New Rose Hotel | | Cast : | Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe | | Director : | Abel Ferrara | | Studio : | Studio Home Entertainment | | Format : | Color, Dolby, Widescreen | | Released Date : | January 01, 1998 | | DVD Released Date : | December 14, 1999 | | Language : | English (Dubbed), Spanish (Subtitled), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | April 09, 2005 | | Summary | New York Grit goes Cyberpunk (sort of) | Content
 | The gritty back-alley path of writer and director Abel Ferrara's career so far seems to be his fervent desire to bring his tales of urban blight and plight to vividly disturbing life on the independent film screen. At times he has succeeded with glorious malignance (King of New York, Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral) and other times he sinks in the self-indulgent mire of his own philosophical and often violent musings on the contemporary urban habitat (The Addiction, The Blackout, Dangerous Game). With New Rose Hotel, Ferrara attempts to take his vision in a somewhat atypical direction by delving into the world of cyberpunk. He does this by tapping into the resources of cyberpunk forefather William Gibson, adapting New Rose Hotel from Gibson's seminal short story collection, Burning Chrome.
Fox (Ferrara regular Christopher Walken doing his Christopher Walken thing) and X (Willem Dafoe) trade in international espionage. They are going to use an alluring prostitute named Sandii (the enigmatic Asia Argento) to seduce a world-renowned techie, and make sure she convinces him to defect from his present biotech employer to a rival company. For accomplishing this task, the Fox and X will receive 100 million dollars. But while navigating this perilous trail, mistakes are made, people end up dead, and the two men become bounty.
Cyberpunk has been splashed across the movie screens a handful of times for the past several years, often successfully (The Matrix) and often not quite so successfully (Johnny Mnemonic). Of course, Mnemonic was also an adaptation from Burning Chrome, a stupefying and inane translation that reeked of filmmakers who did not have a grasp on Gibson's imagination and intentions, or the cyberpunk genre in general. It seemed they wanted to make a "hip" effects-laden sci-fi film and only managed to alienate Gibson-loyal viewers who rightfully barraged Mnemonic with contempt (Johnny Moronic, anyone?).
Such should not be the fate of the low key New Rose Hotel. No, it is not a great film, it might be classifiable as passable, but overall, an imaginative and fairly absorbing beginning deteriorates into an anti-climatic and pointless final act. Ferrara and co-screenwriter Christ Zois certainly understand cyberpunk and Gibson specifically, but their translation of New Rose Hotel is rambling and muddled. Of course, this can prove a problem whenever anyone is trying to turn a thirteen-page story in a ninety-minute film. A certain amount of freedom for expansion is required. But, with New Rose Hotel, there does not seem to be an expansion on the story (okay, there's dialogue in the film, unlike the story), but rather a staunch, almost literal translation. The events of the film are set in motion in a linear fashion, refashioned from the jagged first person recollections of the short story. This lasts for perhaps the first hour of the film, culminating with Dafoe's character holing up in the New Rose Hotel. Then, Ferrara tells the story... again. But this time he tells it as Gibson wrote it in Burning Chrome, using flashbacks of previously viewed scenes interspersed with X realizing how he blew the deal, grasping his delusions about life and love, and longing for Sandii. This provides no new revelations, and does little to further the film. And this is the point when a degree of tedium sets in and the viewer might very well blurt out, "We know, we know. Been there, done that." This is frustrating because, hell, Ferrara could have made a solid and engaging twenty-minute short film to tell a story he tells twice in ninety minutes.
John Lurie (Down by Law, Oz) and Annabella Sciorra (The Addiction, The Sopranos) make cameo appearances in the beginning, at a murky nightclub, and longtime Ferrara regular Victor Argo appears later in the film. Gretchen Mol (who was also in The Funeral) is peppered throughout, without much to do or say. Her character is pivotal but her role is negligible. Ken Kelsch provides some interesting cinematography, hazy and wobbly, sometimes hallucinatory, and generally providing a futuristic feel. But it is not enough to allay viewer apathy about a story that unravels and comes to a shrug-worthy close.
