New Rose Hotel (1998) User Reviews

The Cinema of Abel Ferrara: New Rose Hotel.

[Captain_Couth · 8/10 · 15 August 2005]

New Rose Hotel (1998) was another strange film from Abel Ferrara. Instead of his usual street dramas. Ferrara expands upon the elements that he utilized whilst making BLACKOUT. A dark and moody film that was adapted from a short story that was written by William Gibson. I was surprised by how intriguing and interesting the movie was. I have heard so many negative things about this production that I was a little leery in watching it. But I was impressed by the story, acting and directing.

Christopher Walken and Wilhem Dafoe are two losers who are always looking for rich people to swindle. One day they find the perfect pigeon who'll make them a lot of money. But they need a seductress. They find one in Asia Argento (who's smoking hot in this movie). During the bug hustle, Dafoe falls for her and the two make a side swindle. Unfortunately nothing is really as it seems. Instead of running off with Asia, Dafoe tries to play all sides but he winds up with nothing. Before he can split, his mentor Walken kills himself before the hit men can ice him. Dafoe realizes that he's be burned by a better con artist and flees. Hiding from everyone, Dafoe spends the rest of his pathetic life hiding out in a derelict apartment complex The New Rose Hotel where he re-lives the last month of his life over and over until he ends it all.

Even though we never see what happens to Dafoe's character, one can assume what happens to him. He has nowhere to go but inside the coffin he's created. The movie is a serious character study about not knowing what you could have and how greed and stupidity make a dangerous combination. I found this movie to be very deep and moving as well. But it's not for everyone.

Highly recommended.

Captures bleakness and despair of the short story.

[barberoux · 6/10 · 15 February 2000]

New Rose Hotel captures the bleakness and despair of the short story that seems common to William Gibson's writing. I enjoyed the performances of Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe and the babe was sufficiently babeish to hold my interest though her acting was just OK. The movie peaked too soon and the flashbacks to the film's beginning were too long and repetitious. The short story didn't have enough depth to fill out the movie. William Gibson is heavy on description and atmosphere, a master at it. "Neuromancer", his best book, is enthralling even if you don't know what is happening. The screenplay for the movie should have been padded out more in the beginning maybe showing some history of X and some of the babe's motivations clearer. The story was somewhat obscure. If you didn't listen carefully you missed the plot. The movie was flawed but atmospheric and moody enough to be of interest. William Gibson's fans should see it to see how the book's mood was captured.

It's all about a frustrated future(SPOILER)

[Holocinema · 8/10 · 14 September 2004]

SPOILER

In the end it's all about Sandi's treason, Dafoe remembering how she betrayed him, and how he let himself be betrayed (he found the key in her passport and at one time she disappears to get the apartment key...except the key is in the door as Dafoe finds out...he had all the signs that allowed him to realize she was going to betray him, still he didn't do anything) he was seduced in the same way Hiroshi was. He wanted to get away with herself and the money, and all he gets is a stab in the back, she's gone and there's nothing he can do about it except remembering all this in the dark room of New Rose Hotel (the way he remembers the sex scenes reminds me a bit of the character in "Strange Days" that remembers his happy past with the Juliette Lewis character through the mental video engine). Many will find the ending frustrating, and it is frustrating, it's about a man realizing he's been had.

The only successful William Gibson adaptation

[Jemiah · 10/10 · 19 December 2005]

When making movies out of fiction, most of the time it doesn't work, unless the original text is purely telegraphic in style. If it's good prose, it's not usually the larger actions that we see that make it good - it's something more ethereal within the style itself that give it quality. William Gibson's noir-influenced techno-satire would seem perfect for adaptation, but anyone who's suffered through (or even enjoyed) JOHNNY MNEMONIC suddenly realizes that the characters' tough-guy dialog sounds utterly preposterous when actually voiced by a human being.

