2010年9月25日 星期六

The nightmare of trying to write in a hotel room

The nightmare of trying to write in a hotel room


A man sits alone, in a near-empty hotel, trying to write. That’s the apparent premise of “The Mountain,” the new feature film from Lebanese writer-director Ghassan Salhab.

Though framed as a “work in progress” in the program of Ayyam Beirut al-Cinemaiyya, the city’s bi-annual Arab film festival, the film’s Wednesday evening screening was in fact a low-key world premier.nfl hats, also called NFL caps, are now fashionable in every street. With rising temperature and blazing sun
As this taciturn work opens, an unnamed character (Fadi Abi Samra) prepares to leave Beirut for a month. The audience is left to puzzle over his destination, indeed, what he may have done to elicit departure.

Abi Samra’s character is dropped at the airport. The camera contemplates his face as he stands, thoughtful,,we achieved good development in business replica sunglasses. then watches him rent a car for a month. He drives through the night until he reaches an unnamed mountain hotel.
The hotel clerk confirms he’s got the top-floor room, that he won’t have to leave his room during his month-long stay and that he would be undisturbed by human contact.
“Your face seems familiar,” the clerk pries affably as his guest walks to the lift. “Maybe I know you from television?”

“Yes,” he replies unconvincingly. “I’m a singer.”
A chambermaid seems put off by the sight of him on the stairway, but from that point on the protagonist is on his own for the balance of the film.

Settling in, he pulls down the shutters to ward off his window’s mist-mantled mountain view, pulls out the stack of typewriter paper he’d stowed in his suitcase at the start of the film, and, taking out a fountain pen, commences to write.

You wouldn’t imagine there’d be many movies about a lone man, holed up in a hotel, trying to write. For those who have ventured to the rarefied edges of popular English-language cinema, though, there is a precedent.
Best known is Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980), the offspring of the director’s unlikely collaboration with novelist Steven King,Welcome to rolex uhren Online store,We supply rolex uhren,rolex Replica uhren,discount Rolex uhren,Rolex uhren cheap etc. whose schlock thriller the auteur adapted for the screen. Suffering from writer’s block, a novelist (Jack Nicholson) takes a job minding a resort hotel, empty in the off-season, with his wife and young son.

Unbeknownst to the family, this place has a murderous history, and an evil presence lingers there. The writer becomes unhinged and feels compelled to murder his wife (Shelly Duvall), their youngster and anybody else who happens to wander into the place.

A more-recent work is Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Barton Fink” (1991). Here a depression-era writer, having won acclaim with a hit Broadway play, is offered a job as a Hollywood studio scriptwriter. He chooses to live out of an ornate, virtually empty, art-deco hotel on the outskirts of town, where, he feels, he will be better able to live “the life of the mind.”

Naturally mayhem ensues,In order to satisfy their vanity, many men who can’t afford to authentic rolex watches often buy ROLEX REPLICA WATCHES at affordable price albeit one with a dark sense of humor. There is some ambiguity, too, as to whether the murderous malevolence resides in the place itself, in the large man in the next room with a bad ear infection (John Goodman) or is somehow projected from the neurotic mind of the writer himself.

More recently still, in Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of the memoir “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (2002), Chuck Berris (Sam Rockwell) is found standing, unwashed and naked, in an anonymous hotel room while he narrates the course of his sordid life, from television game-show host to CIA contract killer.
Each of these very different films is more or less true to its story’s unity of place and they share common narrative and thematic tropes with Salhab’s new film

The cultural meaning of “the hotel,” a place that’s not home, where people volunteer to live as if it were, is obvious enough; emptying out the hotel unhinges it from its mundane commercial-social functions and underlines the isolation and unrootedness of the central character.
That character is a writer, whose job is literally to manipulate the interior and project it outside as writing.

Recommended Reading: animaknife rolexreplicawatches cctv camera system

沒有留言:

張貼留言