sorabji

One of the curses of the night owl life is that movies like this surface on the cables at 3am, and for whatever reason I must watch the whole bleepin' thing sunrise be-darned.

I saw this on, what else, the Showtime Women's channel. I hate to admit it but I agree with the IMDb reviewer from 1999: the only reason to watch this nonsense from start to finish is to see Lysette Anthony naked. Everything in between is the bonehead self-absorbed stuff that burns through the Gross Domestic Product of whole countries in a Hollywood week. I can not believe people get paid to do this stuff.

Whatever else there is to say about this, it is always good to see Steve Railsback on screen, even when his dialogue is worthy of a 7th grade playwright. This is a really stupid movie, full of zero- quality acting.

I connect with what this thing is supposed to be, but the substance of these artists is poor. Nothing we see from them rises above the level of teenage poetry. The Chelsea Hotel is still a mecca for poets and artists, even if today it's more a mecca for kids of Kerouac. This movie shows the Chelsea as a mecca for 21st century sulking hipsters who learned hippy-dom from Woodstock DVDs. I don't think that's accurate. If you take away the artist premise and the reputation of the Chelsea as a setting, and replace it with a college dorm full of political science majors, you'd have an equally fascinating film.

But I find the building, the inside of that building, to be beautiful.

I guess I first saw this on cable, complete with all the curse words.

I last saw this on ABC Family, where Disney's ludicrous voice overlays censored out the dirty words. These overlays transformed this light drama into pure comedy. Watching the Disney's overdubbed version, I laughed loud at the dramatic moments. Seriously loud laughter where the original director intended something else.

I was transported from the experience of watching the movie to the experience of producers and lawyers and sound/film editors arguing over how best to convert a four letter word into something the Whole Family© will enjoy.

That's not to say that the "dramatic moments" of this thing were anything but predictable. Class is little more than fluff, but it's fun and well acted. It's a good-when-you're-tanked story, with entertaining performances by then-young actors we now know for other things.

This is a good teenage boy angst fantasy romp, and at best it ends with ... well, no spoilers, I guess. But that was a sudden ending, wasn't it.