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| Orion Pictures | Release Date: March 9, 1984 |
Starring:
Beau Bridges, Jennifer Dundas, Jodie Foster, Joely Richardson, Lisa Banes, Paul McCrane, Rob Lowe, Seth Green, Wallace Shawn, Wally Aspell
Summary:
The film talks about a family that weathers all sorts of disasters and keeps going in spite of it all. It is noted for its wonderful assortment of oddball characters.
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While it is decidedly not to all tastes, The Hotel New Hampshire is a fascinating, largely successful adaptation of John Irving’s 1981 novel. Writer-director Tony Richardson has pulled off a remarkable stylistic tight-rope act, establishing a bizarre tone of morbid whimsicality at the outset and sustaining it throughout.
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This dreary satire of the post-war American family has a small but devoted following. Writer-director Tony Richardson has constructed a complex screenplay based on an even more convoluted novel by John Irving. It's a fairy tale about virtually everything and, as such, will not satisfy everybody. The film is laced with blackly humorous takes on heterosexuality, homosexuality, incest, abandonment, Nazism, masochism--a veritable laundry list of contemporary neuroses.
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I'm pretty sure that the Marquis de Sade would like it. But it's not a movie for everybody. Only those who laugh till they cry when they see a couple of heart attacks. [9 March 1984, p.23]
Irving is a generalissimo of literary assault techniques, shameless about shifting his emphasis from, say, the lewd to the sanctimonious on a moment's notice if he perceives an emotional advantage, particularly one lending itself to convulsive moral indignation. [17 March 1984, p.C8]
The Hotel New Hampshire, in which John Irving's novel comes to the screen, is such a mess that it does not feel like a film at all. It's a kind of endurance contest, an epic bout with the cutes, in which the audience is made to confront a long, quirky line of performers playing oddball "types," and is then given only a handful of platitudes by which the explain the experience. "Sorrow floats" is the story's most profound statement, though there are others. [3 Apr 1984, p.C5]
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