'Hotel' and '9 Songs'

Sigh. Since hitting the high mark with 'And they lived happily ever after..." on Tuesday night, a film I thorougly enjoyed and highly recommend to all when it is inevitably released here sometime in the next two years, it's been very slow going. I've chronicled my displeasure with 'Cafe Lumiere' and last night's 'Hotel' was only slightly better.

While I did lose consciousness for about 15 to 20 minutes, there at least was a semblance of a story here: a woman goes to work at a hotel in the woods and is curious that her predecessor seems to have myseriously disappeared. You'd think, from this premise, that an interesting little story would unfold. Here again, I think it's far more effective to just describe what happens on screen rather than to come up with clever phrases to convey my disappointment.

Take a sequence that is repeated several times throughout the film with little variation: Maid walks down a dimly lit hallway. She turns on a light. She turns the corner down another corridor. She turns on a light. She walks into the darkness in the next corridor (and at this point, and every time the scene is repeated, i was steering myself for some type of jolt, a hand or the sudden appearance of something scary) and then....emerges at the other side of the darkened hallway. She opens a door and walks outside. She stares out into the darkened woods. Scene ends. Time elapsed: 8 minutes.

There was an interesting moment where she picks up a guy at a bar and takes him home and he stares at her for a few minutes and the stare turns slowly into a creepy smile. This garnered many laughs from the audience but that was about the most exciting to happen all evening. Even at a comparatively spare 82 minutes, it still felt too long.

'9 Songs' was a lot better at eliciting reactions from an audience which packed the theatre on a weekday afternoon to take in a little Franz Ferdinand and hardcore porn. Some attendees, apparently unaware that the Visions Progamme is comprised mainly of films that lack anything resembling a plot or that the warning, "Contains explicit sex scenes" in the Programme book, was to be taken literally, left shortly into the proceedings. But perhaps I'm too hasty to ascribe an intolerant puritanism to the departing throes: maybe they just hated the music, the quality of the video, or the forementioned lack of a real story.

Me, I kinda liked it, the live music sets especially (other acts to perform songs or snippets of songs included: Primal Scream, Super Furry Animals, Dandy Warhols, Elbow--man, all these directors seem to be borrowing heavily from my music collection), and the flow of the scenes and images in coordination with the soundtrack. The sex scenes....well, they certainly didn't bother me but I didn't find them particularly arousing, perhaps because I found the lead actress incredibly annoying and not all that appealing. I thought the aerial shots of Antartica were far more interesting than some of the other, um, shots. Recommend for those who are interested in this type of thing.

Note to Stuart: I find that movies, like concerts and plays, are always more interesting when you show up for them on the date printed on the ticket. Just a tip, big guy.