Ray Pride

There's a theory about entrepreneurship that suggests someone who starts a business usually won't have the skill to both nurture and then to sustain it.

Tangents like that flood the mind while watching certain atrocious movies, like the brave, pretentious, florid, insipid and self-consciously bonkers 2001 "Hotel," writer-director-composer Mike Figgis' second attempt, after "Time Code," to work with improvisation and depictions of "real time." (And would we have had "24" if not for "Time Code"'s inspiration?) While his latest, the studio-financed post-"Fatal Attraction" thriller "Cold Creek Manor" is steeped in the mood of sensual dread of his better, large-budget films, "Hotel" is a dead end, a stone wall hit at high velocity. Figgis could have persisted in Hollywood work-for-hire, and his willingness to fail at smaller scale has to be admired. Yet there's more vim than vision on screen in this titanically awful, willfully indulgent, scattershot, laboriously incoherent failure that mingles high art with celebrity gawking. (Such as John Malkovich, beret clamped to his dome, appearing only in the film's arch opening scene.) It's a workshop in search of a high-camp movie.

Once, when prompted to offer evidence of his writing process, Vladimir Nabokov said, "I never show first drafts. It would be like opening a handkerchief and exhibiting my sputum." With that in mind, "Hotel" is one enormous hankie. But Figgis remains a brilliant entrepreneur and advocate for new technologies. On panels and in the press notes for "Hotel," he describes devising prototype rigs to provide Steadicam-like stability for images shot using the small digital cameras he prefers, avoiding the shake that makes many shot-on-DV projects seem like unintentional parodies of "The Blair Witch Project." Some segments in "Hotel" are shot with night vision, described by Figgis as scenes "where the actors could see nothing of each other."

The 55-year-old director collected over thirty actors who saw something of the project from around the world and packed them into the Hotel Hungaria, a hotel in disrepair on the Lido in Venice. Again, the process is terrific: living and sleeping in the same location where you're shooting. A Dogme 95 film crew is shooting a version of John Webster's gory Jacobean tragedy, "The Duchess of Malfi." The producer wants to kill the director, take over the film and the leading lady. But what about the hotel staff who are also vampires? Fatuous satire toward the film industry ensues. (Figgis' farrago at one point cuts to a widescreen image that consists, inscrutably, entirely of a walk-by by Burt Reynolds.)

Avoiding the rigidity of "Time Code," shot entirely in a grid of four unbroken sequence shots, "Hotel" bursts with visual approaches, stranding actors like Julian Sands, Salma Hayek, Danny Huston, Valeria Golina, Rhys Ifans, David Schwimmer, Lucy Liu and Saffron Burrows in a dismal succession of subpar acting exercises.(Burrows does get the rare honor of being a leading lady who gets to rape her male costar with a strap-on.) "Hotel" is the kind of movie that cries out for a DVD commentary track, without the option of hearing the movie underneath.

While Figgis hails from a background in 1970s experimental theater, "Hotel" is the first of his diverse projects to take on the worst traits of that era. Figgis abandoned the real-time quadrant format of "Time Code," and the effect is like a distant emulation of Robert Altman's "Nashville," a film that manages to be great despite a hovering superiority toward its characters. Fuzzy with pseudo-degradation, Figgis' storytelling only shows contempt for art-house audiences who might be attracted by name actors like Hayek and Schwimmer.

Without a forceful hand guiding the improvisation, the brackish repartee lurches from the misanthropic to the merely misogynist: "I don't want to be upstaged by my own tits," an improvised song hurled at Hayek, "You got a big juicy ass but an ugly pair of coconuts"; "See you later, cunt;" or my favorite, "I want to smell pussy... I want you to fuck her like a criminal!" Now that's direction! Can we just fast-forward a few years ahead and see the movies future filmmakers will be inspired to make from Figgis' latest cracked model? Or remember that Steven Soderbergh needed to spit out a "Schizopolis" to clear his head for his own high-gloss movies and smaller experiments that have followed since.

"Hotel" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2003-09-25)

Also by Ray Pride

Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2003-09-17)

This is the modern world
With the painfully intelligent "demonlover," Olivier Assayas fashions a counter-"Matrix" of paranoia and dread, while tempting the boundaries of subversive or offensive imagery
(2003-09-17)

Fallout
The smell of Toronto in fall: turning leaves, newly decriminalized marijuana wafting along the streets, and freshly struck celluloid.
(2003-09-17)

Tip of the Week
Helen Stickler's beautifully edited, years-in-the-making documentary is a snapshot of skateboarding culture in the 1980s
(2003-09-10)

Short Runs
(2003-09-10)

Fistful of pesos
(2003-09-10)

Tuning into Tokyo
(2003-09-10)

Every time I see you falling
(2003-09-04)

Short Runs
(2003-09-04)

Tip of the Week
(2003-08-27)

Requiem for a teen
(2003-08-27)

Short Runs
(2003-08-27)

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