The Million Dollar Hotel

A once proud hotel, still brandishing its gaudy moniker, has really let itself go. High in the sky, iron letters, clinging to a metal frame work and dotted with star white glowing bulbs to form the letters, proclaim the name for all to see: The Million Dollar Hotel. It is now populated that rejects that aren't quite the clichéd mental cases associated with movie crazies (this is Wim Wenders, give him some credit) but they aren't necessarily as all together going to make you as uncomfortable as the mentally ill person you'd likely have the real chance of meeting if you dropped by down town L A one night in the real world. They're quirky and funny and crazy. You like them all a little bit. Well I do anyway. God bless them they, for the most part, are not sitting around waiting on death and watching TV (all though there is a lot of TV watching). No, for the most part, in just about every moment they have, they're swinging for the fences with their crazy. All or nothing crazy.

The film was conceived of and co-written by Bono (of U2) and Christopher Klein, with Wim Wenders directing. Bono, both with U2 and with a band collected for the scoring of the film (including Daniel Lanois and John Hassle) put together music that hangs out in weird places with weird people and thus finds itself very much at home within the story we've got here.

For what it's worth, what we've got is a film not about anything you could possibly gather by reading a description of the film. But, for fun, here's what you get in this goodie bag. First, an unsteady alliance of a handful of the residents of the hotel that involves an art scam of sorts that could make them rich. The art in question? Tar. Big, six foot canvases of black, black tar. Painted by a man (Jimmy Smits) who believes he's an Indian chief when in reality he's an angry pothead who dresses like an Indian chief.