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Chelsea Walls (2001, dir. Ethan Hawke)
I was prepared to not like this movie. I did not really want to like this movie. I put it in the DVD player and kept my hand on the remote, ready to fast-forward from meager RSL scene to meager RSL scene. But I never used it. Well, not till the end, and that was to skip back and watch parts of it again. And again.
It's a character- rather than a plot-driven movie, but it's also not so much about the people as it is about the hotel they're living in (the Chelsea Hotel, hence the title) or rather about both at once, since the hotel wouldn't be the hotel without its tenants and the tenants wouldn't have the same stories if they were living elsewhere. Hence we get a mood-setting monologue in the beginning in an elevator by a possibly-crazy man about how the hotel is haunted by all the ghosts of great artists who've lived and died there.
Playing these myriad characters were lots of notable people, none of whom did a shabby job, off the top of my head. We had an alcoholic writer struggling with love (Kris Kristofferson), a waitress/writer with intimacy issues (Uma Thurman with a freakish pixie haircut), buddies from Minnesota who drove to Manhattan to make music (Robert Sean Leonard) and detox (Steve Zahn), a poet (Rosario Dawson) and her on-again/off-again boyfriend (Mark Webber) trying to make things work, a painter (Vince D'Onofrio, unusually reserved) struggling with his "patron" and with a crush on Uma, an aging singer (Jimmy Scott) too frail to go next door and bet at OTB, and on and on, including cameos by Natasha Richardson and Harris Yulin. Oh! ha ha. I was going to say that the only person in the film who annoyed me, not counting well-acted characters who were deadbeats/assholes/etc. and Steve Zahn when he was being loud, was Uma's character's boyfriend, Sam, who we only meet through his voice over the phone, and I've just discovered on IMDB that that was Ethan Hawke. Stay behind the camera, man.
Because it was shot on digital film, the quality was grainy, the lighting sometimes jarring, and the sound less than crisp. It worked well for a movie about artists in varying states of depression and poverty living in a hotel. Did nice things to RSL's voice in some scenes too. The worst part about it was a scene with RSL and Steve Zahn singing in a bathroom bathed in harsh red light like a darkroom.
The direction was very good, as was the writing. The way I see it, two forces tugged the dialogue in different directions and ended up balancing it. First, the movie was based on a play (the playwright, Nicole Burdette, adapted the script herself). That can turn a film into an overarticulate, self-satisfied, pseudo-profound barrage of words. Second, you had a group of actor-friends filming a movie together in a casual atmosphere involving scenes where characters are high, or drunk, or depressed, or searching for a way to express their feelings and motivations and philosophies. That can turn a film into a series of painfully stretched-out conversations consisting of silence and rambling incoherence in which viewers are further distracted by how obvious it is that half the actors know each other in real life *coughRichardLinklatercough*. But together, these two facts helped things feel natural. Most of the time.
It helped that few of the shots or scenes went on too long. The editing, with two or three stories spliced together at a time, could have felt schizophrenic but ended up being oddly effective instead. Possibly Ethan Hawke & co. cut it up that way to show how the lives of the hotel inhabitants were interconnected even though they hardly interact with one another, or to suggest connections between/among the pairs of people in the stories co-presented, or to imitate how people move in and out of the hotel at different times so their stories overlap irregularly, or all of these, or just because it was a nice, different, non-traditional technique. Couldn't say for sure, but I liked it. The sound editing was nice too, weaving RSL's guitar-playing and Jimmy Scott's singing and a Chet Baker song and recitations of Beat poems by the maybe-crazy guy through multiple scenes, as well as layering passages from Kris Kristofferson's book or lines from Rosario Dawson's poetry on top of each other.
Right, on to RSL.
He had more screen time than I was expecting, having based my estimate on the piddling 4-5 minutes' worth of songs he did for the soundtrack. I really liked his character, Terry, a songwriter/guitarist in quiet despair. In the DVD interview RSL said Terry is like an exposed nerve, someone who'd shiver if you open a window three floors up, so sensitive to everything that he's in constant pain. Terry's serious and intense; moves and talks as if he has nowhere else to be and nothing else to do; looks ill through the whole movie and sleeps a lot; turns away two girls who offer themselves to him (once because he wants to go to sleep and once because she's too young), and calls a girl back home for a lengthy conversation from a pay phone although it's implied that they were never really together and probably never will be; records his songs with pal Steve Zahn in their bathroom with a microphone dangling from the ceiling; and gazes out windows.
