Chelsea Walls (2001)

Just perfect...

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

"Chelsea Walls" is a sensual meditation on the lost and troubled souls who drift in and out and settle down at the historic Chelsea Hotel.Ethan Hawke here stays behind the camera as director and gathers his friends Robert Sean Leonard and Steve Zahn, wife Uma Thurman, veterans Kris Kristofferson, Tuesday Weld and Harris Yulin and luminous relative newcomers Rosario Dawson and Mark Webber for moving monologues and dialogs written by playwright Nicole Burdette, as well as mesmerizing poetry renderings of Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas.Hawke has an unusual eye that loves and respects women that's more romantic and empowering than nude humpings in most films today, even as here all we see are fleeting moments in confusing relationships with their irresponsible men, even though I really had no idea what was going on. The music, mostly by Jeff Tweedy and Wilco (with a striking cameo by Jimmy Scott, both acting and singing Lennon's "Jealous Guy") was used as lovely commentary and yearning revealed.Filmed in digital video, the bleeding over the screen and the blurriness could have been due to lousy projection. (originally written 5/4/2002)

I watched, with unenthusiastic anticipation, Chelsea Walls last pm. Ethan Hawke directed it, and well, and it was filled with top actors and a few good unknowns. Another independent, Art-house movie no one saw! A collage of struggling artists in a rundown New York hotel once haunted by great and famous artists. Interesting and sad. An authentic commentary of the lives of people who would wrench beauty and truth from their starving souls, bodies, and lives in a surrounding world of indifferent walls and lost, disconnected, bustling, solipsistic climbers. For the casual movie goer or average movie buff? - too raw, too realistic, too deep into the nightmare life of those simultaneously struggling, slavishly, and exclusively devoted, full of emaciated hope, to their art and, yet, never having been loved enough are still - and eternally and desperately - reaching with withered and scared hands and hearts for connection. While both wanting to and searching for elusive care, even while self imprisoned in their anguished solitude, they labor, possessed by and surrendered to their evolving dream creations, to just eke out survival so as to have one more day to forge one more note, one more line, one more stroke of their brush, or one more verse. It is a portrayal of a tattered but soulfully beautiful social Ghetto in the midst of a dazzling, opulent, technologically overly well-appointed, commercially successful, sky-rocketing, Gotham-like Empire. To the artistically inclined: Look and listen to its intimately personal, heart-singeing, message at your own risk. You may find it more informing and rewarding than entertaining.

This film may not be the movie of the year, but it is indeed a beautiful piece of work by several great actors and actresses, with a wonderful soundtrack. A great movie about a legendary hotel.

I'm generally patient with movies and will watch almost anything. My trick to get through dull stuff like this is watch 10-15 minutes at a time, take a break and come back to see if either my mood or the movie has "improved". Now I have sat down twice over a period of several months and tried to watch this thing, but gave up after about 45 minutes and fast-forwarded through it. Awesome cast, total disappointment.