CineVegas Film Festival 2008

 
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Chelsea on the Rocks
Abel Ferrara 2008
Categories: Featured, Pioneer Documentaries, U.S. Premiere
Average Rating:
Rated 4.021225622998903/5 Stars
My Rating:
Run time: 85 min. | USA | Language: English
It is 12 stories and 250 rooms. It is artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers. It is sex, drugs, suicides, and ghosts. The Chelsea Hotel was Manhattan’s first cooperative apartment building and became a bastion for creativity and excess. Dylan, Hendrix and Joplin made music there. William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch there. Nancy Spungeon died there…and Sid Vicious basically died at the Chelsea Hotel as well.

The Chelsea hotel’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (even with its rent) is now in danger. A new management company has taken over and forced out stalwart manager Stanley Bard, showing disregard for his history and pointing to big changes to come. Before something happens, legendary filmmaker Abel Ferrara takes us through the hotel room by room, story by story, pulling open all the closet doors, profiling its past and admonishing its future. As a turbulent, trustworthy soul and then resident at the Hotel, people feel free to open up to him about everything. A few recreations and gritty archival footage build upon the legends.

The Chelsea is more than a building; it is a reflection of our nation's greatest talents. To lose it would mean losing our inspiration.

4 pictures Pictures
Screenings
time venue calendar tickets
4:00 PM     Sun, Jun 15
plays with...
Brenden Theatres + add to cal buy tickets
1:00 PM     Tue, Jun 17
plays with...
Brenden Theatres + add to cal buy tickets
About the film
Cast & Crew
director
Abel Ferrara
 
executive producer
Kris Haber, Ovidio E Diaz
producer
Jen Gatien, David D Wasserman
composer
Hal Willner
cinematographer
Ken Kelsch, ACE
editor
Langdon Page
Cast
Ethan Hawke, Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Bijou Phillips, Adam Goldberg, Giancarlo Esposito
Audience Buzz
Rated 4.021225622998903/5 Stars
4.0 | 6
views 737 people viewed this page
adds 35 people added it to their calendar (find out who)
Featured Review
Notice! The featured review is chosen at random and contributed by an audience member. Click the reviews tab above to read all the reviews for this film, or register to write your own review. Close
Rated 3.0/5 Stars
pjperez
4:34 PM
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It’s a documentary about New York’s famous (infamous?) Chelsea Hotel, temporary home to untold numbers of artists, actors, filmmakers, poets and even some plain ol’ ordinary folk over the many decades of its existence, which sees its future in question under new ownership and new management. The casual conversations between Ferrara and various past and present residents of the Chelsea — including Milos Forman, Ethan Hawke and Robert Crumb — would have made for an engaging movie on their own, as well as the atmospheric scenes of the lobby and neighboring businesses that evoke the collective vibe of the property. But Ferrara intersperses the interviews with unnecessary recreations/imaginings of “famous” situations at the Chelsea, such as Nancy Spungen’s mysterious death and drug overdose-inducing partying by Janis Joplin. Those vignettes, combined with time-killing transitional elements, extend the film about 20 minutes longer than it needed to be, and take away from the colorful, intimate anecdotes that really should be the meat of the film. Overall, it’s an intriguing look at a New York institution, but it’s a bit dizzying with its distractions. The audience’s own ambiguity toward the film may have been evident in the stalled, subdued applause rendered Chelsea in comparison to the enthusiastic reception given to its preceding short, To Kill an American, an inspiring, three-minute short by actor-turned-director Matthew Modine.
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