The Motel Life (now on video)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I promised myself in writing this review I wouldn't make any gratuitous Robin Williams references. For many reasons. (1) It's somewhat disrespectful to the late entertainer and his bereaved family - not to mention that everyone else is doing it. (2) For some odd reason, this review may be re-posted or re-read at some point in the future, when the suicide of Williams is no longer a front-page headline, and would only come across as a sicko non-sequitur, and (3) if you haven't learned from reading me yet that showbiz ruins lives and destroys people, you'll never learn.

Also, I don't want to be tempted to make my Robin-Williams-suicide-connected-to-Cleveland wisecrack. That one is just bad taste, even by my lowly standards.

Besides, you get me started on the topic, I'll never stop. So let's just pretend you've just scrolled down about 40 paragraphs of me or so riffing about Robin Williams and suicide. Now you finally get to the movie review. There, see? Think of the time and negative thoughts towards myself I just saved you.

Prince Avalanche (November 9th and 10th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[PRINCE AVALANCHE screens Saturday November 9th at 9:25 pm and Sunday November 10th at 6:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Milan Paurich

A two-hander with heart, PRINCE AVALANCHE is the latest film by David Gordon Green, a director whose career trajectory ranks among the most unusual in contemporary cinema. Like Richard Linklater, another American regionalist, Gordon Green’s stubborn refusal to be pigeonholed has produced a body of work as eclectic as it is sometimes frustrating. (His long-gestating--and surely doomed--remake of Italian giallo master Dario Argento’s horror classic “Suspiria” seems to have
been abandoned, thank heavens.)

From the faux Malick-isms of GEORGE WASHINGTON (2000) and ALL THE REAL GIRLS (2002), to the stoner commedia dell’arte of PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (2008) and YOUR HIGHNESS (2011) and the gleefully non-p.c. HBO raunch fest Eastbound and Down, Gordon Green has consistently marched to the beat of a different drummer, sometimes to his own detriment. I’m sure even Gordon Green would admit that his chicken-fried 2004 Gothic UNDERTOW was a bad idea.