Hotel

You might love it, you might very well hate it, but there won't be a lot of middle ground when it comes to Hotel, a decidedly peculiar film directed, produced, scored, and written (the story, not the script) by Mike Figgis (Stormy Monday, Cold Creek Manor, Leaving Las Vegas). It's ostensibly about a film crew, led by insufferable director Rhys Ifans, in Venice to shoot a version of Renaissance playwright John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. But Hotel transpires on a dizzying number of levels: while we're watching these actors (who also include David Schwimmer, Saffron Burrows, Lucy Liu, and even Burt Reynolds) make their movie within a movie, they themselves are being filmed for a documentary (helmed by a delightfully obnoxious Salma Hayek); meanwhile, they're staying at a crumbling hotel whose employees' notion of haute cuisine is finely-sliced strips of human flesh served in a dungeon. Add to that Figgis' occasional use of a four-way split screen (a technique he'd already used in 2000's Timecode), as well as various other visual (scenes were shot both on video and on celluloid) and aural effects, and you've got a sometimes outrageous, sometimes shocking, sometimes satirical (Figgis is clearly no fan of the big-time movie biz), and sometimes merely pretentious concoction that, as one reviewer put it, “works in no conventional sense, and succeeds in several unconventional ones.” A strong optional purchase. [Note: DVD extras include a “making of” documentary, and a slew of “web shorts,” many of which have the look and feel of outtakes or deleted scenes. Bottom line: a small extras package for an uneven film.] (S. Graham)