Hotel Paradise (1995)

Bride-to-be Theresa Russell wakes up in a hotel room with Vincent D’Onofrio, who is not her groom-to-be. She regrets fooling around with him, or says she does, and she keeps him handcuffed to a bed.

Nicolas Roeg made this half-hour short, and it’s good enough to hold my attention to the end, but not good enough to recommend it.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

“If these walls could talk,” is the cliché when looking around in an old building. What happened in these rooms, long ago?

That’s the concept of this HBO micro-miniseries. It’s only three episodes, each about half an hour. Each episode is set in room 603 at an old hotel, but in a different time and year and with a different cast in each episode.

In the first episode, Harry Dean Stanton rents the room and Glenne Headly to share it with, but what happens isn’t the business transaction they’d expected. In the second ep, Griffin Dunne and Deborah Kara Unger have a messy break-up. In the third and final ep, Crispin Glover and Alicia Witt are seeing a doctor the next day, but there’s a blackout the night before.

It’s mostly soft-spoken dialogue about folks’ interpersonal relationships. The show’s executive producer, David Lynch, directed the first and third episodes.

This Hotel Room is weird, with early-Lynch weirdness — the kind that sorta makes sense.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hound (2015)

Four minutes of slow music as a couple of white dudes walk along a road, into a meadow. No dialogue. Wobbling camerawork. No dog, despite the title.

Whatever I just watched, twice, I don’t even half-understand.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

It’s World War II, and Sammy Rice is a scientist working with components for experimental explosives. He’s a civilian, though — perhaps ex-military. He has an injured foot that gives him a slight limp and constant pain, and he’s developed a weakness for the bottle, and a crotchety attitude. Still, he’s the go-to man when British children start turning up dead after contact with a mysterious new German weapon.

The drama and performances are stiff upper lip, and very serious, in a wartime context of saving olde England. Along the way, there’s time for some understated but unmistakable criticisms of bureaucracy, war profiteering, sexism, and war itself. There’s also a romantic subplot that makes sense as more than merely part of a formula.

The story takes a few detours not particularly related to the war and the plot, but it’s tense all the way.

Co-written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who worked together on plenty of top-notch stuff — Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann, and more.

The star is David Farrar, who’s only slightly known to me, but he’s terrific, and so’s the flick.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

This is a documentary about a moment in history utterly unknown to me. In the late 1960s, rebels rose up against cruel, British-backed Oman, on the Arabian Peninsula. The twist is that the rebels were mostly women, led by women, a buncha feminist guerrillas struggling to establish a democratic country, to be called Dhofar.

If it’s news to you like it was news to me, you don’t need to worry about the intricacies of such a long-ago uprising, because nothing’s really changed. As the subtitles explain early on: “For centuries the Arabian Gulf suffered colonialism. It was occupied by Britain from the late 18th century, because of its strategic importance. The discovery of oil increased British greed…”

Filmed as it happened by a Lebanese woman, the film is rousing, not because of the filmmaking (which is kinda rough and literally amateur) but because of what these fighting feminists pulled off.

No happy endings, though. You’ve heard of Oman, because it’s still there. Chances are, you’ve never heard of the country of Dhofar, because it’s not.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

This is Ingmar Bergman, maker of all those heavy head trip movies like Wild Strawberries (introspective road trip) and The Seventh Seal (play chess with Death), doing a horror movie. It’s kinda wowbang.

Johan is an artist, and he’s Max von Sydow so he’s all angular and angst and having visions and nightmares. He’s married to Alma, who’s Liv Ullmann, as tends to happen in Bergman movies. She’s every bit as deep and subject to heavy headstuff and visions and such.

They live in a small rented cabin on a remote island, where Johan shows Alma (but not us) sketches he’s made of his very strange visions. It’s serious psycho stuff, including “cast-iron, cackling women” and “spider-men” and a woman wearing a hat that, if she takes it off, would take off her face as well. There’s also a man with the beak of a bird, which Johan says is related to Papageno from Mozart’s The Magic Flute (filmed by Bergman a few years after this).

