Own the rights?
This is what happens when an actor is handed a video camera and convinces himself that he has the talent to make a full-length feature as his first "project" out of the starting gate, rather than honing his directorial skills on smaller, lesser efforts first.CHELSEA WALLS is a meandering, unfocused film that has all the ear-markings of a self-indulgent, pretentious, look-at-me-world-I'm-directing film school assignment. Scenes go on excruciatingly long, saying nothing and begging for an editor, and worse, not even creating a mood for any substantial ideas to build on. It seems that the ONLY rational idea that comes out of this hodge-podge of ill-defined, self-pitying and pitiful characters is no more than that old, hackneyed cliché that somehow if you are a drunk, an addict or a looser -- or better yet, all of the above, then any gibberish issuing forth from your mouth or your pen MUST be high art.Of course this is nonsense. But it seems that the director has incorporated that misnomer as his own film-making style -- evidently he feels that all he has to do is aim a camera and shoot without benefit of script, or even a vague notion of what should happen from point A to point B, without adequate lighting or even a simple focus puller, and that will somehow the resultant murky, low contrast, dark (in many scenes, barely visible) and mostly out-of-focus images will rise to "Film Festival Winner" quality. This too is film student's cliché and it is dead wrong. Hopefully by the senior year they have either learned how wrong this is, or they have flunked out. I am afraid, Mr. Hawke is about to flunk out.If you think it is fun to sit and watch Kris Kristofferson play a falling down, drooling, nearly incoherent drunk, then by all means, knock yourself out. If you think you will be entertained by an endless string of poorly lit scenes in which the characters are barely visible while they spout nonsense lines, supposedly odes to the famous artists who once populated that hotel like Bob Dylan -- however, Dylan they certainly are not, then by all means, hunker down because CHELSEA WALLS is peppered with this kind of aimless, pointless dialogue; it's the "poetic meat" of the film, or so Ethan Hawke keeps telling the hosts on the string of talk shows he's visited in the last week to promote this unpleasant, oh-so-serious trash (even Andy Warhol's TRASH had sense enough to laugh at itself).The film's director keeps bragging that it only cost him $100,000 to make. It looks it. It feels it. Now there certainly have been plenty of films out of Hollywood that cost hundreds of millions and nevertheless wound up being nothing but garbage, but at least in those they had enough money to pay for key and fill lights so you could at least see the garbage that was going on.If this is what video-to-film is going to engender -- all those actors who think they can be directors because they can cough up enough money to direct a vanity "movie," then please, in the spirit of truth-in-advertising, let it be clearly stated on the marquee before we plunk down our $10.50 -- "This film was made with a video camera for less money than most productions spend on sandwiches for the crew -- enter at your own risk."
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