Chelsea on the Rocks Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Chelsea on the Rocks Blu-ray Movie Review

A Curmudgeon Defends a Legend

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 28, 2012

New York's Chelsea Hotel is hard to miss when you walk past it on West 23rd Street, and it's hard not to encounter one of its famous residents in the last century of English-speaking culture, both high and low. Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac stayed there. Arthur C. Clarke wrote the novel 2001 in one of its rooms. The playwright Arthur Miller hid there from Marilyn Monroe when their marriage went sour. The poet Dylan Thomas died there.

A who's who of popular musicians have called the Chelsea home, including Bob Dylan (who refers to it in "Sara" on the album Desire), Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Edith Piaf, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Madonna and, most famously, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, who was arrested at the Chelsea after his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, was found stabbed to death in their room. Visual artists including Julian Schnabel, Cristo, R. Crumb, Willem de Kooning and Frieda Kahlo have stayed there as well. Andy Warhol never actually stayed at the Chelsea, but it was home to so many members of his circle that his name is inextricably bound with it.

Then there are the film people, certainly an odd selection. On what other list would one find Stanley Kubrick next to Dennis Hopper? Miloš Forman stayed there when he first came to America. Ethan Hawke took a two-room apartment when he split from Uma Thurman. Eddie Izzard, Michael Imperioli, Vincent Gallo and Elliott Gould have all been residents.

With such a rich history, the Chelsea Hotel seems the perfect subject for a Ken Burns-style documentary on its central place in American (or even world) culture, but this is not such a film. Chelsea on the Rocks is a stubbornly personal manifesto by long-time Chelsea resident Abel Ferrara, who also happens to be one of the most idiosyncratic and unpredictable directors working today. The creator of Bad Lieutenant and King of New York—maybe not classics in the traditional sense, but memorably one-of-a-kind—Ferrara didn't like what was happening to the Chelsea after its long-time management was replaced in 2007. So he did what any aggrieved filmmaker would do; he grabbed a camera and started filming.

Ferrara has never been too concerned about narrative setup, and he plunges right into interviews with Chelsea Hotel residents. At some point, he (or a producer) must have realized that viewers other than a small circle of aging hipsters might need an introduction, and so the Blu-ray's menu features a text introduction on a replica of a building plaque that comes and goes, providing a brief overview of the historical moment about which people are speaking.

Three families have jointly owned the Chelsea since 1939, and since the Fifties it was managed by Stanley Bard, the son of one of the original owners. Bard appears in the film as both a young man in vintage footage and an elderly one in contemporary interviews, and he's as colorful as any of the Hotel's residents. A benevolent dictator, he saw himself as a handmaiden to the arts, offering space and breathing room to talented people. How did he know they were talented? In some cases, because they were famous; in others, because his instincts told him so. But Bard also loved rubbing shoulders with celebrities and collecting gossipy tales, which he would pass on to others with relish. And while he would let the penniless slide on their rent for months at a time, he often made it up by gouging those who'd become successful. (Just ask Ethan Hawke.)

But in 2007, the third generation of the two other owner families voted to remove Bard as manager and bring in professionals. Paranoia raced through the building's residents, who had watched the forces of gentrification swiftly transforming their neighborhood around them. This was the moment when Ferrara, himself a Chelsea resident, began filming, not for the purpose of documenting the Hotel's history, but to capture the peculiar mixture of regret and nostalgia before what everyone assumed would be the inevitable transformation of the building into something other than what it had been.

When Chelsea on the Rocks played briefly in theaters, critics complained at Ferrara's omission of on-screen IDs of his speakers, and it is disorienting to encounter one talking head after another with no name. But most of the interviewees aren't famous outside of a narrow circle, and their identity is less important than the stories they tell and the way they tell them. Ferrara wants to capture a mood, an atmosphere, a kind of alternate reality populated by eccentrics that could only exist at the Chelsea Hotel. When he takes you into the living room of the well-dressed couple who proudly point out their African fetish doll made entirely of human excrement and the bones of small children (and that's not even the most shocking thing about it), you feel like you've stepped back in time and directly into an Andy Warhol film.

