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Niagara Motel (2005)
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Reviews Counted:13
Fresh:5
Rotten:8
Average Rating:5.1/10
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: In Niagara Motel, several struggling individuals cross paths at a low-rent motel in the tourist Mecca of Niagara Falls. They are not tourists and they are all, for various reasons, at crisis points... In Niagara Motel, several struggling individuals cross paths at a low-rent motel in the tourist Mecca of Niagara Falls. They are not tourists and they are all, for various reasons, at crisis points in their lives. The main characters are: a knockout waitress being recruited to star in low budget porn videos, a young couple with criminal pasts struggling to recover their child from social services and a middle class husband and wife whose marriage is disintegrating. The story also includes the woeful drunken motel manager, a prostitute working to support two children, a small time hustler, an underachieving staple salesman, the Serbian owner of the motel, his physics studying daughter and a social worker with a Christian bias. The needs of these people, their obvious failings and the unlucky conditions of their lives make them so vulnerable that they careen from the disturbing to the hilarious in a breathless instant. In this story, tragedy waltzes with unpredictable comedy in an intense dance of life. [More]
Reviews for Niagara Motel
Yates has given himself so many stories to tell here that his only plausible excuse for Niagara Motel's total lack of dramatic tension or laughs is a script that fails to include a solitary good line.
The quirky script is packed with good lines and off-the-wall moments and the stories are surprisingly moving in places.
Extremely watchable, even though it's a bit fragmented and unfocussed.
I'm not exactly sure what compelled me to finish watching this so-called "black comedy," which is a little heavy on the black and far too light on the comedy.
a tragicomic ensemble piece about people on the edge and love on the rocks.
An unfunny ensemble that completely wastes the talent gathered and the material it's based on.
A blue chip cast is wasted in the painfully unfunny ensemble comedy Niagara Motel, about a gaggle of self-absorbed nitwits struggling to make ends meet on the Canadian side of the tourist mecca.
Too many characters and so much plot that no single scenario ever develops into an absorbing drama.
The lives of nine assorted down-and-outers converge in frequently funny and sometimes tragic ways, giving Yates a chance to put his own spin on a template perfected decades ago by Robert Altman and reinvigorated in recent years by P.T. Anderson.
An ensemble piece with spirit, vitality and a heavy dose of dark, twisted humour.
The actors are more or less on the same page, trying as much as possible to underplay this overheated material. But that doesn't help when the page itself is a scribbled sheet of foolscap crammed with narrative tangents and thematic jottings.
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