The Best Hotel on Skid Row from Obsidian Obelisk on Vimeo.

"The Best Hotel on Skid Row" takes the viewer into the Madison Hotel in Los Angeles, where for about $8.20 a night, 200 loners and losers get a place to sleep -- no pets, no hot plates, bath down the hall. This documentary drifts to the bluesy, boozy rhythms of people who exist on pension checks or welfare checks or, in a few cases, paychecks from pickup jobs. Not all are old, but nobody seems ever to have been young. Charles Bukowski, known as the poet of skid row, does the narrating for what he calls "an ode to the fixed-income blues." The script is hard boiled: "If you can't pay, you can't stay."