Cyberpunk is not about cool effects and big guns and slow motion bullets, no matter what viewers took away from the Matrix (a good movie, sure, but not the pinnacle nor the point of cyberpunk). Insofar as fleshed-out characters with truly human qualities and their interactions with technology and futuristic bureaucracy, Ferrara gets it. But his technique, mainly in the writing, unfortunately lacks. Ferrara is always a ballsy and interesting director, for better or worse. For the Ferrara neophyte, the top recommendations would be King of New York and The Funeral. For the Gibson neophyte, start with Burning Chrome, and then move immediately to the all-time cyberpunk classic, the brilliant Neuromancer. And for those familiar with Gibson, the question may be raised, "Is it better than Johnny Mnemonic?" Well, sure, of course. But saying New Rose Hotel is better than Johnny Mnemonic isn't really saying much.
|
| Rating | | | Date | December 17, 2003 | | Summary | Pff | Content
| Well,
Everybody seems to hate this movie in almost all regards. I would say that it isn't spectacular, but I think it deserves better than a lot of these people are giving it. I can respect that they think differently of it.
*chuckle*
It's amazing how many people can be wrong. Many complained that they didn't understand what was going on. Sucks for them, I guess they just aren't very bright I know I watched it, and had no trouble seeing what was going on. I read the book afterward, and thought it was quite a well-done adaptation, though I would have thought that they could have come up with a better william gibson story to do a movie of, considering the brevity of this particular one, and the abundance of other stories out there, many of which are considerably longer. |
| Rating | | | Date | April 18, 2003 | | Summary | A movie that could have been. | Content
| Look, it's like this.
The story New Rose Hotel, by William Gibson is one which hilights the decay of society through peoples own self destructive impulses and that never ending bain of humanity greed.As a story, New Rose Hotel is to be honest way to short to even contemplate making a movie out of it. There's just not enough there and when I watch the movie, it shows immensely. Dafoe and Walken are 2 of my favourite actors and there performance together I found to be of good status. What this movie needed to do was give the viewer a good explanation as to the status of the society , this different world, basically an atmosphere. Instead it gives you a blurred corporate scene and then your thrown into a bar with women that can't sing and the 2 main characters forcing themselves to make out there enjoying the poor entertainment. The exchanging of information should have been more secretive and when people wispered in others ears you should have been given a zoom on that audio. Then there was the main guts of the story, with the nano technologist. This was what could have been the movies saviour, alas it was brushed over and the conversations where the main focus of the movie. This brings me to my last annoyance. The person in charge of camera directing should have been .... Instead of seeing people interacting together at important sections of the story, you got terrible close ups of single faces that were below amateur quality and destracted you from the dialogue. All in all Gibson should have written extra material for the movie and a lot more should have been spent on atmosphere to enhance the intrigue of the story, even if it meant getting more cost effective actors. ...I like to end with a positive note, and the only one I can make as far as capturing the story goes, is that the end scene that Dafoe acted out at the end was effective enough. If your like me and a fan of William Gibson and these two great actors, you may want this movie as part of your collection, but I tell you now, after your first viewing it's one that will sit and gather dust very quickly. |
| Rating | | | Date | April 05, 2003 | | Summary | Another love-it or hate-it film. | Content
| Notice that almost no one gives this film its average score (around 2.3 stars)? It's a classic bimodal distribution: hate it or love it. Well, maybe "love it" is a bit strong, but for those who 1) don't know the plot ahead of time, and 2) carefully follow the plot as it develops in the film, particularly in the last quarter, the story is quite gripping. If you've read the story ahead of time, or lose the plot while watching, it will just seem like a very low-budget muddle. Like many of Gibson's stories, this is hardly science fiction-- in fact, it's more purely noir than many other more noir-y looking films that come to mind. As such, it's about money, love, betrayal, women, memory, machismo--that sort of stuff. Having read the story after seeing the film, I'd almost say the movie was better, while still being true to Gibson's spirit: less of the narrator's whiny voice, more Fox; more mystery, less pseudo-futuristic-cosmopolitanism. And a much better finish. The best part is really the much-maligned last quarter, which in its memory flashbacks leads you to discover for yourself who betrayed whom and why. The conclusion, if you care about these sorts of issues at all, is really quite sad and moving. Not knowing when it would end, I jumped up close to the TV to hear Argento's reply to Dafoe's last line. To end there shows that these guys knew what they were doing. |
| Rating | | | Date | March 11, 2003 | | Summary | a new tool of torture... | Content
| It took me 4 separate sessions to sit through this abortion. I've read Neuromancer, so I'm not ignorant of Gibson's work. I don't care if this movie is a great adaptation of the book...that just tells me that the book must be equally as boring.
The "eroticism" is cheesy, the story meanders... it's as if noone was really interested in making this. If so, it shows.
If this had been a low budget b-movie, it might have had "so-bad-it's-good" potential. Nope.
I didn't want to even give it 1 star, really, but I'll say it's for the minor nudity & the so-so performances by Walken & Dafoe. |
|