Interesting factoid: RSL plays guitar right-handed and smokes ambidextrously.
I don't really like RSL with facial hair. But man, his scene with the second girl (Paz de la Huerta), when he's sitting cross-legged on his bed fully clothed (boots and all) and talking about some of his problems without really revealing them, talking about his youngest brother's ruined life, and then looking at her when she unzips her sweatshirt and telling her after a moment to put her clothes back on because he's going to take her home so she can go to school the next morning, and staring at her... So. Hot. I wanted to be the girl in either of her scenes with him and have him be the cool, sexy older guy too virtuous to make a move. He had some funny moments as well, like falling asleep while the first girl is trying to seduce him and muttering "Jesus" after a boy gives a speech about how he wants to be a private detective (one of the times the movie slips into the play-adaptation trap). Can't say more for spoilers.
And okay,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thewlisian_afer, I believe you now that it was indeed RSL singing those three songs, even the twangy one ("Promising"), even the one horrifically off-key ("The Lonely 1"). I don't know if he was singing that way on purpose, or if he usually has to work to hit the notes and didn't bother when filming because the atmosphere was so relaxed, but sometimes it hurt to listen to.
He was adorable in the special-features interview, too, not only because it was hilariously badly edited and because the 15-year-old(-sounding) interviewer kept screwing up her questions, but also because he took so long to answer some of the questions and got distracted once when someone off-screen said "weed-whacker" and sang a few lines of the Jesus song really quickly and inadvertently revealed that he'd probably been told to take his glasses off when they appeared in his hand during a gesture; and as soon as the interview was over, he got up with a relieved agreement of "painless." Poor guy is so nervous in these things. His hair was so shiny in that last shot.
Final verdict: A definite recommendation for RSL fans. Otherwise, if you're holding the movie in your hands, unsure, and aren't opposed to indie films, I say give it a whirl; you might be surprised like I was.
It's a character- rather than a plot-driven movie, but it's also not so much about the people as it is about the hotel they're living in (the Chelsea Hotel, hence the title) or rather about both at once, since the hotel wouldn't be the hotel without its tenants and the tenants wouldn't have the same stories if they were living elsewhere. Hence we get a mood-setting monologue in the beginning in an elevator by a possibly-crazy man about how the hotel is haunted by all the ghosts of great artists who've lived and died there.
Playing these myriad characters were lots of notable people, none of whom did a shabby job, off the top of my head. We had an alcoholic writer struggling with love (Kris Kristofferson), a waitress/writer with intimacy issues (Uma Thurman with a freakish pixie haircut), buddies from Minnesota who drove to Manhattan to make music (Robert Sean Leonard) and detox (Steve Zahn), a poet (Rosario Dawson) and her on-again/off-again boyfriend (Mark Webber) trying to make things work, a painter (Vince D'Onofrio, unusually reserved) struggling with his "patron" and with a crush on Uma, an aging singer (Jimmy Scott) too frail to go next door and bet at OTB, and on and on, including cameos by Natasha Richardson and Harris Yulin. Oh! ha ha. I was going to say that the only person in the film who annoyed me, not counting well-acted characters who were deadbeats/assholes/etc. and Steve Zahn when he was being loud, was Uma's character's boyfriend, Sam, who we only meet through his voice over the phone, and I've just discovered on IMDB that that was Ethan Hawke. Stay behind the camera, man.
Because it was shot on digital film, the quality was grainy, the lighting sometimes jarring, and the sound less than crisp. It worked well for a movie about artists in varying states of depression and poverty living in a hotel. Did nice things to RSL's voice in some scenes too. The worst part about it was a scene with RSL and Steve Zahn singing in a bathroom bathed in harsh red light like a darkroom.
The direction was very good, as was the writing. The way I see it, two forces tugged the dialogue in different directions and ended up balancing it. First, the movie was based on a play (the playwright, Nicole Burdette, adapted the script herself). That can turn a film into an overarticulate, self-satisfied, pseudo-profound barrage of words. Second, you had a group of actor-friends filming a movie together in a casual atmosphere involving scenes where characters are high, or drunk, or depressed, or searching for a way to express their feelings and motivations and philosophies. That can turn a film into a series of painfully stretched-out conversations consisting of silence and rambling incoherence in which viewers are further distracted by how obvious it is that half the actors know each other in real life *coughRichardLinklatercough*. But together, these two facts helped things feel natural. Most of the time.
