Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel

I was very disappointed. The description sounded interesting. Instead it was an artist bore. No real story. Just about elderly people living in terrible conditions over the years of construction. I was getting annoyed midway, but felt I needed to watch the rest to be sure it was really as awful as it seemed. It was.

The Chelsea Hotel probably has a wonderful story, but listening to mostly boring people complain about their living arrangements in a rent-controlled apartment in the heart of NYC is not my idea of a good time or an interesting documentary. The famous landmark is undergoing renovations, and there's very little context to anything and it makes the 80 minute film feel like a slog. It's in focus! Final Score: 2/10

So much more could have been done with this movie. There was no substance at all. How about really speaking with those who have lived there. This was full of fluff and I wasted time that I cannot take back.

Disappointing. There would be great potential about a documentary about the sparkling and varied history of this New York hotel where fascinating figures in the arts lived. But instead it features interviews with the largely drab and uninteresting people who are leftovers, who have stayed in the hotel after most residents left while rehabbing was taking place. I don't blame the interviewees, who were game and did their best, but I do blame the filmmakers for building a movie around them. One cute scene in which an elderly woman resident dances with one of the young and friendly construction workers.

I wish something would have happened in this doc. It is boring.

A impressionistic love poem and elegy about the hotel as the haunted and indestructible body of New York and its living mythology. Occasionally veering toward the nostalgic, the directors always manage to re-center the focus on how the building inspires fringe artists currently living there to make new work and how it is essential to their livelihood.