In NEW ROSE HOTEL, director Abel Ferrara finds the emotional heart of a very spare Gibson short (one of the best things Gibson's ever written, and blessedly short on actual dialog) and creates a recognizable near- future world and characters who seem as comfortable with this subtly accelerated reality as we of 2005 are with plasma-screen TVs and mobile phones. The structure of the film can be extremely off-putting to those without enormous patience - it's very slow-paced, and halfway through we see the almost the entire story over again, but very slightly changed. As far as I can tell, most of the scenes were shot twice from different angles. The entire point of Abel Ferrara's approach is to visually represent the phrase, "If only I knew then what I know now". NEW ROSE HOTEL really needs to be seen at least twice to be understood, and only lets go of the intelligence and daring of the direction and the performances after repeated viewings.

Christopher Walken plays Christopher Walken, under the guise of the character "Fox", but I've rarely seen Walken so simultaneously comfortable and affected in any other role. Willem Dafoe has to play younger than he looks, and we get to watch his character learn what a fool he's been, writhing with embarrassed disgust and fear as he discovers that the source of his predicament is his own stupidity and sentimentality. A very young-looking Asia Argento plays Sandii with more depth than she is regularly given credit for - her style is so subtle and genuine that she hardly seems to be acting, and as far as I've seen, she isn't, but she's so sexy and vulnerable that I'm more than willing to watch.

It's a shame this film is so under-appreciated; it's definitely my favorite Ferrara film, and one of my top two Christopher Walken films. And lots of Asia in her underwear - what's not to love?

good if you like William Gibson or Abel Ferrara

[ShimmySnail · 8/10 · 29 May 2006]

I think this movie got a bum rap. I actually enjoyed it much more than that travesty Johnny Mnemonic (my apologies to Gibson, I know he liked it). Note to Hollywood, Ice-T does not go good with everything, and the deranged preacher bit has been overdone. But here I think Abel Ferrara really made a world in line with what I envisioned when reading the short story, any of Gibson's short stories. It's not a future where everything is blinking lights and super speed CGI, it's a future where most people live in the slums, and the rest have a clean, aerodynamic, one-button-for-everything lifestyle.

The premise, a couple of corporate "headhunters" trying to seduce a brilliant researcher away from a billion dollar multinational with a geisha type mole, is the kind of premise that Gibson is famous for. It's a single incident revolving around human emotions but having worldwide implications because the man is so brilliant he could change the course of science.

The acting is great of course: Willem Dafoe, Christopher Walken, and an early glimpse of Asia Argento. The story doesn't hit you over the head explaining events like most films, but Ferrara never does, and half the fun is suddenly realizing what's happened, the check mate, on your own.

If you want action, go see Johnny Mnemonic, if you want deep, see this film.

The Future is Blurry

[proterozoic · 4/10 · 31 December 2011]

Abel Ferrara found himself in a MacGyver situation: to improvise a cyberpunk film with a) several very good actors, b) a camcorder, c) an impressive but extremely short and sketchy story by William Gibson, d) futuristic props consisting entirely of a PDA (google it, kids) and a half-bitten circuit board, and e) $600 bucks for expenses.

This is all conjecture on my part, based on nothing more than having seen New Rose Hotel. Can you blame me? After hacking off all the stylistic coir, the story is as such: it's the Future. The most profitable form of industrial espionage is stealing human talent. Two threadbare hijack artists, played by Walken and Dafoe, will lure a brilliant scientist named Hiroshi from Evil Megacorp to Mega Evilcorp. They will use a magnetic temptress that they pick from a squirming Shinjuku flesh pit based on her skill at fellating a karaoke mic.

Asia Argento is the girl – the actress has, the rarity of rarities! not only sex appeal but enough charisma and acting ability to work the part. Unfortunately, the singing is bad, and the songs are bad, and the sexy bar where they are performed is not very sexy at all. While we're at it, the future is not all that futuristic. The sex, of which there is plenty, is made up of cuts, quick pans and motion blur. The seduction and abduction of Hiroshi is talked about exhaustively, but would have been pedestrian even if it didn't entirely take place off-camera.

