Hotel Noir - Showdown im Morgengrauen

As I watched this, I'm reading the screenplay in my mind, and my eyes and mind popped. Great writing, great conversion from paper to print to film.

Danny Devito, early years you'd think from the setting, tells the tale.

But actually, I'm watching the 2016 re-release, aptly re-named Sin City. The original film, Hotel Noire, apparently 2012. Yet it seems to be 1940 something.

The cast expands, marvelously. Rosario Dawson. Kevin Connolly. Michael B. Jordan.

Malin Åkerman. Mandy Moore and Cameron Richardson, Rufus Sewell. Haven't researched it yet, but would love to know the House and team, including the screenwriter that wrote this.

Kudos.

This was a god awful endless snooze.

It starts out with Danny talking bout his life as shower door salesman,and how one good looking women came on to him once. Fron there it's just a bumpy downhill ride,with endless monologues and dialogues that never really manged to lift the movie,nor keep you awake.

It tries to be this really clever film noir,but you are neither entertained by nor interested in any of the characters nor their faith. You just want it to end.

I have never given Malin ackerman all that much thought as anything else than eye candy,so far she hasn't disappointed me yet.Her and Carla Gugino mostly work as eye candy and some lame sort of femme fatale, to draw people to the movie by name association .

In short stay away from this

"Are you a cop? Why? You ask questions like a cop. How's that? Like you're not really interested in the answer, but the way I answer. I'm a cop. No kidding. You're on a stakeout? I was gonna hop a train. Changed your mind? Missed my train."

"Hotel Noir" takes place in the infamous 50s. The years of glitter and glamour with its jazzy mood. When men walked around like Humphrey Bogart and every woman seemed to be a diva. Those were the days that lightning a cigarette wasn't associated with a deadly disease, but with fun and sensuality. The time in which a microphone looked like a significantly over-sized toaster and women wore bras as if sophisticated cruise missiles were hidden in it. The same wigwam-shaped things Madonna became famous with, many years later. Men and women had conversation as if they were performing in a stage play with rapid dialogue lines which sounded shrewd and ingenious. It was the Charleston time and the time the mafia ruled with Dick Tracy-like gangsters.

Unfortunately this rather old-fashioned-feeling film reminded me of the dull theater shows I had to watch when I went to high school. At the beginning I still had this hopeful thought that this could be a pretty entertaining movie. And this because of the fact that they managed to convince a few well-known actors to cooperate, such as Dany Devito, Rufus "I'll follow you down" Sewell, Rosario "Trance" Dawson and Carla "San Andreas" Gugino. But despite the well-known cast, the film felt like a third-rate detective novel in which the relationships between the protagonists revealed themselves painfully slow. And the stories are intertwined such as the spaghetti in a Spaghetti Bolognaise.

And that's also the biggest drawback of this film. The complexity and quantity of twists made it a really hard to follow film. It all feels cheap and minimalistic as well. Both in terms of story as scenography. I bet the limited budget, this movie was made with, probably has something to do with that. And it's not really intriguing or exciting at all. The conversation between Felix (Rufus Sewell) and Hanna Click (Carla Gugino) is the most fascinating part of the whole movie. A series of short questions and answers the two protagonists are shooting at each other. Amazingly shrewd sometimes. But ultimately it's still nothing more than a colorless film, trying to emulate a similar film from a successful era in film history. A game of Cluedo was more exciting in those days.

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I watched this carefully and noted the comments from other reviewers, and I wanted to find something to disagree with them so I could offer a more balanced opinion. I think it's important to have a wide variety of opinions from different people so that you are left with a much more accurate impression of what the movie is about.

However I failed, there's no saving graces, it's rubbish. It is in fact an anachronism and I suspect Danny DeVito signed up to it as he simply doesn't get parts anymore so he'll grasp at anything. More than likely Malin Ackerman did the same, she realises she's out in the cold and wants to come back in but can't grasp that she can't act. Robert Forster is the only saving grace of this film, he's consistently excellent and believable but his role was so small that he did nothing to lift the movie.

Don't waste you time, I'd rather do housework than watch it again.

I came to IMDb looking for a review to decide on whether to watch this and there wasn't one so I let that decide in the movie's favor as I figured to write one for it.

I liked it. Any movie with the word 'noir' in the title has work to do to avoid the clichés that the genre forces it to reference. The characters have to be one-dimensional and fit the molds. The dialog has to be clipped and clever. Yet this movie is homage to noir as well as being a fun yarn in its own right.

It's stylish and stylized with narration and inner monologues from multiple characters. There's flashbacks and story tangents from all the main characters, that stand on their own as but also get sewn together by the end. It's black and white but you stop noticing that early on because the medium matches the tone of the movie so well.

If you're in the mood for light story-telling that's well thought out then Hotel Noir is a fine place to spend an evening.