I honestly don't know whether "Hotel" is a good movie or a bad one -- right now I'm stuck somewhere between "fascinating failure" and "nettlesome work of genius" -- but I do know that Mike Figgis should be honored for making it. Like much of Figgis' recent work, it's a bizarre hybrid of high style and obscure art, of the shallowest kind of celebrity worship and the most daring fringes of the avant-garde. I think this blend is deliberate, and that the point of "Hotel," more or less, is that the Hollywoodization of the world has led to a global culture of vampirism and cannibalism, but I can't even be sure about that. Figgis has become the obvious heir to two people who aren't dead -- Jean-Luc Godard and Helmut Newton -- and I guess the more you think about it the less the distance between them actually is. I can't think of another movie with this many stars in it that has ever been so deliberately puzzling, or is likely to be seen by fewer people. Maybe it will become a midnight cult movie in the vein of Liliana Cavani's "The Night Porter" (an obvious point of reference), but then again maybe it won't. Here's a taste: "Hotel" begins with a character played by John Malkovich arriving at an exclusive boutique hotel in Venice, sometime after the main events of the film have occurred (as we will figure out later). He is taken to the basement and housed in some kind of prison cell, where his captors sit with him -- at a table partly in the cell and partly outside it -- engage in polite, educated talk and serve him a luxurious dinner featuring a mysterious carpaccio-like delicacy. The mystery meat is human flesh. Malkovich never appears in the movie again. Full article on Salon.com here.