In brief, the amount of abstraction and suspension required to enjoy – if I may use such a bold term – "New Rose Hotel" hangs some serious lifting on the viewer. Discounting the bland nudity, the only distinct pleasure is watching Christopher Walken's line delivery. The one other actor who gets to do anything of note is his partner in crime, Willem Dafoe; unfortunately, his arc comes down to getting warned severely against falling in love with Argento's character, then falling in love with her like a man taking a headfirst dive on a concrete slab.

Some people have called this movie confusing, but they are dumb. The plot is crystal clear. It's simple as a triangle. Others have called it a boring, flickering mess, which is a much harder charge to beat. You know those "reveal" montages where the main character figures out the horrible secret? They're all made up the same way, with ominous music getting louder in the background, snippets of flashback picked half-second at a time from various parts of the movie, and key lines of dialogue played over and over, with an echo effect added on top.

The entire movie plays like one of those. A relatively simple story is packed inside a fifteen-layered rebus of headache, eyestrain and tinnitus as you squint to figure out what's on screen. If this is how the regular narrative plays, then as a parting fillip, the entire last half hour of the movie is made up of an actual flashback montage as one of the characters, soon to be found and killed by his enemies, is reliving past mistakes and pleasures in a dinky hotel room.

Some have complained about this sequence because it goes on for about 20 minutes after even the densest of us have figured out every plot secret. I think they're missing the point – the scene isn't a reveal, but the fevered, looping memories of a man who's about to kick off the chair. As such, it has a good deal of pathos. However, in the end, it's not really all that interesting, good-looking or original. And way, way too long.

The central question of New Rose Hotel is as follows: is there any reason at all to watch this dizzy 90-minute montage, when you could read the original short story in 15 minutes? None, actually. Unless you are enough of a stim addict to prefer watching any sort of dull video to reading any kind of engaging prose.

Hard to believe it's not better

[lazarillo · 13 March 2004]

It's hard to believe that a movie directed by Abel Ferrara based on a story by William Gibson and starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento would be anything less than great, but this movie is just OK. It has a lot of moody atmosphere. Asia A., the lovely Eurobabe who is supposedly ogre-ish horror-meister Dario Argento's daughter (I, for one, won't believe it until I see the blood tests), spends most of the movie in various states of undress (unfortunately, so does Dafoe). Walken is great as always. But literally nothing happens. It's all atmosphere, eerie music, and occasional bursts of softcore groping. Neither Ferrara's visuals, Walken's acting presence, or Argento's tatooed nether regions can ultimately carry a film so totally devoid of conventional plot, suspense, or action. Not a bad film, just a disappointing one.

New Rose Hotel: modest-ambitions, better-results

[gnosticboy · 7 December 2002]

After reading a number of reviews at imdb--and elsewhere--I have to come-down-on-the-side of the director, Abel Ferrera's

vision. This is a GREAT science-fiction film, and for those who are

generally-disappointed with it, I have to ask whether they

understand what sci-fi IS. If science-fiction isn't about the present

(as-filtered through an imagined-future), it generally isn't good, but

New Rose Hotel fits this criteria. This is a pretty-old story from the

80s that Gibson had published in "Omni Magazine," it might-have

been his first-acceptance. While it is a minor-story, it has

dramatic-elements to it that are very-pleasing within-the-structure

of the "Ferrera" universe: a metropolitan-dystopia, urban and

moral-decay, the eternal quest by many for "power," official- corruption, the consequences of murder, sexuality, drugs, how

memory works, they all mesh-well with Ferrera's thematic-styles.

There are no great moral-lessons here, this is about the aftermath

of that paradigm. The only-complaint I have is that the future has

caught-up a bit, due to the age of the original-story. With our

human-society growing more-restrictive, with the rise of corporate- statism, and the subsequent-decline of the Nation State, New

Rose Hotel seems almost "quaint." That should give-us-pause.

If you liked the short story . . .