It helped that few of the shots or scenes went on too long. The editing, with two or three stories spliced together at a time, could have felt schizophrenic but ended up being oddly effective instead. Possibly Ethan Hawke & co. cut it up that way to show how the lives of the hotel inhabitants were interconnected even though they hardly interact with one another, or to suggest connections between/among the pairs of people in the stories co-presented, or to imitate how people move in and out of the hotel at different times so their stories overlap irregularly, or all of these, or just because it was a nice, different, non-traditional technique. Couldn't say for sure, but I liked it. The sound editing was nice too, weaving RSL's guitar-playing and Jimmy Scott's singing and a Chet Baker song and recitations of Beat poems by the maybe-crazy guy through multiple scenes, as well as layering passages from Kris Kristofferson's book or lines from Rosario Dawson's poetry on top of each other.
Right, on to RSL.
He had more screen time than I was expecting, having based my estimate on the piddling 4-5 minutes' worth of songs he did for the soundtrack. I really liked his character, Terry, a songwriter/guitarist in quiet despair. In the DVD interview RSL said Terry is like an exposed nerve, someone who'd shiver if you open a window three floors up, so sensitive to everything that he's in constant pain. Terry's serious and intense; moves and talks as if he has nowhere else to be and nothing else to do; looks ill through the whole movie and sleeps a lot; turns away two girls who offer themselves to him (once because he wants to go to sleep and once because she's too young), and calls a girl back home for a lengthy conversation from a pay phone although it's implied that they were never really together and probably never will be; records his songs with pal Steve Zahn in their bathroom with a microphone dangling from the ceiling; and gazes out windows.
Interesting factoid: RSL plays guitar right-handed and smokes ambidextrously.
I don't really like RSL with facial hair. But man, his scene with the second girl (Paz de la Huerta), when he's sitting cross-legged on his bed fully clothed (boots and all) and talking about some of his problems without really revealing them, talking about his youngest brother's ruined life, and then looking at her when she unzips her sweatshirt and telling her after a moment to put her clothes back on because he's going to take her home so she can go to school the next morning, and staring at her... So. Hot. I wanted to be the girl in either of her scenes with him and have him be the cool, sexy older guy too virtuous to make a move. He had some funny moments as well, like falling asleep while the first girl is trying to seduce him and muttering "Jesus" after a boy gives a speech about how he wants to be a private detective (one of the times the movie slips into the play-adaptation trap). Can't say more for spoilers.
And okay,
thewlisian_afer, I believe you now that it was indeed RSL singing those three songs, even the twangy one ("Promising"), even the one horrifically off-key ("The Lonely 1"). I don't know if he was singing that way on purpose, or if he usually has to work to hit the notes and didn't bother when filming because the atmosphere was so relaxed, but sometimes it hurt to listen to.He was adorable in the special-features interview, too, not only because it was hilariously badly edited and because the 15-year-old(-sounding) interviewer kept screwing up her questions, but also because he took so long to answer some of the questions and got distracted once when someone off-screen said "weed-whacker" and sang a few lines of the Jesus song really quickly and inadvertently revealed that he'd probably been told to take his glasses off when they appeared in his hand during a gesture; and as soon as the interview was over, he got up with a relieved agreement of "painless." Poor guy is so nervous in these things. His hair was so shiny in that last shot.
Final verdict: A definite recommendation for RSL fans. Otherwise, if you're holding the movie in your hands, unsure, and aren't opposed to indie films, I say give it a whirl; you might be surprised like I was.
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I hope when you do see it you tear it apart like you did for the Outer Limits episode. It'd be so easy to do. Even if you enjoy it. I wanted to be mean but I liked it too much (low expectations work wonders), and so many of the articles out there reviewing the movie were nasty enough already, not to explain what worked in it.
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The special features stuff was cool - I didn't get to see that, because I saw it on video.
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And RSL was hot in that scene on the bed.
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Oh yes. I have to say I was hoping he'd agree :)
Heh - I thought you sounded like you quite enjoyed it. Of course, the shock of it not sucking as badly as you feared might account for that.
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I have to say I was hoping he'd agree :)
Hee. It was really a win/win -- if he said no, we'd love him for having integrity (though he did stare, and it was delish), and if he said yes, we'd get to watch the outcome.
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Heh - I was actually thinking of blonde girl. I was kind of relieved he turned down the high schooler. The staring was nice though :)
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Corpse Bride started out great and went downhill -- I thought, anyway. Most people I know really enjoyed it. The problem was doubtless that I liked the scenes in stuffy Victorian society better than the ones in the raucous underworld/afterlife place.
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