4. I can tolerate an average album, because there’s usually a track or two I’ll still enjoy. Plus, an album doesn’t typically have my full attention. But a film does. And a lot more often than not, I find myself wishing I had done something else with those two hours I just lost from my life. Like reading a book, or doing a few loads of laundry.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2005 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.