[overlordofmu · 10/10 · 10 June 2007]

This film is based on a William Gibson short story by the same name in a collection of shorts titled "Burning Chrome". This story itself is less than a dozen pages with no quotation marks appearing anywhere in the print.

From this short story with absolutely no dialog, master director Able Ferrara crafts a haunting film that is primarily dialog driven. The small cast's intimate conversations, which are woven together into a disjointed collage, are the heart of the film.

One might assume that this divergence from the original media's style would result in a derivative work that no longer held true to the essence of the original. This is wonderfully not the case.

This is one of my favorite Ferrara films, precisely because it translates the written work so aptly. This film is not intended for mass market appeal, but is instead uncorrupted artistic expression. I do not believe that this film was intended by the director to be a financial success (I wish it were so I could see more like it) but to be an artistic success.

The film is technically a science fiction work because it is set in the future. This is a future of gritty realism. The filth, violence, and crime of our present has not been washed away by the years. It is omnipresent as always. Ferrara has used very few "special effects" to indicate future technology as there was no need to do so. In the decadent underworld that is his setting, said future tech is in cell phones and surveillance equipment which are subtle background, not flashy foreground. There are no laser guns or flying cars.

This is a story about memory and feeling. It has a tendency to be non-linear. The music selected and performed in the film is a perfect compliment to the shadowy, disjointed imagery. The acting from everyone including the three principals, Walken, Dafoe and Argento, is superb. Ferrara films often involve small tight-knit casts with soulful dialog and this is more of the director and his cast at their best.

This is a film from a lover of film to lovers of film.

thank god for walken.

[wigz · 7/10 · 25 November 1999]

This is a decent Abel Ferrara movie,with Walken turning in another memorable performance.I figure any movie with Walken's name listed in the credits first is worth watching.It did feel like the most important scenes were not filmed, and the rehashing of earlier scenes in the third act is really tedious. Overall, I think this movie would have been great with a bigger budget, but as it stands, I'd only recommend this to Walken fans.

Grotesque limping

[VisionThing · 4/10 · 17 June 2003]

With a solid plot basis (William Gibson short story), two excellent actors (Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe) and an interesting director (Abel Ferrara) this movie could have well turned out to be a real hidden gem. Dario Argento's daughter posing as the female lead doesn't have any other qualification for her role than an Italian accent and a nice body -- no screen presence, no femme fatale charisma, no "edge" -- and the budget has obviously been someone's lunch money for a week, but those things alone would not have done too much damage. However, there are some bigger issues with this film.

In the beginning of the movie there's way too much singing in the bars, and it's all bad. I've been to karaoke bars where the performers have been significantly more talented. All of them. No kidding. And near the end the movie falls apart, mainly thanks to way too many flashbacks -- they are not of just one or two key scenes, but of umpteen, in a peculiar "here's the movie again in case you missed it" fashion. They are annoying as such, and as a result you probably lose your focus and, consequently, your grasp of the plot. What you end up having instead of a real movie is a 90 minutes long artsy collection of insubstantial sleazy moving pictures with nudity.

In short, the first half of the movie does not get your hopes up too high, yet the latter half is disappointing. Kind of an achievement, I suppose. For better or worse, Walken's cool charisma and Argento's numerous nude scenes may still keep you awake through the whole thing. 4/10

Its all about atmosphere and style

[lingmeister · 6/10 · 18 May 2002]

This movie seem to go all out for the ambience of what it could be like in the near future, giving us a look of the cold and bleak world that is set out for us. It doesn't quite succeed like in Blade Runner, probably due to its small budget, limited settings, which were mostly indoors, but it gave it a good run for the money.

On the plot side, I think it might have been better if the flashback method of the original story were used. This will avoid the replay of the first 2/3 of the film onto the final 1/3. Plus it would have also lead us to see how X (William Dafoe), being a person who frequents high caliber hotels all over the world, ended up in a porta-crypt.

Also, there seem to be too many ambiguous plot lines or cues that's either meaningless or completely open to interpretation. What's the significance of the tattoo on Sandii's (Asia Argento) belly? Was her deception both ways toward X? If it was, it was not implied at the end.

