Movies Worth Watching - HOSTEL: 'The Abbreviated Epic'

I was recently in Cancun, Mexico, walking along a street filled with resorts, cantinas plastered with Corona banners, and North American chain restaurants. (Some people go on vacation to get away from Starbucks; alas, it seems to be waiting for you everywhere...)  In a crack between the commercial facades there was a small weathered sign advertising a hostel. A Mexican hostel. This Cancun strip may favor tourists with money, but one needn't be elite to be treated like a boss in Mexico. It's difficult to imagine backpackers roughing it in a hole in the ground dump like a Mexican hostel when for a reasonable price you can be across the street in a five-star all-inclusive hotel, drunk on the beach at 10am.

Being away from the internet and our American culture for a few days, seeing that grungy hostel sign reminded me of a great little movie I saw for the first time just last year, the cult hit Hostel (2005), directed by Eli Roth, the now fairly well-known director who got his break with Cabin Fever (2002)--a film that was picked up after screening initially at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Hostel is an example of what I like to call 'the abbreviated epic.' There is a song by The Pixies called "Mr. Grieves" that nicely illustrates this paradigm. Clocking in at just over two minutes in length, "Mr. Grieves" undergoes several tempo and stylistic changes, making it feel grandiose and well-appointed even though it is incredibly brief by the standards governing most pop/rock songs. "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" by The Beatles is another example, with a similar rhapsodic change-up structure. Especially in an era in our cultural evolution where attention spans are markedly stunted, successfully communicating a complete artistic vision in a small timeframe is a feat.  Imagine if it were possible that for the entire cinematic Harry Potter saga you could get everything you needed from it in just one movie rather than eight or nine. Or to know who the next American Idol will be in sixty minutes instead of over four months, with the same satisfaction of experience. And there is more to admire than deftly seizing restricted opportunity: Efficiency. All our lives progress inexorably forward with a time limitation, a certain endpoint, and there is much to see, do, and learn about the universe over a definite period. If everything were compact and fully maximized, there would be greater chance to absorb and accomplish. We could all be richer people.

Roth's movie understands this concept and dutifully strives for it. Hostel is a mere 94 minutes long and it contains essentially three movies linked together by one storyline. The story: a trio of friends travel to eastern Europe and stay in a hostel; they meet some girls; two of the guys are killed off; the third one survives. Act one of the story is presented as a sort of teen-friendly romp: guys goofing off in a foreign country, drinking, drugs, lots of nudity and sex. They meet a strange man on a train. One of the guys goes missing.  Act two: the skin-flick sensibility of act one bleeds over and the movie changes into gruesome torture-porn; blood and gore abound--not for the squeamish. Missing guy turns up dead, second guy dies. Third guy gets away. Act three: the bloodletting of act two continues as the lone survivor discovers the weird guy from the train is part of a murderous sect that offed his buddies, goes after the weird guy, and the movie becomes an homage to Korean revenge films (such as those by Park Chan-wook), survivor wearing a black suit and leather gloves as he hunts down the killer.

The beauty of the genre metamorphosis in Hostel--besides simply admiring each act for its own unique awesomeness--is that when the surviving buddy finally gets to the weirdo from the train and cuts off his fingers, the expansive all-inclusiveness in the muscular running time of the preceding make you as the viewer feel as though you are fulfilling a rather prolonged and arduous journey and provides the intensified, earned sense of satisfaction that accompanies the end of such a journey. Because it is short movie (each of the Harry Potter movies, eight of them, run for hour longer ore more apiece) much detail and exposition is necessarily omitted, but by phase-shifting from one act to the next an illusion of depth is created. Each individual section of the movie is adequately self-contained, but strung together they synthesize a dramatic enormity. It is the same effect as a one-dimensional rectangular image rotating to reveal it tunnels out into a third dimension; or the cumulative awe brought on by the entire Manhattan skyline viewed from Liberty Island. Scope is not necessarily a function of actual size.

Eli Roth's films have been appreciated by his peers, who also like to put him to work--such as Quentin Tarantinto. You might recall Roth doing double duty in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) as an actor and director, the latter of which roles produced the film-within-a-film in Basterds, Nation's Pride.  Roth also directed a fake movie trailer (Thanksgiving) to appear in the 'intermission' between films in the dual-feature Grindhouse (2007), the concept for which was co-conceived by, and the second feature of which was directed by Tarantino (Death Proof; the first feature was directed by Roberto Rodriguez). Quentin Tarantino has demonstrated clear admiration, and seems a most appropriate candidate to qualify Roth's work--QT is the quintessential genre-mashing filmmaker and a touchstone cinematic artisan, and certainly he above anyone else would have the sensibility to recognize a likeness in kind, likewise skilled.

The success and popularity of Hostel spawned a sequel, directed by Roth--it was almost as good as the first--but he has yet to author a follow-up movie.  If he decides to do a Hostel III perhaps he could shoot it in Mexico--there has certainly been lots of appropriately horrific content in the media lately to work with. Plenty of decent resorts down there to put the crew up in, too.

"Hope everything is alright..."