Rating: 
Summary: what good actors do when good roles dry up
Review: "New Rose Hotel" is the second attempt to turn a William Gibson story into a feature-length film (after the fairly disastrous "Johnny Mnemonic," starring King of Inexpression Keanu Reeves), and its pedigree is what drew me toward it: stars Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Asia Argento(!), and director Abel Ferrara ("Ms. 45") all have steady reputations in the film world. This gave me a slight reassurance: "no matter how bad the script is, the cast and direction could make up for it."Well, "New Rose Hotel" is the type of film that exists in the twilight zone between films that are so bad they're painful to watch, and films that are so bad they're a laugh riot. The story has something to do with two cyber-pirates (Walken & Dafoe) who hire Asia Argento to fall in love with a prestigious Japanese scientist, and collect a large sum of money in the process. The events unfold with a maximum of confusion and even when things actually seem to be making sense, they just get confusing again. That's not to say "New Rose Hotel" is ALL bad. Sterling Video, which released this specimen, is a company pretty notorious for pushing out low-budget, bill-paying dreck featuring brand-name stars under the radar of the mainstream so as to pass unnoticed to the library shelves at your local video store. And this is no exception. While Walken and Dafoe bring trademark professionalism to their nothing roles, you know this wasn't a movie made for Academy Award consideration. Ferrara, however, seems to have given up hope after filming, allowing the editor to piece together what little story there was using the gimmick of close-circuit cameras for stylistic value. And Asia Argento, it must be said, is an AMAZINGLY bad actress who would have no career if she wasn't the daughter of Italain director Dario Argento; she mumbles her lines to the point where you won't be able to make out what she's saying (not a bad thing, considering this film makes good use of her physical assets). "New Rose Hotel" is a low-budget, confusing mess that would be completely forgettable without the presence of Walken and Dafoe. Some scenes retain a sense of style, but other than that this is a lost cause. If you're compelled to rent this, go in with your expectations low and it'll pass easier.
Rating:
Summary: what good actors do when good roles dry up
Review: "New Rose Hotel" is the second attempt to turn a William Gibson story into a feature-length film (after the fairly disastrous "Johnny Mnemonic," starring King of Inexpression Keanu Reeves), and its pedigree is what drew me toward it: stars Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Asia Argento(!), and director Abel Ferrara ("Ms. 45") all have steady reputations in the film world. This gave me a slight reassurance: "no matter how bad the script is, the cast and direction could make up for it." Well, "New Rose Hotel" is the type of film that exists in the twilight zone between films that are so bad they're painful to watch, and films that are so bad they're a laugh riot. The story has something to do with two cyber-pirates (Walken & Dafoe) who hire Asia Argento to fall in love with a prestigious Japanese scientist, and collect a large sum of money in the process. The events unfold with a maximum of confusion and even when things actually seem to be making sense, they just get confusing again. That's not to say "New Rose Hotel" is ALL bad. Sterling Video, which released this specimen, is a company pretty notorious for pushing out low-budget, bill-paying dreck featuring brand-name stars under the radar of the mainstream so as to pass unnoticed to the library shelves at your local video store. And this is no exception. While Walken and Dafoe bring trademark professionalism to their nothing roles, you know this wasn't a movie made for Academy Award consideration. Ferrara, however, seems to have given up hope after filming, allowing the editor to piece together what little story there was using the gimmick of close-circuit cameras for stylistic value. And Asia Argento, it must be said, is an AMAZINGLY bad actress who would have no career if she wasn't the daughter of Italain director Dario Argento; she mumbles her lines to the point where you won't be able to make out what she's saying (not a bad thing, considering this film makes good use of her physical assets). "New Rose Hotel" is a low-budget, confusing mess that would be completely forgettable without the presence of Walken and Dafoe. Some scenes retain a sense of style, but other than that this is a lost cause. If you're compelled to rent this, go in with your expectations low and it'll pass easier.
