Hotel Splendide

This is one of the strangest, most bizarre films I've watched - but it was splendid and hilarious!!! Great cast and wonderfully fun - but you need a sense of humor to watch it!!!!

Tale of a resort and health spa, on a remote island off the coast. Lots of time spent talking about the health treatments, the menu, and the heating system... the miserly old patriarch owner, Mrs. Blanche has passed on, and now the family can spruce it all up. If they can only agree on what's to be done. When Kath (Collette), a former employee returns, the cook (daniel craig) refuses to work with her. Stanley (Hugh O'Conor, the irish one!) is the nightly entertainment, and is watching the wacky goings on. He wants to leave, but is scared of crossing the water. So he stays. This zany film was one of Craig's quirky ones, before he started playing James Bond. Collette has done so many of these fun, indie films, she seems to really excel in this category. It's a ton of fun. Even when bad stuff happens, it's light and fluffy and fun. I'll definitely watch this one again. Directed by Terence Gross. Story by Marie Redonnet, french author.

Just watched the film and certainly haven't seen anything like it in a long time. Sort of a weird cross between an Ealing comedy and a Gothic horror. Loved the texture and atmosphere but didn't get that engaged with the story, which is is at times comic and at other moments disturbing or just plain strange, though the characters are beautifully drawn and very memorable, especially Stanley, the neurotic virgin, and the sister, Cora.

People seem to either love or hate this one - maybe because it's so different from the run of the mill Brit film. It seems to draw on an earlier period in cinema for its style and references, which I thought was refreshing. At the end I had the feeling that it might have begun as an even darker and stranger story that has had some element or other removed, maybe to make it more accessible. It does have some really haunting images and a great sound effects track. Definitely worth watching, for its atmosphere alone.

See if only for the plumbing and the music. I can't think of anything more ghastly than spending time at an English spa treating digestive disorders. This is exactly what I would imagine it would be like. On a remote, rainy and rocky little spit of crab dung sits the Hotel Splendide run by the by the Blanche family who seem to have come there at some better time, maybe before ferry service was cut to once a month. There isn't a plot exactly: its more of a scripted hysteria. Very fine cast with Daniel Craig, Toni Collette, and particularly the late Katrin Cartlidge as a character who has wandered in from Black Narcissus. There is also an unusual performance by Stephen Tompkinson that'a unlike anything you are likely to see anywhere else. The cinematography also owes something to Jack Cardiff and the heyday of the Archers and their use of color. Toby Jones and Peter Vaughan round out, with young Hugh O'Connor, an excellent group of lost bowel obsessives existing mostly on various eel dishes. Try it.

What an odd movie to pop up on my list of recommendation on Prime. The cast is excellent (I'll watch anything with Daniel Craig), but the ensemble is amazing. The precis presented by Prime is incorrect -- the young woman returning to the monstrosity that is the Hotel Splendide is the former lover, not the sister, of the chef, and this change turned what I thought might be a quirky comedy into a rather dark but still lively exploration of what happens when the dead refuse to die. The atmosphere of this film is somewhere between Grand Budapest Hotel and Amalie -- I definitely feel the shades of Jeunot and Caro flitting about -- but the revolution which occurs is quintessentially British -- low key, strange, and ultimately enlightening.