The operative phrase is "back in time". As the film unfolds and Ferrara meanders on (what's that 9/11 footage doing there?), one can't help but notice how few of his interview subjects are under the age of 40 in a documentary about a building that once was the mecca for all that was young, hip and happening. Indeed, the only way Ferrara can get any sustained sense of youth into the film is by staging reenactments, which he does twice. The first is his version of Sid and Nancy (Bijou Phillips and Jamie Burke), in which Nancy was killed by drug dealers (Adam Goldberg and Giancarlo Esposito) while Sid lay passed out on the bed. This is the alternate account urged by a sometime actor known as "Rockets Redglare", who died in 2001 and is seen telling his story in a grainy video recording. Ferrara's second reenactment is a bizarre attempt to show Janis Joplin (Shanyn Leigh) partying and passed out, to the great concern of a neighbor named Bev (played by an almost unrecognizable Grace Jones). Were it not for the bottle of Southern Comfort, you might not realize it's supposed to be Joplin, because Leigh looks so little like her, which becomes clear when the real Joplin appears in an old videotape.

At one point, Ferrara meets Miloš Forman in the Chelsea lobby, and they sit down with Stanley Bard for a trip down memory lane. Then the camera follows them up to the eighth floor, the site of Forman's old room, while Forman recounts a story, with characteristic panache, about a fire alarm in the middle of the night when he was living there. The incident was quickly contained, but everyone was already out in the hall, and Forman describes how the building evacuation quickly turned into an orgiastic party, whose spirit was only momentarily dampened by the discovery that one of the residents had died. Now that, Forman seems to be saying, is the Chelsea Hotel I remember—and then the two elderly men continue up the stairs.

So much of Chelsea on the Rocks has that feeling: echoes of a time gone by, when empty halls bustled with life. But if Stanley Bard still ran the place, would starving artists still come there looking for a room?

Chelsea on the Rocks Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Hannover House's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray faithfully presents the mixed array of sources that make up Chelsea on the Rocks. The newly shot interview footage on hi-definition video is clean, noiseless and detailed. Black levels and color definition depend on the lighting conditions, because this film was shot on the run. If a subject remained in one spot, as was usually the case, the image is perfectly stable. But if a subject was moving and Ferrara and his crew were following, the image shifts in clarity as the crew struggles to keep him or her fully illuminated. Far from being a flaw in the image, this phenomenon serves as reminder that these were real people reacting spontaneously in real time.

The various archival sources, some film, some video, are all over the map in terms of quality, which is about what one would expect given the variety of sources and indifferent preservation. Ferrara and the post-production crew have presumably made the best they can out of them.

As a Blu-ray, Chelsea on the Rocks will certainly never be demo material, but as an insider's intimate record of the last days before the Hotel Chelsea began its transformation into whatever future guise it assumes, this disc's detail is indispensable.

Chelsea on the Rocks Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The audio is a purely functional DD 2.0 that I'm sure is identical to what appeared on Hannover House's DVD of Chelsea on the Rocks. As with Hounddog, this was an early Hannover Blu-ray, and Hannover had not yet adopted lossless audio, as they appear to have done more recently. In any case, the DD 2.0 is adequate for the interview footage, both past and present, and the live musical performances captured by a single sound recordist. I admire Ethan Hawke as an actor, but I doubt that lossless treatment would improve his singing.

Chelsea on the Rocks Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no listed extras, but there is a peculiar item after the main feature, which ends at approximately 1:29, although the disc has a running time that is six minutes longer. After about two minutes of black screen, at about 1:31:10 a text screen appears that says: "Chelsea on the Rocks, Textless". It's followed by a montage of scenes from the beginning and end of the film that's shown, as advertised, without any of the text that accompanies some of these scenes in the finished film. I suspect that only Abel Ferrara knows why this is here.

Chelsea on the Rocks Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Just before the credits, Ferrara notes a few tenants appearing in the film who were forced out shortly after. The real coda came two years after the film's release in 2009. In 2011, a real estate developer bought the hotel from the three families who had owned it for so long and began major renovations. Whatever happens next with the Chelsea, an era has definitively ended, and Abel Ferrara was there to record its last gasp of protest. Recommended, as long as you know what you're getting into and have a taste for the bizarre.