Rating: 
Summary: A Flawed, but Necessary, Contribution to Sci-Fi Cinema
Review: It's refreshing to find a science-fiction movie that isn't just another hundred-million-dollar comic book, that isn't populated with emotionally stunted characters who all behave like eleven-year-olds when it comes to personal conflicts and relationships, that isn't completely obsessed with its own bells and whistles and special effects, that isn't cobbled together from the tired conventions of other film genres -- film noir, Hong Kong, Western, sword & sorcery, WWII, etc. In fact, compared to its contemporaries ("The Matrix" and "Johnny Moronic," for example), "New Rose Hotel" barely qualifies as science fiction at all. It qualifies solidly as a drama, however, and it qualifies solidly as a successful glimpse into the lives of the misfits and bottom-feeders who populate William Gibson's writing. Who cares how flashy the little techno-toys are? Who cares how lovingly the digital images and film transfers are rendered? Who imposed these ridiculous cover-charges? Why is it not science fiction anymore unless it's been die-cut and mylar-wrapped by Industrial Light & Magic? The effects in "New Rose Hotel" are no better than they need to be to tell the story, thank God. They're not the centerpiece of this thing, thank God. It's about grown men and women, behaving like grown men and women, in a slightly exaggerated version of the world we live in today. It's about people, which is what the best science fiction is always about. It's about doubt, suspicion, honor among thieves, obsession, dreams, and failure. Tell me -- when was the last time you saw a science-fiction movie in which the leading man and the leading lady kicked around the idea of marriage? That can be a lot more terrifying than a computer-generated robo-monster. This isn't a perfect movie by any means. Yes, the last half-hour recycles the hour before it in a misguided pledge of allegiance to the Gibson story. Yes, it bends under the weight of the gratuitous butt & boob nonsense, as do all other "thrillers" made for the international market. Yes, Christopher Walken gnaws on the scenery and wears out his Vaudeville-huckster shtick very quickly. Yes, the production sound is a little shoddy, and combined with the accents and Walken's demented jibber-jabber you might have to replay a few scenes to figure it out. It's definitely not of the Spielberg-Lucas school, with eighteen Foley artists smashing things into walls to reinvent the sound of a bite taken out of an apple in THX / Dolby 5.1. But if Abel Farrara and his team have failed in this effort (I don't believe they have), at least the effort was made to bring some kind of adult sensibility to an increasingly childish, and increasingly synthetic, category of film... and at least the effort was made without a budget that could underwrite the Russian Republic for the next five years. It just seems to me that a lot of the frustration and impatience being directed at this movie exist because of two things, neither of which address the movie on its own terms: one is unreasonable genre expectations, cultivated by big-budget Hollywood studios, who see science fiction as a mere marketing structure for action figures and videogames; the second is an audience raised on a steady diet of such marketing, who haven't had to ponder or interpret anything onscreen since "Blade Runner" twenty years ago. If you think "New Rose Hotel" is exasperating, I invite you to check out the 1960s television series "The Prisoner," also somewhat unfairly thrown into the science-fiction bin because of certain cosmetic touches... but, once inside the science-fiction bin, does wonders for the credibility and the legitimacy of the genre. Give "New Rose Hotel" a fair shot. It succeeds where movies ten times bigger fear to tread. It's a little crude, a little rough around the edges, but it does its own thing, and the rewards are there to be had.
Rating: 
Summary: New Rose Hotel - see it!
Review: Abel Ferrara is one of those directors that people either love, or don't know exists, and New Rose Hotel is one of his films to treasure. This adaption of William Gibson's short story "New Rose Hotel"is one of Ferrara's finer films.
Fortunately Ferrara is committed to film. he will ignore whatever and keep making films regardless. Ferrara is obviously not a person imprisoned by the notion of 'good taste', but more to the point, recognises that life is an emotional mental and physical experience - sex looks weird, decisions are 'non logical' and the world is bigger than any individual. These are virtues. Forget everything you have heard about William Gibson - 'cyberpunk' blah blah blah. Ferrera pulls out the beating heart and mind (they are the same thing) at the centre of the short story and avoids speculation about 'the future. This is a love story, and it reeks of semen, strange urges and a distinctively human scent.This is not a sci-fi story, and If anyone tells you this is a sci-fi story, never take a word they say seriously again. The smartest move Ferrara makes is recognising that the future looks remarkably like the present. Freedom! left the geeks behind, so lets get on with it! Once again Walken pulls out the stops for Ferrara and delivers the kind of desparte, funny, tender, sad, tragic, half mad characterisations only these two seem to know how to cook up. It is also a thrill to see Willem de Foe deliver a good performance in a watchable film. Like a lot of Ferrara's films its riches are yielded through multiple viewings - engaging, confusing, evocative - the relationship between the three protaganists and their place in a world they don't quite understand, and which will surprise them. It would be tempting to call this an arthouse movie - but that is an insult. When arthouse stands for some halfwitted pose (it is not good enough to mock mainstream film values - you actually need to deliver something superior), Ferrara is a rare talent. he doesn't need our encouragement, but do see this movie before he explodes.
Rating:
Summary: A film for cinematographers
Review: An excellent film, but not for the faint of heart, New Rose Hotel requires a level of concentration usually reserved for literature. It is a good measure by which to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Rating: 
Summary: We Liked It & Even Watched It Twice!
