Night at the Golden Eagle (2002)

Admirable film.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

After spending more seven years in prison, the criminal Tommy (Donnie Montemarano) is released and his former partner Mick (Vinny Argiro) is waiting for him to take him home. Mick is an ex-convict that is straight now, working as a janitor in a porno shop and living in the decadent and filthy Golden Eagle hotel in Los Angeles. He tells Tommy that he has saved 2.5 thousand dollar and has bought two tickets to Las Vegas for them. Mick's intention is to find a job in a casino and begin a new life with his old friend in a nice place. The dirty Golden Eagle is a joint where prostitutes meet clients and losers and decadent people live. When Mick goes to work his last night in his job, Tommy brings the prostitute Amber (Natasha Lyonne) to the room to have sex with her. Amber works with her friend Sally (Ann Magnuson) on the streets and their pimp is the strong Rodan (Vinnie Jones) that is luring the fifteen year-old runaway Loriann (Nicole Jacobs), promising that she will become a cinema actress. Tommy fails with Amber and she mocks him. Tommy gets angry and kills Amber. When Mick returns to his room, he finds her body. Will that be the end of Mick's dreams?"Night at the Golden Eagle" is a depressing feature with unpleasant characters. The story is awful, without humor or moral, and the subplots are repulsive. The lead plot refers to Mick and Tommy and is neither good nor interesting; the subplot with the young prostitute is depressive; the plots with the lonely old tapper and his dog and the television viewer are melancholic. In the end, "Night at the Golden Eagle" is a movie that will make you feel completely down. My vote is four.Title (Brazil): "A Iniciação" ("The Initiation")

I am a fan of European movies because the film makers there seem to be able to create human inspired dramas which explore the realistic side of life at a microscopical level. Their films dive deep into the human condition - hopes, shattered dreams, past memories, sex, hopes, love, and despair.This movie does exactly that! Well done to all the cast, the crew, the story teller, and everyone involved to create a telling story against all the prevailing forces which consider entertainment as a business only enterprise.This is a brilliantly executed classic of the best of American film making. I am stunned that everyone involved managed to achieve such excellence in their art against the enormous pressure at the time it was made to produce bucks-only cinema.If you are a fan of serious story-telling and you appreciate the fine art which the cinema medium allows when Great story-tellers are involved, then you are going to discover an absolute classic of brilliance here.See it. Talk about it. Think about it. Many people have yet to enjoy this extraordinary excursion into the heart of human darkness, and to learn where real life is lived by the masses.mol

Imagine taking a 1970s sitcom about a couple of senior citizen petty criminals, splicing it together with a 1980s TV movie about the hazards of being a street corner hooker and sprinkling in bits of a 1990s indy flick about the dysfunctional dwellers of a squalid hotel lobby that tries to get all heartfelt and meaningful at the end. If you can imagine that, what you come up with is almost certainly better than Night at the Golden Eagle.This isn't by any means the worst movie I've ever seen, but this type of bad movie is probably the worst kind of film to sit through. It's not really stupid or pretentious or incompetent enough for you to have fun with how much it sucks. It's merely so ill conceived that nothing about it works.There are three separate elements to this story. One focuses on Tommy (Donnie Montemarano) and Mick (Vinny Argiro). They grew up together as street thugs who were never good enough to be real gangsters. Instead, they became the sort of small time hoods who stick up ice cream trucks and that's all they've ever been, even though they're both on the wrong side of 60 as this movie opens. Tommy is just getting out after a 7 year stint in prison and Mick surprises him with a plan to move out to Las Vegas and, once and for all, go straight. That plan pretty much goes up in smoke when Tommy brings a prostitute back to Mick's room at the Golden Eagle hotel and kills her.Another aspect of this film shows us 15 year old runaway Loriann (Nicole Jacobs) as she falls in with a disgusting pimp named Rodan (Vinny Jones) and his aging whore, Sally (Ann Magnuson). Rodan works on Loriann's neediness and insecurity before handing her over to let Sally show her the ropes. We see a maternal bond form between Sally and Loriann, until Loriann emotionally ages about 20 years in 15 seconds and becomes even harder and more broken than Sally. This part of the movie made me wonder two things.1. Is the character of Rodan named after the artist or the flying Japanese movie monster?2. Is Vinny Jones a wholesome family man in real life? If he is, the guy deserves an Academy Award because on screen he is absolutely convincing as the sleaziest, most soulless piece of human excrement you can imagine.The final thread to this cinematic tapestry is the interactions between the desk clerk (Miles Dougal) and the denizens of the Golden Eagle hotel lobby. All of them are no more than a half-step up from the gutter and none of them are reaching for the stars. This is the stuff where we're supposed to be impressed with how gritty and realistic things are and at the ironic detachment that turns these people's mental and emotional wounds into sources of humor. Yet it spoils all its cynical aspirations by trying to wring a tear out of the audience by having the lovable, old black buy die.Can you see how mushing all of that together becomes a problem? The comedy can never be that comedic, the drama can never that dramatic and the snarky can never be that snarkful because it's all sloshing together in a movie goulash.Like a great many independent films, I don't think Night at the Golden Eagle was ever meant to entertain anyone. This is the sort of thing where the filmmaker hopes it gets shown at film festivals and people applaud because the folks there convince themselves that it must be art. Well, I don't know art but I know what I like and it ain't this movie.

That is how I felt after watching this spectacle of humanity. Completely down. Like I was damaged and left for refuse on the side of the curb. Rifkin did a wonderful job of giving us a side of humanity that we usually see but not at its gritty and gnarly best. This film is right up there with Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream" only it feels slightly more polished. The locale for one lent a perfectly hopeless air to the mise en scene. Rifkin played with the color saturation in such a way that it also added an extra layer of desperation to the visuals. Perfection, and this movie is right up there with other modern despair epics like Atlantic City and Requiem for a Dream.