The Hot Spot (1990)
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
Hot Water (1924)
Hôtel des Invalides (1952)
Hotel Du Nord (1938)
Tár (2022)
Neverending Film Festival
#346 — Nov. 2, 2024
The Hot Spot (1990)
Don Johnson plays a cocky used car salesman. Jennifer Connelly wears glasses as big as her hooters, and Virginia Madsen wears a fake Southern accent and tries to be trouble. Jack Nance tries to be peculiar when, of course, he’s Jack Nance, so he doesn’t need to try and it’s kinda silly when he does.
Directed by Dennis Hopper, who was a dang fine actor but stays behind the camera here. The movie tries for sultry and sweaty, but moves awfully slow while never quite getting anywhere.
Verdict: NO.
♦ ♦ ♦
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
Three comedic adult man-children — John Cusack, Craig Robinson, and Rob Corddry — decide to return to a ski resort where they once shared the greatest weekend of their lives. When they check in, they discover that their room’s jacuzzi is actually a time machine, which whisks them back to that long-lost weekend.
Every time the movie starts really simmering, Chevy Chase shows up to deflate everything, but other than that, Hot Tub Time Machine is funny, sometimes smart, and better-than-average mainstream Hollywood stuff.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Hot Water (1924)
Harold Lloyd is best known for Safety Last!, where he famously hangs from a Big Ben clock high over a city’s streets. That’s probably his best work, but I haven’t seen it yet. Through the luck of the alphabet I’ve seen Lloyd’s The Freshman, Grandma’s Boy, High and Dizzy, and now this, and he’s not wowing me yet.
This has three separate but interconnected episodes about the comedy of marriage. First, Lloyd runs a shopping errand for his wife, and apparently bags hadn’t been invented yet, so he struggles with carrying her long list of items home in his arms. Then he loads the family into their new car for a drive, and things go wrong. Lastly, he mistakenly thinks he’s accidentally killed his meddlesome mother-in-law.
It’s certainly nothing special or groundbreaking. Lloyd’s screen persona is genial and funny, but he’s no Fatty Arbuckle, no Buster Keaton, and about a third of the Three Stooges. Hot Water is tepid — almost an hour, and my 21st-century attention span barely spanned it.
Verdict: MAYBE.
♦ ♦ ♦
Hôtel des Invalides (1952)
In Paris, the Hôtel National des Invalides is a nursing home for war-wounded veterans, and also a museum of France’s military history. This was filmed there, and opens with the moviemakers’ acknowledgment that they felt they couldn’t do justice to the injured men and the museum in the same film, so they decided to concentrate on the museum.
We’re shown countless cannons in a courtyard, battle horns and flags, ancient armor, even a child’s suit of armor (!) from the time of Louis the XIIIth, and the head from a statue that was blown apart in war. “Don’t touch,” say the signs and guards, so a kid of course touches the display.
We’re shown aircraft, guns, and turrets from the Great War, and occasionally but not often, a nurse wheels a disabled resident past in the background, or an old man in uniform hobbles by on a pegleg.
There’s a statue of an emperor who isn’t named, just “The Emperor,” but when the camera gets close enough you’ll recognize ol’ Nappy Napoleon. There’s his camp bed, where he slept between battles, his attaché, his famous hat, and his stuffed and preserved horse and dog.
Toward the end, a few of the disabled veterans gather to attend a memorial service at “the Church of the Soldiers.” Over archival footage from WWI, a box score flashes on the screen: 3,594,889 French injured, 314,000 missing, 1,071,000 dead. Total allied losses in that war: 3,070,000.
The music by Maurice Jarre, who later scored Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, sometimes amplifies the somber mood, other times seemingly mocks it. Directed by Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face, Le grand Méliès, Head Against the Wall, and co-founder of Cinematheque Française), this documentary is only 22 minutes, and it’s either subversive as hell or I’ve missed the point entirely.
Verdict: BIG YES, though the only English-subtitled copy I could find has been vandalized with some egomaniac’s ugly logo in the corner, all the way through it.
♦ ♦ ♦
Hotel Du Nord (1938)
Set in a French residential hotel, this is a crowded near-noir, in which a handful of characters interact, most quite convincingly. There’s a classy but aging hooker and her oddly aloof boyfriend who has a troubled past, a young he-and-she couple sharing a suicide pact, and the hotel’s owners, and a few other residents who seem real.
There are many moments of dazzlingly sharp dialogue, and other moments when the acting is too melodramatic, but like the best of noir, the dark characters have some light to them, and the light characters have darkness. Innovating camerawork and set construction, too.
Stay out of room 16.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
… and out of alphabetical order …
Tár (2022)
This is a biopic of Lydia Tár, a famous female composer, conductor of the Berlin Symphony, and universally acclaimed in classical music circles. She’s someone I should’ve heard of, but I hadn’t, so I paused the movie after half an hour to Google her. She doesn’t exist. The movie is a fictional biopic.
But wow, this is universe-building that’s right up there with Game of Thrones. Beginning to end and all the way through, there’s not a moment that doesn’t ring right and plausibly true.
Tár is shown to be brilliant, yet personable, at least so long as things go the way she’s carefully planned and decided. Sometimes she’s arrogant, but if anyone has the right to be arrogant, it’s her. She’s even magnanimous when a student disagrees with her, for a while. But there’s intense backstage politics to be played, and sometimes she’s vindictive, even manipulative. She’s a volatile mix of perfect public persona while being privately… difficult. She’s what you’d perhaps expect from a person of Tár’s fame and stature.
When things take an unexpected turn, like life so often does, there’s drama by the bushel. It’s as if streetlights, headlights, and GPS have been flipped off at the same time, while driving at 60 mph. And it’s terrific.
Cate Blanchett stars, and delivers the performance, which requires speaking the language of music, in German and English, often including long stretches of musical theorizing and expertise. In addition to playing a character, she needs to sound like she completely knows this stuff — and she does.
Best I can do for coming up with a criticism is that the opening credits roll under (to me) unpleasant female chanting, which I endured for two minutes, then fast-forwarded past. After that, though, everything in this film is perfectly assembled highbrow art about highbrow art.
Directed by Todd Field, who also made the marvelous In the Bedroom.
Verdict: BIG YES.
11/2/2024
Hotel Room (1993)
Hour of Glory (1949)
The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1972)
Hour of the Wolf (1968)
… plus schlock, shorts, and surprises …
Now accepting movie recommendations, especially beginning with the letter ‘I’.
Illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.
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