Review: Apparently most viewers hate this movie. It is not an easy movie to follow, I grant you. However, I've seen most of Abel Ferrara's films and liked them plus I generally go for anything with Willem Dafoe in it. Walken is a favorite too. Hubby absolutely adored it and would probably go the whole 5 stars if he were writing this, which puts him at variance with almost everyone. I can't go that far but I will go 4 stars. The plot is not that tricky. What is tricky is knowing what moment of time you are in with the characters. At any given moment you can be at the start, middle or end of the story. In this it rather resembles "Memento," which is in the theaters now. Ferrara should have considered changes in lighting or some other visual key to cue the viewers into this time shifts. I've seen this done by shooting part of a film in black and white and the rest in color. I've also seen one time sequence shot in all cool or blue tones while the rest of the movie is shot in reddish hot tones. In short, there are ways to make this easier on the viewer. The plot is that Walken and Dafoe are going to make an Asian scientist fall in love with a call girl they've just met, Sandy. Sandy will bewitch the scientist and he will go wherever she wants him to go. Industrialists will pay Walken and Dafoe big money for the con. They in turn will pay Sandy a million dollars as her share. The question becomes though who is conning whom. While Dafoe is busy falling in love with Sandy, he doesn't follow through on tracing the various leads about her which come into his hands. One irony I couldn't get over was Dafoe being stunned by someone else's beauty, when, in his prime, he had to have been one of the most beautiful people on the planet. Move this back to the 1980s and probably no one would be looking at the call girls in this film! My absolute favorite movie by Ferrara is "Bad Lieutenant" with Harvey Keitel in the starring role. Keitel gives the performance of his life in that film and it is much easier to follow than this one. Before you totally write off this film maker, you might give that one a a try if all the negative reviews on this one are too much for you.
Rating: 
Summary: William Gibson: Great in Print...
Review: But preternaturally awful in film. Since Gibson's accomplishments as a writer of science fiction include the coining of the term "cyberspace" and several field-advancing novels that shaped the entire course of the cyberpunk sub-genre, it seems an amazing thing that a half-decent film based on one of his books either: A) Cannot be made. B) Cannot be made even with him writing the screenplay. C) Cannot be made with a trillion dollars and an executive order compelling every last American citizen to watch and enjoy it. Some of us have had the misfortune of watching _Johnny Mnemonic_, an extrapolation by Gibson on one of his short stories from the _Burning Chrome_ collection. Even in a career as uneven as Keanu Reeves has had, it's one of the weaker efforts in a portfolio that includes _Point Break_. _Point Break_. For the love of God. This latest effort, also taken from the aforementioned collection of short stories, is called _New Rose Hotel_, which stars Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento, an actress of whom I had not previously heard. The plot, insofar as it goes, is that a maverick researcher from one genetic engineering concern in Germany is wanted by another in Japan. Walken and Dafoe engage in a sort of intellectual larceny by convincing the unhappy and talented to disappear from their current employers and relocate to one who pays Walken and Dafoe. Asia Argento, whose name and soft Italo-Hispanic contralto suggest a career that will unfold between the hours of 2 and 6 a.m. on Cinemax, plays a postmodern lounge singer whose act includes two other women kissing and caressing her through each song. Walken has the brilliant idea to recruit Argento to seduce his quarry for corporate relocation, and it falls to Dafoe to train her properly through no fewer than three nude sequences. I love the work of William Gibson and want to see it onscreen in as many well-conceived adaptations as Hollywood's small collective mind will permit. This film is not under that category, and in fact is so far away from being in it that particles of light currently at that category may not reach this film for several decades. I guess that I can forgive Dafoe and Walken - we all have balloon mortgage payments or bone-marrow transplants or something that might justify appearing in this for some undisclosed fortune - and Asia Argento will probably never have a chance to work in more dignified settings. Apparently the director's idea of conveying a dark, near-future setting is to film his researcher in grainy segments that look like an extremely weak television signal for a show that no one wants to view. The omnipresence and power of the corporation, Japanese culture and all of Gibson's other touches that define the contiguous world of his books are not here. Anywhere. The coffin hotel of the New Rose outside of Narita International is as close as it gets, and by the time you see that you have tired completely of the film's last third, which is Dafoe and Walken having flashbacks of the film's uninteresting first two-thirds. Even though I felt suspicious of a DVD title priced less than one night at the base theater with Junior Mints, I felt that a smaller-scale film released without any pretense of competing at the box office might be worth it. Possibly. But don't buy, rent or allow yourself to waste precious hours of consciousness on this.
Rating:
Summary: Worth watching for the most part.