Next morning, Alma has a vision of her own, wherein a 200-year-old woman wearing a hat (Don’t take it off!) tells her where Johan keeps his diary, and that she should read it. It’s never a good idea to read someone else’s diary, so of course, Alma looks where the imaginary lady told her to look, and finds and reads his diary.

Among my favorite moments in the movie, Johan’s artsy solitude is intruded on by a ‘psychiatric curator’, who says “I finger people’s souls and turn their insides out.” There’s a troubling dinner party sequence, where everyone looks odd and says the wrong things and the camera flies through it all like it’s swaying on a rope.

There’s a lot going on here, most of it inside Johan and Alma’s minds, and yours. It’s a horror movie, but if you’re hoping for Nightmare on Elm Street, go rent Nightmare on Elm Street; this is something different.

Lots of human introspection and existentialism and smart people thinking and talking deep thoughts. It reminds me, it’s been too long since I’ve seen the Bergman classics, and some of them I’ve never seen. We’ll fix that!

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

The House (1961)

Juxtaposed against workmen knocking down an old house, we’re shown glimpses of the lives, births, and deaths that happened in the house. It’s moody, mesmerizing, and surprisingly light.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

… and out of alphabetical order …

Charlie Anderson (James Stewart) has six adult sons and one about-to-be-married daughter (Rosemary Forsyth), and she’s tougher than any of the boys.

The Civil War is coming close to their family farm in Virginia, but Charlie doesn’t care, which helps the movie greatly — when a movie asks me to care about the Confederacy, or about anyone who does, I refuse. Shenandoah makes it clear within minutes that the Anderson family doesn’t own slaves, doesn’t want to, doesn’t think slavery is right, and doesn’t have any sympathy for the rebel cause.

It also helps that the flick stars Jimmy Stewart, and the script makes him a lovable old wisdom-spewing country widower. A mule-cart’s worth of sarcastic lines delivered with Stewart’s drawl makes for one of his finest performances.

Before she died, many years earlier, his wife asked him to raise the children in the church, so he attends. He’s only the slightest believer, though, and says grace at the supper table like this:

“Lord, we cleared this land. We plowed it, sowed it, and harvest it. We cook the harvest. It wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be eating it, if we hadn’t done it all ourselves. We worked dog-bone hard for every crumb and morsel, but we thank you just the same anyway, Lord, for this food we’re about to eat, amen.”

Papa Anderson’s surly demeanor is hilarious, and his disinterest in the war raging mere miles from the farm is easy to interpret as a stoic, stubborn pacifism. “Are they on our property?” he asks his eldest son. The answer is no, so Anderson chews his cigar and says again, “Then it doesn’t concern us.”

Then his youngest son is mistakenly taken prisoner by Union soldiers, and when word reaches Papa Anderson, his response is, “Now it concerns us.”

Despite its Civil War setting and a sprawling cast of hundreds, there are only about three black people in the movie. None have much to say, and one says nothing, but when the black characters do speak, they don’t say massah. They sound like people, not stereotypes.

Shenandoah is a near-perfect Hollywood movie — not particularly deep or thoughtful, but stirring, thrilling, and satisfying in the end.

If there’s a weakness to the film it’s that Stewart’s character and performance dominates everything, leaving nobody else in the movie time or dialogue enough to emerge as characters. Which hardly matters, really. It’s a Jimmy Stewart movie all the way, and that’s more than enough.

Screenplay by James Lee Barrett, based on his novel Fields of Honor. Never read it, but Barrett was already known to me for writing the marvelously mockable Jack Webb-in-the-Marines movie, The D.I., which you simply must see if you haven’t. He also wrote or co-wrote On the Beach, Smokey and the Bandit, and …tick…tick…tick…, among other pretty good films.

I watched Shenandoah on TV when I was a kid, and never again until today, so why was the music instantly and thoroughly familiar? Ah, Wikipedia tells me what the movie’s credits didn’t: “The American folk song ‘Oh Shenandoah’ features prominently in the film’s soundtrack.”

Verdict: BIG YES.

11/16/2024

House (1977)
The House at the End of Time (2013)
House by the River (1950)
The House I Live In (2012)
… 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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