Grand Hotel

Grand Hotel
1932

The Grand Hotel! “A place where nothing ever happens.”

Oh, how this quote could not be truer. Because as I watched this Best Picture winner, I cannot remember I a time a movie has bored me so dreadfully. Even my dear old mother, who watched this film with me, was frightfully bored out of her wits during this movie. Once we began to play on Facebook it was a whole lot better.

The movie was about intersecting lives. Do you know what that means? Lots of characters to keep track of, and very little plot to keep us interested. We have the suicidal crazy overdramatic ballerina. We have the thieving baron. Also we have the poor but funny and pretty stenographer and a dying man who’s just blowing his money.

The baron and the stenographer meet and hit it off. He asks her to dance with him the next night and she agrees. But the baron’s a jerk. He’s in love with the ballerina, but they’ve never spoken. He just thinks she’s pretty. Oh there is some depth for you. He just breaks into her room to breathe the air she breaths. Can you say creepy? He also breaks in to steal her pearl necklace. It’s a very weird love I suppose.

The sick man decides to become best friends with the baron. I am not sure why, the baron is a creeper who steals from people.

So, the baron is going to steal the necklace. But as he is in her room, the ballerina comes in and is right about to shoot herself. So out comes the baron, and he begs her not to kill herself because he loves her. She says okay.

This is ENTIRELY RIDICULOUS. If I saw a guy hiding in my room while I wasn’t there, especially one that I didn’t know, professing his undying love to me, I would not be cool with it. I would scream for help as there was a psycho in my room. But no. The ballerina is just insane. So, I guess she deserves the baron.

But the poor baron while he’s off professing love forgot about the poor stenographer. I like the stenographer. She actually has personality and is the only thing of interest in the whole movie. And she’s sarcastic which is just an added bonus.

So down the baron goes racing to the stenographer. They dance and he tells her that he found love. Well isn’t that just a dandy thing to hear on a first date. The jerk of a baron then makes her dance with the sick man and ditches her. I hate the baron.

Which is why I don’t feel bad when he attempts to steal the REALLY scary looking guys wallet, and the scary guy kills him for it. He totally had it coming. The ballerina is now really sad because she loved him. The stenographer didn’t care he was a thief; she loved him too.

This is so messed up. Just once in my life I would like a realistic presentation of love in a movie. Is it really that hard to ask for? Apparently.

In the end, the ballerina randomly disappeared and the sick man and the stenographer run off to Paris together. This is entirely disgusting, as he is old enough to be her father.

That was a full length two hour film. It was sheer torture. The ballerina acted overdramatically. Everyone mumbled and it was hard to hear what they were saying. The hotel itself was disappointing in grandness. This movie did absolutely nothing to deserve the title Best Picture and I really wish I had those two hours back.