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Information

• Member: WesW
• Studio: Classic Rock Productions
• Title: Hotel California
• Premiered: 2008-04-14
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Other
• Song:
  • Eagles, The Hotel California
• Anime:
  • Memories: Magnetic Rose
• Comments: Hotel California tells the story of a small group of men onboard a spaceship who decide to investigate an S.O.S. emanating from a dangerous region of space, and find themselves in an environment they could never have imagined.
  
  Star ratings notes: Are you a "4" or a "2"? As I write this, the average rating for the vid is a 3, but from the way the rating has jumped around, it must have received about as many 2's and 4's as has 3's. I'd like to think that people who take the time to read the notes below and watch it all the way through are the people giving it the 4's, while those who don't like the slow start and give up on it are the 2's. So, which are you?
  
  Song notes: From the song's Wikipedia entry:
  "Hotel California" won the Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1978.
  In a 2004 issue, Rolling Stone magazine placed it as the forty-ninth greatest song of all time, and the song's guitar solo is ranked 8th on Guitar Magazine's Top 100 Guitar Solos.
  Its album, also titled Hotel California, is the 15th best-selling album of all time, in any category.
  
  The song's lyrics describe the title establishment as a luxury resort where "you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave." On the surface, the song tells the tale of a weary traveler who becomes trapped in a nightmarish hotel that at first appeared inviting and tempting. The song is generally understood to be an allegory about hedonism and self-destruction in the Southern California music industry of the late 1970s; Don Henley called it "our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles".
  
  Sync notes: This vid is primarily synched to the guitar, rather than lyric lines or drumbeat. This means that occasionally the lyrics will begin and then the scene will change, but if you listen closely you'll notice that the singer will emphasize the syllable upon which the guitar sounds and the scene changes.
  
  Lyric-matching notes: On a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, HC would have to be a 10 as far as finding scenes to match the lyrics of the song. Combine this with the fact that Magnetic Rose is only about 40 minutes long, and it's inevitable that there are going to be some lyrics for which there are no identically-matching scenes in the film. For better or worse, most of these scenes occur in the first couple of stanzas. Once the guy starts going down the corridor, the lyrics and visuals start correlating better, and stay pretty well matched the rest of the way through. For the lyrics which had no matching visuals, I tried to find either a scene with similar imagery or activities, or failing that, a scene which contributed to the story of men.
  
  The challenge with this vid was to construct a coherent and logical visual narrative while incorporating as many scenes as possible which matched the lyrics and story of the song as closely as possible. In most cases I think I succeeded pretty well, though to get the most enjoyment from the vid you'll have to occasionally use your imagination, and not be anal about the fact that sometimes what you hear and what you see don't completely correlate.
  Hotel California is all about allegory and using your imagination, so if you like the song, I think you'll like how I've interpreted it. Forum thread.
  
  If the video won't play, get this codec pack.