Review: For William Gibson fans, this movie was not so bad. It was (relatively) faithful to the short story. It was, for the budget and what it was, not too bad an adaption to film. Certainly better than Johnny Mnemonic, from that standpoint. I believe the director also directed Bad Lieutenant (another character study) which, when I realized it, made the format of how the film is more sensical. He went along a similar vein here in terms of studying the people rather than following the events around them. The characters were well-cast in my opinion, based on the short story of the same name. As other reviewers pointed out, it DOES add a lot to the genre. All the cyberpunk stories are _not_ just the Matrix or Blade Runner, or a mishmash of either. (Not that they're bad. In fact, I enjoy both.) This succeeds in presenting a dramatic tale in the shady future Gibson created. There are problems among the good stuff, make no mistake. [VERY MINOR SPOILER BELOW} The montage at the end was, well....utterly boring and pointless. It gives the impression (whether or not it was actually true) that one ran out of time before the film was supposed to be over, so a slide show of various images from the hours previous that you've already seen are presented in a confusing cloud of images...which serve no real purpose. Up until that point however, the movie as both a character study and a suspensful tale are not bad at all. It's sort of like A.I. You KNOW when the movie ends, yet a little snippet drags it on well past it should. Anyway, give it a try, especially if you are a Gibson fan, and if Johnny Mnemonic thoroughly disappointed you. This will give you more faith in future renditions, at least a little (and pray like hell for Sci-Fi to pick up one of his books for a mini series, heh) Another thing to keep in mind with books, especially Gibson, is that the true caliber of his work in many ways can't be put on film. I don't know if there is a way to portray the terror, disappointment and cruelness of the future of his world in a movie....but I'd have to say that this movie made at least a valliant attempt, and a better one than JM.
Rating:
Summary: Worth watching for the most part.
Review: For William Gibson fans, this movie was not so bad. It was (relatively) faithful to the short story. It was, for the budget and what it was, not too bad an adaption to film. Certainly better than Johnny Mnemonic, from that standpoint. I believe the director also directed Bad Lieutenant (another character study) which, when I realized it, made the format of how the film is more sensical. He went along a similar vein here in terms of studying the people rather than following the events around them. The characters were well-cast in my opinion, based on the short story of the same name. As other reviewers pointed out, it DOES add a lot to the genre. All the cyberpunk stories are _not_ just the Matrix or Blade Runner, or a mishmash of either. (Not that they're bad. In fact, I enjoy both.) This succeeds in presenting a dramatic tale in the shady future Gibson created. There are problems among the good stuff, make no mistake. [VERY MINOR SPOILER BELOW} The montage at the end was, well....utterly boring and pointless. It gives the impression (whether or not it was actually true) that one ran out of time before the film was supposed to be over, so a slide show of various images from the hours previous that you've already seen are presented in a confusing cloud of images...which serve no real purpose. Up until that point however, the movie as both a character study and a suspensful tale are not bad at all. It's sort of like A.I. You KNOW when the movie ends, yet a little snippet drags it on well past it should. Anyway, give it a try, especially if you are a Gibson fan, and if Johnny Mnemonic thoroughly disappointed you. This will give you more faith in future renditions, at least a little (and pray like hell for Sci-Fi to pick up one of his books for a mini series, heh) Another thing to keep in mind with books, especially Gibson, is that the true caliber of his work in many ways can't be put on film. I don't know if there is a way to portray the terror, disappointment and cruelness of the future of his world in a movie....but I'd have to say that this movie made at least a valliant attempt, and a better one than JM.
Rating:
Summary: Ouch
Review: Gibson, whose first adaptation was slaughtered in Johnny Mnemonic, has been shafted royally again with this awful, bad, stinky mess of a film. I'm truly sorry I sat through it. The lighting is awful, the sound nearly nonexistent, the production values forgotten (gee, Mr. Dafoe, what was it like to crawl around in a box in a warehouse with a toy gun?)--and the stars, perfect for the parts, are wasted. Even the relatively unknown Asia Argento, obviously a serious talent, is limited to singing (very, very quietly) and being topless a lot. In an immediate conflict with the original short, the movie starts out by telling its story in normal narrative fashion and THEN going to the flashback. This last, employed well by Gibson, turns into a retread of literally the entire film (albeit with a bit of different sequencing and a good deal more porn). You'll end up watching out of sheer morbid curiosity, hoping desperately that the already mutilating screenwriter will at least supply a different ending. You'll be disappointed. I wish I could just apologize on the behalf of the filmmakers to all the ten people who rented this sprawling malignance of a video. Please stay away from it. Your life will be a good deal brighter.
| 
