BEFORE: Two films left in January, then I can get started on posting the TCM Oscar schedule and also my romance chain - but I've got to get there first. I'm supposed to take the Jeopardy! online test tonight at 11 pm EST, and thanks to my busy work AND movie-watching schedule, I haven't been able to do much studying. I know where my weak spots are - African countries, Vice Presidents, the Crimean War - but you can't really cram for this test like that. If you do, then they just turn around and ask you about last week's Grammy Awards, and you realize you should have paid more attention to THAT. You can't cheat, either, because you only have 15 seconds per question, barely enough time to think about your answer, and not enough time to Google anything, so it's really a test of how much info you have handy, on the tip of your brain. So here's hoping they ask me about recent DC superheroes, different boxing weight divisions, Jimmy Hoffa, Queen Victoria (or Queen Anne, or Mary Queen of Scots) and maybe Stockholm syndrome or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle...
Shea Whigham carries over from "The Catcher Was a Spy".
THE PLOT: In the early 1970's, four strangers check in at the El Royale Hotel, staffed by a single desk clerk. Some of the new guests' reasons for being there are less than innocent and some are not who they appear to be.
AFTER: This feels a little bit like some kind of lost Tarantino film, or maybe I'm just recalling that he directed a segment in another hotel-based film, called "Four Rooms". I know this probably isn't the case, but it almost feels like some writer found out that Quentin was planning to set his next film in Los Angeles in the 1960's, and tried to anticipate the story he was going to write and beat him to the punch. I say this because the non-linear approach here feels a little bit like an homage to "Pulp Fiction", where the story sort of slowly enfolds as it bends back upon itself, plus it's a slow build of violence (similar to, say, "Reservoir Dogs") where a bunch of strangers are thrown together at a location for travelers (as in "The Hateful Eight") and you start to get the feeling that maybe not all of the characters are going to make it to the end of the story (umm, every Tarantino pic).
Plus there's a charismatic but unhinged cult leader, and the buzz leaked out about how "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" tangentially tells the story of the Manson family, so there's another comparison. I haven't been able to schedule this film just yet (I missed my chance to drop it in between two other films with Al Pacino in them, the screener didn't arrive in time...) but I want to see it ASAP. I'm putting a rough late-March/early April schedule together now, and I do have a way to link to it, but it's very early, and there's a LOT to consider. I think the next calendar reference point is Hitler's birthday, oddly enough, because I have several films where he's a prominent character, but is that really the way I want to go? Plus, with so much turnover a large portion of my watchlist could be all-new by then, so maybe it's best to wait until the end of February to draw up the next segment of my schedule.
The main question to ask here, and the answer could be a very personal one, is whether the separate story pieces come together to form a coherent whole. There's a bank heist, one that happened in the past, where the money may have ended up being stashed under one of the hotel's rooms, so part of the reason that one or more of the guests are there in the first place could be to find the money - only, who's looking for it? And which room is it in? Who else knows about it? And what else is going down in this hotel at the same time? Naturally these answers are doled out to us quite slowly, some might say too slowly, plus what's up with the hidden microphones and the two-way mirrors?
I have to call a bit NITPICK POINT on a main premise of the film, that a hotel could be built on a state line, half in California and half in Nevada. Cute idea, perhaps, but the only reason to put this plot point in a film would be if somebody could gain something by stepping over the state line - like if they were chased by cops and needed to get out of their jurisdiction. Unfortunately this never comes up, the state line is ever present but it's never USEFUL or even particularly important, so why even have it be this way? The more I think about it, the more I realize it would never, ever happen, not even to give hotel guests the opportunity to gamble in Nevada and say, follow that up with a drink in California. You can drink in Nevada, too, unless for some reason it's a dry county, which it's not.
Think about the logistics of running this hotel - charging different rates for rooms, maintaining two sets of books, being aware of two sets of laws, not to mention tax rates, zoning laws, two sets of local, county and state governments, inspections, basically double work on everything. Plus how would the place get built in the first place, unless someone bought two adjoining properties, one in each state, and joined them together, OR they built the property before someone decided on where exactly the state line was, which is unlikely. Look, I live right near the border between Brooklyn and Queens in NYC, and the borough divider runs right down the middle of the street - there are no houses that are half in Brooklyn and half in Queens, because that's stupid, and that's also not how borders work. Borders define lots, and property is built on lots, and except for Four Corners park in the Southwest, it's incredibly rare to have anything right ON the borders.
Ah, a little research on IMDB tells me that the fictional El Royale is based on the Cal Neva, a real resort that was co-owned by Frank Sinatra (and Dean Martin, and mobster Sam Giancana) for a while, which straddles the California-Nevada border on the shore of Lake Tahoe. That resort famously had a large white line that divided the dining room in half - but for legal purposes, technically the resort consisted of two adjacent properties in neighboring states that were joined. Again, two sets of books, two accounts for every aspect of the business - was the novelty factor worth all of the extra work? Sinatra had his gaming license suspended at some point, and leased the property to investors in 1968. After changing hands several times, the property closed for renovations in 2013 and has not yet re-opened.
So I guess I stand corrected - it is possible to have a hotel resort in two states, it's just dumb.
Also starring Jeff Bridges (last seen in "Only the Brave"), Cynthia Erivo (last seen in "Widows"), Dakota Johnson (last seen in "Black Mass"), Jon Hamm (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Chris Hemsworth (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame"), Cailee Spaeny (last seen in "Vice"), Lewis Pullman (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Nick Offerman (last seen in "The Little Hours"), Xavier Dolan (last seen in "Boy Erased"), Mark O'Brien (last seen in "The Front Runner"), Charles Halford (last seen in "The Clapper"), Jim O'Heir (last seen in "Logan Lucky"), Alvina August, Gerry Nairn, William B. Davis, Manny Jacinto, Tally Rodin, Sophia Lauchin Hirt, Hannah Zirke, Billy Wickman, Charlotte Mosby, Austin Abell, with archive footage of Richard Nixon (last seen in "Stockholm")
RATING: 6 out of 10 jukebox selections
No comments:
Post a Comment