Crappy film

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Lucas Black is a naive young man who is more or less forced by circumstances to repair and repaint a dilapidated rural motel owned by Peter Coyote. I doubt you've ever seen Coyote in a role like this -- totally weird, his voice lowered to a metallic rasp, his get-up -- the voice, the cigar, the hat, the white windbreaker with the rolled-back sleeves -- ripped off from Robert Mitchum's psychopathic heavy in the original "Cape Fear." Here's what I mean by "weird." Black and Coyote near the beginning are sitting in a café over breakfast, discussing the arrangement. Coyote conspicuously picks up the salt and the pepper shakers and gives each a quick wipe with his handkerchief. Black later tires to shake some salt on his meal, the top falls from the shaker, the meal is ruined. He makes an elliptical allusion to there being "still room for another body in that lake." Coyote laughs in the most unbuttoned way. "You and I are gonna get along fine!" They are? It reminded me of a ride I caught while hitch-hiking one night outside Las Vegas. The car was warm and comfortable, the family utterly bourgeois, a man, his wife, and a baby asleep in the back seat, until the driver turned to his wife and asked in dead earnest, "Where should we ditch this hot car, Honey?" It called for an immediate redefinition of the situation. Coyote makes frequent remarks that are as unnerving as that.There is quite a focus on cars, on what they look like, on the year and the make, and on how fast they go. The whole film carried with it a kind of rural Southern sensibility. The accent is Southern and so is the landscape. So is the dialog: "While you were out there pumpin' that car, your man here was carvin' on me like a big tom turkey." Mia Maestro as Iris, the maid who upkeeps the motel, is not Southern. She transcends regionality. Anything that so closely approaches a Platonic ideal can't carry with it any regional attributes. The role of course is beneath her but then everything is beneath her, a gilded Athena in a mossy Parthenon. Her voice is silky and sensual with Argentine overtones. Bezos a vos! You must see her in Carlos Saura's "Tango." The director has done his best and it's not bad. Some of the shots are conspicuously arty. He's avoided the modern tendency to wobble the camera and focus on irrelevant artifacts during a conversation. And when Lucas Black and Mia Maestro make love, he's also avoided the cliché of the strange hand and fingers caressing an unidentified but sinuous body part. However, there's only so much you can do to signal copulation without actually showing it, so we get two hands gripping a partner's hair. The scene proves that Black himself is no saint, since Maestro is Coyote's dissatisfied wife. Only towards the climax, when Black is training for a boxing match with Coyote -- the prize being Maestro -- is the stage of ejaculatory inevitability reached and we're handed a tasteless explosion of editorial razzle-dazzle.I suspect that the author of the novel, Matthew F. Jones, knows his way around manual labor because the film doesn't shy away from showing us Lucas Black scraping paint off the weathered boards of the motel. That willingness to show people at work is one of the things I admired about James Jones' novel, "From Here to Eternity." Val Lewton was careful to show us his principals at work too. And I admired the way that a truly sinister element creeps so gradually into the movie. We know Peter Coyote is weird, but it's only incrementally that we find out HOW weird. I'll end with the observation that one of the characters is a truly sick puppy but probably not the one you imagine.

Anyone who appreciated original film noir will appreciate this offering, a film which applies Nat Banyan's perceptions through the camera, at times we do not realize what we are seeing and visualizing, until we really begin to analyze its meaning, and possible interpretations.Peter Coyote is excellent as the eccentric owner of the Deepwater Motel. Its environs remind one of Hitchcock's Bates Motel from "Psycho".Lucas Black is believable as Nat Banyan, a drifter and handyman who works on the motel for a time. There are many twists and turns, and excellent cameos by Michael Ironside as a used car salesman, and Lesley Ann Warren as a down and out waitress.Coyote was amazing in his characterization and earns the film ten stars. Highly recommended.

A Southern boy (Lucas Black) gets a job working at a motel near an Indian reservation and casino. He discovers that the motel owner (Peter Coyote), a 1/8 Indian, is involved in a corrupt scheme with his Indian friends to get control of the casino. Some people are killed and the Southern boy believes the motel owner is responsible. The Southern boy has a fling with a waitress (Lesley Ann Warren), but becomes obsessed with the motel owner's wife (Mia Maestro). The boy hatches a plan to steal the husband's cash and run away with the wife. Before he does, he must engage in a challenge boxing match with the motel owner, an aging former pro boxer. The cast of characters in this movie are very interesting and the acting is really good. The atmosphere is eerie. This movie held my interest completely and I am easily bored. This movie deserves better than the 5.0 rating at this writing. I grade it an 8.

Where was I when this movie came out? I don't' remember it EVER coming out. But I was at the DVD rental store and saw this movie, and since all I wanted was to lie down and vegetate, I rented it because the cast was interesting and I thought I'd give it a try. It seemed like a big mistake at first. The first 45 minutes had me reaching for a magazine to read at the same time, because I was sure I knew what was going on, and some of the characters seemed, well, stupid. And I hate stupid characters... but after seeing it in it's entirely, it has really stuck with me. Rent it, hang in there, and you'll be in for a treat.