Hotel

Hot Springs Hotel: The Complete Series
$29.95
A no brainer in the best sense of the word. Imagine a very funny 'love boat' with a cast of beautiful 'California' girls. Late night cable isn't the same without Hot Springs Hotel.

Hotels
$79.90
Hotels is a three dimensional game of high rises and high stakes where the object is to develop a chain of hotels and drive your competitors out of business. For 2-4 players, ages 10 to adult.

Hotel: An American History
$27.50
Interesting to know how, in America, grand hotels emerged from the 'taverns' which preceded them, and how in Europe it was pretty much the same phenomenon.The writing is graceful, the details fascinating. A great read.

Hotel
$25.98
"The Hotel"(2001) is an experimental, dogma film, directed by Mike Figgis, and shot in Venice. In the Hotel Hungaria there are various groups of people, such as a film crew, which is shooting "The Duchess of Malfi", as well as a hit man, a call girl, and a Hollywood producer. The production started with a structure, but no script, and so the actors were asked to improvise. Mike Higgis filmed the movie with a specially rigged digital camera, sometimes utilizing night vision, which gave some of the sequences an eery quality, with the actors eyes being strangely lit up like phantoms of the night. At other times Figgis divided the screen into quadrants which emphasized the notion of various stories inside the hotel taking place at the same time.

The film has a mesmerizing quality about it. For those who have the patience to stick with the film one gradually is submerged into a kind of dreamy surreal world. Is there really any story or meaning here? There seems to be, but maybe not, it's as if one is pulled off into a world where imagination and reality shift about each other, as we wander through the corridors and rooms of the hotel, and then out into the dark, mysterious Venetian streets and canals.

Music and sound form an important aspect of the movie. The click clack of the flamenco dancers shoes echoes throughout the film like a motif of passion. Piano chords dramatically portend to the dangers lurking in this hotel. The movie opens with a surreal scene of cannibalism, with diners dining in cell like quarters. The danger is always there. As one occupant mentions, Venice has a sordid history. The prison in the gothic Ducal Palace sits on the perimeter of St. Mark's square where the actors are performing. People seem unbounded by social codes of conduct, and act to their base desires, and instincts. Some engage in sexual behavior, while others behave like dogs, or werewolves transformed by the night, as two of the men periodically snarl into each other's faces.

In some ways I'm reminded of the movie "Last Year at Marienbad", where we're taken through an environment of memories, and reality is only as stable as the character's memory of the events. As in "Marienbad" there are moments of desire and ecstasy. Figgis, though, takes these desires a step further, moving into erotic dream like fantasies: a bare breasted woman, leaning on a table, pushes slowly up and down, dipping her nipples into glasses of milk; in another room, a woman visits a man in the middle of the night, sensuously opens her blouse, and mounts the man, erotically licking his lips as he fondles her breasts. Eroticism and danger build as the film progresses down these dark corridors of the psyche which open up to us like the labyrinth of canals of Venice.