jimrader

Well-acted, directed, produced & shot but something vital is missing-- namely, a plot. HICK is essentially a modern crime film, a genre that requires some sort of plot, or at least thread. HICK is a bit like Bad Night At Hotel Royale, but that film's desperate/ disparate characters were all there in search of the cash millions hidden under the floorboards. Though drawn fairly well, HICK's characters lack a center, so much so that I forgot all about the gun./ Oh my, I've just been told my review is too short. Hey Amazon, GFY. Yet more anonymous techno fascism. SHOW YOURSELVES, COWARDS!/ Uh oh, I still need ten more words to pass muster. Drop dead, sideways.

Though considered merely passable by most online critics, this little film will endure./ Like Warhol's Chelsea Girls, Room 304 concerns the sordid lives of a cursed hotel, its focal point the room in which its manager and his colleague have an affair. In other rooms we find a Spanish hooker, a Kosovan refugee couple, and a travelling businessman-cum-Kosovan war criminal familiar to one of the refugees. A gun that turns up in the hotel laundry gets passed around till the vengeful refugee gets a hold of it then...the only flaw here is the film's relentless gravity. Still, it has something to say about a certain desperation that has virtually become the order of the day.

Notes from the underground. It helps to have a "little fella" at hand while watching this off-beat classic. Weirdly, there was no mention of Warhol's scene. Or maybe not so weirdly, as, though as wacky and self-absorbed as any "superstar", Jason was too uptown for that scene. He probably used to hang out at the Cafe Carlyle during Bobby Short's residence. / I knew a fair number of people in New York who were on Jason's kind of trip, the hustlers who focus on lonely rich folks. They justified their lifestyle as hip, or alternative, or as a kind of stardom. They were a lot like Jason, by turns fun, hypersensitive, and bitchy. Jason is fun to watch, and i can see him in "Laugh-In", or as a black gay Lenny Bruce. I saw acting potential in two hustler friends, but like Jason the only stage they understood was the stage of life.

The saddest part in this film is Jason's ho-hum night club act; you can't wait till he returns to his desperate performance-in-life.