The surrounding towers take away all the pleasure of being up high. Maybe I was influenced by Curbed critic Alexandra Lange’s idea that looking toward the river and the tracks gets you the best view, but I have to agree that it’s the only real view. Ultimately, though, it didn’t get me anywhere. (I’ll admit that everyone was safer because I didn’t bring my coffee.) Looking up from the base. It was a pleasant walk, apart from the extreme wind. Meandering to the top of the Vessel, rather than making a beeline for it, was almost meditative (as close as you can get to meditative in Manhattan). I like walking, getting as high up a building or structure as I can, for the views. I actually enjoyed the climb, the experience of ascending the stairs with no real direction but up. However, the option to take different routes up and around Vessel (and probably, I’ll admit, the monitored admission) made it more tolerable than some crowded art-consumption experiences. There were hordes, and I had to pause a handful of times to avoid people’s selfies or group photos. I avoided all that and started up the stairs on a choose-your-own-adventure path. A purple light glowed from the floor at the center of Vessel, drawing people in to lower their phone cameras and point them upward, a prime spot for selfies with a wall of shining Vessel as backdrop. Immediately upon entry, there were photo ops, and there was congestion. The tulips were very nice.Īfter showing my ticket, I waited at the base of the object to be admitted as other visitors left. I could check out only the exterior of The Shed, a cultural center not yet open to the public. While finishing my coffee, I took the opportunity to do a couple of laps around the base of Vessel. It is a creative work-arguably the only thing in the new luxury neighborhood that is not a residence or a business-and I expected to engage with it without being ticketed, screened, and told what to do. I thought this was dumb because I had been thinking about Vessel as a piece of public art instead, it was the sculpture-structure version of a privately owned public space. After getting back in line with my ticket, I was told I would have to finish or dispose of my iced coffee before I would be admitted. Approaching him, I was pointed to an easy-to-miss little-marked ticket stand. It took some hovering around the base of the object to figure out that a black-clad man addressing a small group of people was a Vessel authority. Wayfinding was scarce (so were trash and recycling receptacles). Still, the site managed to be somewhat off-putting and inaccessible. Vessel’s surroundings-landscape, hardscape, architecture, wayfinding-were still coming together, not yet occupied by luxury tenants and residents. Was more like what I had expected it to be: a polished self-contained object among the high-rises. Not remembering the signature towers vividly enough for them to work as beacons, I had to use equal parts mental map and GPS to track down the site.
![my road to nowhere my road to nowhere](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/64_3OOqzpYk/maxresdefault.jpg)
In reality, it was in densely developed Manhattan. I expected Vessel, designed by Thomas Heatherwick, to act as a beacon: reflecting light, visible from sidewalks, guiding me to it. Hellman’s great coup is to suggest that his actors, in playing their roles, in some instances, end up playing themselves.After deboarding and grabbing a quick lunch in Midtown, I walked toward the no-man’s land of BoltBus departures, Penn Station, and the Javits Center. Like Brooks’ Lulu in “Pandora’s Box,” Sossamon’s Laurel is an innocent who has as devastating an effect on her director as her character has on De Young’s crooked politico. Can murder, suicide and worse be far behind? In the film within the film, her heroine is pursued by a shady state government official (Cliff De Young, never better) intent on making off with $100 million.
#MY ROAD TO NOWHERE MOVIE#
With only a vampire movie to her credit, her Laurel has been hired by young director Mitch Haven (Tygh Runyan) to star in his new picture, also called “Road to Nowhere,” shooting in the Smoky Mountains outside Asheville, N.C. The film ultimately stands on the beauty and talent of its femme fatale, and Shannyn Sossamon is so stunning and gifted she actually withstands a remark comparing her to Louise Brooks. Genre conventions become a point of departure for Hellman as he contemplates and explores an all-consuming romantic passion, a love of making films, the blurry lines between truth and illusion and the magic of cinema and its enduring power. Director Monte Hellman returns to features after a 21-year-absence with “Road to Nowhere.” The film is a stylish, shimmering neo-noir with a multi-layered narrative for which the director’s longtime collaborator Steven Gaydos has written an exceedingly elliptical and challenging script.