The Hotel New Hampshire (1984)

Brilliant and touching

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

The Hotel New Hampshire has to rank up there with maybe the top 10 of weird films I've seen. Not one for the kid's matinée.There's no real plot to this film. Beau Bridges who is a scholarly teacher at a New Hampshire High School has decided to fulfill his dream of owning a hotel and being an innkeeper. He and the family give up all to own and renovate a broken down hotel, first in New Hampshire and then in Vienna. Bridges was sucked into it by a Viennese character played by Wallace Shawn who is known as that most famous Viennese of all, Freud.Beau's family the Berrys certainly have their collection of fruits and nuts in it. Children like Rob Lowe, Jodie Foster, and Seth Green and a crotchety old grandpa played by Wilford Brimley. But interesting characters without a coherent plot is a chair with weak legs.In the best part of the film Jodie Foster gets some sweet revenge for being raped by Matthew Modine. Let's say he gets to understand the victim's point of view.Not the best of work for upcoming stars like Foster and Lowe.

I am a big movie fan and I'm certainly not one to ever tell anyone what to watch and to not try to enjoy a movie each his own we all have our own tastes and opinions but I have to say for a film with so much talent involved I hated this film in fact it probably ranks as one of the worse if not the worse film I ve ever seen!!!In fact just like another reviewer wrote I specifically decided to review this film because of how terrible it was and bad taste this film left in my mouth, but again this is just my opinion watch it and make up your own mind This whole film though I realize it was trying to be quirky didn't make any sense at all.

I have never read any John Irving, but based on this movie and "Simon Birch", the man is either a jaw-droppingly terrible writer, or he has the worst luck in movie adaptations of any author in history.This movie lost me in the first five minutes. The plot is impossible to follow without confusion. There are in fact 147 different plots, each more absurd than the last. The most absurd being the campy terrorists whose plot is never explained. Characters die and their family members never seem sad. It's impossible to tell how much time has passed. Characters wander in and out without explanation. The dialog and characters are laughable and totally unbelievable. Even good actors like Jodie Foster are awkward and are always a beat off.The slapstick attempts at humor made me cringe (to say nothing of the incest.) The gang rape and multiple deaths of family members made me laugh, because I didn't believe in the characters or the situations.When Jodie Foster's character is raped I was disturbed for a moment. But when her brother and a gang of black students rush to the rescue, and Foster's character makes some crack about "same old Halloween" I laughed. I laughed harder when they bring her home and she just wants to recover from the experience by cuddling with dog...WHO THE FATHER HAS JUST HAS PUT TO SLEEP. The girl is gang raped and her father put the dog to sleep without telling her. This is better than "Degrassi" or other after school specials, and cannot be taken at all seriously.Perhaps some things were meant to be surreal or blackly humorous, but none of the humor or the surreal impossibility of the many plots seemed intentional.Perhaps Irving is a good writer, but I wonder after the campy mess of an acid trip of this film and the soppy diabetic mess of "Simon Birch." If you enjoyed "Plan 9 From Outer Space", you should pick this film up. Oh hell, it's a masterpiece that will have you laughing, laughing, cringing, and hitting your pillows and screaming "WHAT THE FCK?!!!"

Okay, this was officially an insane film. The dysfunctional families in The Royal Tenenbaums or Little Miss Sunshine have got nothing on this lot.Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster are a teenage brother and sister who harbor blatant incestuous desires for each other. Jodie gets gang-raped (a test run for The Accused, perhaps) and then falls for the guy who spearheaded her rape. Matthew Modine has a double role as the head rapist and the perverted leader of a radical terrorist gang who want to blow up a Viennese opera house. Nastassja Kinski pops up halfway through as an insecure lesbian in a bear suit, and gets it on with both Rob and Jodie. Amanda Plummer plays a virginal Austrian chambermaid/terrorist known only as Miss Miscarriage. Beau Bridges is the patriarch, a teacher who dreams of setting up a hotel and gets blinded by an exploding bomb. There's also a child authoress (Jennie Dundas), a weightlifting grandfather (Wilford Brimley), a real bear and a dog with "terminal flatulence".Tony Richardson is obviously going for a type of bizarre, surreal, epic black comedy, and he has faithfully adapted John Irving's sprawling, near-unfilmable 1981 novel. Both the tone and the narrative are faithful, but it's certainly not as successful an adaptation as The World According to Garp two years earlier. The cast is game and there are some rich, funny moments along the way, but there is clearly too much going on, too many characters and wild globe-hopping vignettes, and the overdose of quirk becomes wearisome well before the end. It's an utterly chaotic mess, then, but it remains one of those morbidly fascinating films you can't tear your eyes away from, if only to see what the hell happens next.