Hostel

Title: Hostel
Director: Eli Roth
Cast: Jay Hernandez, Derek Richardson, Lenka Vlasakova
Year: 2005
MPAA: Rated R for brutal violence, sexual situations, drug use, language
Date of Review: April 27, 2006

"...paying to go into a room so you can do whatever you want to someone isn't exactly a turn on."

These words are spoken by the character of Josh, played by Derek Richardson, in Eli Roth's controversial horror shocker Hostel. This also pretty well sums up the movie, as it is spoken during a scene in a brothel, but is quite obviously a double entendre, referring also to the film's plot line about rich people paying incredibly large sums of money for the chance to torture and kill an innocent traveller. While the film's premise is written quite intelligently, comparing the business of prostitution to the (supposedly) real-life horrors of underground murder-for-profit establishments, its amateurish direction never allows it to escape the lackluster mood of a typical Hollywood teen slasher.

Hostel stars Jay Hernandez and Derek Richardson as two college-age Americans backpacking across Europe, with the unspoken goal of having sex with anyone they can. When they reach Amsterdam, a drug dealer tells them of a heavenly hostel in Eastern Europe, in which all the women are beautiful and wanting American men. So, of course, the two randy Americans make their way there and have a jolly good time, until one of them goes missing. Here the story takes off, and leads the two characters through a grisly journey, in which they discover how deeply rooted this business of torture is in the culture of this small Eastern European town.

The film's story is told in two distinct parts, which basically divide the film in half. The first half of the film is entirely sexual in nature. The audience is shown many crude images of sex, nudity and perversion. The second half is occupied by gore, violence, and sadomasochistic behaviour. It is in these two halves that the audience will find the film's deepest messages. The audience is shown nearly 45 minutes of sex - some may feel uncomfortable, while some (probably in the younger crowd) will enjoy the gratuitous female nudity. The film then jolts its viewers into a nightmarish world of grisly sadomasochism. It is the discrepancy between these two worlds that provides the film's social commentary. We are made to feel incredibly uncomfortable with the film's gruesome violence...yet violence is something that can be seen everywhere in society, from entertainment and the media to "real life". Yet the sex near the beginning of the film is what our society says we should be ashamed of - the simple act of procreation and physical love is no longer taboo in Hostel. The film doesn't attempt to make any judgements as to whether these views are right or wrong, but simply asks the audience to think about it for themselves.

The greatest problem with this is that the film is quite obviously intended for a teenage audience, regardless of its R rating. It has the feel of your typical shock horror film that relies on beautiful women and fast paced, quickly cut violence to keep the audience in their seats. This is a real shame, since there is a very smart film underneath all this, but it has been marketed to the wrong crowd - and, dare I say, directed by the wrong person. Had Quentin Tarantino's influence in the film been a directorial position rather than that of a producer, the film could have been so much more.

While Hostel is not the masterful horror film that it was built up to be for so many months before its release, it does manage to crawl slightly ahead of recent horrors such as House of Wax and Boogeyman, where the scares are not in the scripts, but rather in imagining how they were ever possibly made. Eli Roth shows promise as a writer, but his direction is terribly unoriginal. Had Hostel been handled more maturely, and relied more on the story and its comparison of violence and sex, it could have been the groundbreaking horror that it was made out to be. As it is, Hostel is simply another gorefest, which doesn't really do anything better than many movies before it have.

5/10

A New Day in Old Sana'a

Title: A New Day in Old Sana'a
Director: Bader Ben Hirsi
Cast: Paolo Romano, Dania Hammoud, Nabil Saber
Year: 2005
MPAA: PG
Date of Review: April 9, 2006

Yemen's first feature film is an ambitious one. Despite the fact that it is a fairly lighthearted movie by general standards, it presents the audience with a look at Arab culture that has never really been shown to a western audience before now. The director, Bader Ben Hirsi, has taken the stereotypes of religious fanaticism and terrorism in the Middle-East, and thrown them out the window to create a beautiful and genuinely funny romantic-comedy set in the magical city of Old Sana'a. Not only did the film try to destroy any preconceived notions about Islamic life, but it tries to rebuild a completely new view of this culture, showing that between the Middle-East and the West, there are much more similarities in life than there are differences.

The basic plot of the film revolves around a young man and woman who are about to be wed. It begins early in the morning when it is still dark, and the young man is walking around the streets of Old Sana'a, when he sees a woman dancing in the street, whom he assumes is his wife as she is wearing the dress he gave her. The rest of the film covers a single day, from dawn to dusk, and how this sighting sends the young man on a journey to discover who was wearing the dress. Much of the story is told through the gossiping of a few women in the town who are involved with the wedding preparations. One is an egg-vendor, who provides much of the comic relief in the film. They are all strong characters that come across very naturally, and none of their performances seem forced. Strangely enough, the only bad performance in the whole film was that of the only Western actor, Paolo Romano. He plays an Italian photographer living in Old Sana'a, and also doubles as the narrator. Not only did his character seem to be somewhat unnecessary, he also did not play it convincingly at all. He speaks with a British accent, and really cannot hold his own next to the Yemeni cast members - which is surprising, since he is the only one in the cast who has made previous films.

One of the most important characters in the film is the city of Old Sana'a itself. Bader Ben Hirsi captured it beautifully, using various techniques with light and shadow to add to the atmosphere of various scenes. As tensions rise between the characters, the city seems to get tighter, creating a claustrophobic feeling. This setting is perfect for adding quite a magical feel to the film, emphasizing on it's "modern-day fairy tale" type story.

Seeing as how the film is the first to come out of the country, one cannot expect "Casablanca". Bader Ben Hirsi had quite a hellish time trying to bring this story to life. The Yemeni Government was giving him constant trouble, pulling funding and insisting that he change the script to keep Westerners from seeing the true Yemeni lifestyle. Newspapers published over 200 fictional stories, claiming that Bader Ben Hirsi was filming pornography in mosques, and even trying to prove that Bader Ben Hirsi was an undercover agent for the Mossad. However, after seven weeks of shooting, the film was finally complete, and London-born Bader Ben Hirsi has been travelling the world displaying his film at festivals ever since. It has already won "Best Arab Film" at the Cairo International Film Festival, and is expected to do well at Cannes next month.

While not up to the production standards that we have come to expect from other films, "A New Day in old Sana'a" succeeds by being unafraid to show what life is really like in the Middle-East. It was a labour of love by all involved, and that is immediately apparent. Hopefully this is only the beginning of a wonderful film industry coming out of the beautiful country of Yemen.

7.5