Christopher Walken, William Dafeo were both good in the film, with Walken putting his quirky improvisations to his character and Dafeo serious and troubled as usual. The surprise was Asia Argento, who's sultry performance proves that not all non English speaking actresses has to act as if they are reading lines like the way Penelope Cruz does.

Overall, a satisfactory film, giving a good visual and feel, but not dense enough in plot to make complete sense or to fill out the 90 minutes the movie takes.

Horrible film

[Whitefield · 1/10 · 8 October 2002]

Truly dreadful, slow, boring. Couldn't care less about the characters or the (nonexistent) plot. You must have read the Gibson short story to have any clue what your emotions should be.

Zero special effects, zero character development, zero cinematography, zero interesting anything (well, nude Asia Argento was okay). And the last act simply rehashes the dreck you've already experienced.

This thing looks like a film made by a 14 year old on his Mac. It makes Johnny Mnenonic look like Lawrence of Arabia. How *did* this "movie" get made?

At least there was one laugh: the shaky image projected onto a palm pilot, trying to make it look like some future device. Was that really supposed to be believable? Sheesh.

Stay away.

The Bones of what we Believe

[tieman64 · 7 July 2014]

"Virtue has never been as respectable as money." - Mark Twain

Abel Ferrara's "New Rose Hotel" opens with murky surveillance footage. Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano), a brilliant researcher, is being observed by Fox (Christopher Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe), two corporate extraction specialists. Fox hopes to manipulate Hiroshi into leaving Maas, the transnational corporation at which he works, in favour for joining Hosaka, a rival corporation. Whoever controls Hiroshi controls big bucks.

What's odd about this surveillance footage, though, is that X is also being observed. So who, if not Fox and X, is ultimately behind the extraction of Hiroshi? And who is watching all three characters?

"Hotel's" second scene takes place in a shadowy brothel. "There's a war being waged for every shred of information," Fox is told, "and the corporate suits are killing each other by the thousands every year. It's the Holocaust of the 21st century. Everybody knows, nobody says anything and governments are just as culpable." The speaker then tries to sell Fox a job pushing cutting edge viruses, but Fox ignores him, more interested in the sultry female bodies gyrating in a corner. Moments later Fox has a conversation with Madam Rosa, the brothel owner. "I've given up looking for knowledge and virtue", Fox admits, the guy now existing solely to chase after cash and sex. This pursuit's gotten his back broken; Fox limps with a cane.

As Ferrara's camera zooms in on Fox, a lounge singer stops singing about "looking for love without love" and starts singing about a woman whose "soul's as black as black". Enter Sandii (the smoky eyed Asia Argento), a prostitute who takes to a microphone. "I loved you for forever and a day but you walked away," she prophetically sings. Fox gets an idea: he'll use Sandii to seduce Hiroshi away from Maas. Afterall, Fox says, Hiroshi has everything – money, riches, status – except love. Fox will provide the love. But is Madam Rosa planting Sandii to get at Fox? Is Sandii ultimately seducing Fox and not Hiroshi?

Fox, X and Sandii begin putting their plan into motion. Along the way, X falls in love with Sandii and she, apparently, with him. "Let's make believe," she says in their living room, as she strokes Fox's ego under the guise of stroking Hiroshi's. Fox is hooked. She's his ticket to Hiroshi and Hiroshi, on the brink of patenting "high speed proteins", is Fox's ticket to millions. We then learn that it is Madam Rosa supplying Fox with surveillance footage and that Madam Rosa is being bankrolled by Maas. Fox, unaware that he is being set-up, remains optimistic. "The new virtue," Fox says, "is going to the edge. This plan takes us to the edge!"

Holding onto virtue becomes the dilemma of the film's last act. Here Sandii reveals that she is "really in love with X" and that she "doesn't wish to continue a false relationship with Hiroshi". X, in turn, is madly in love with Sandii. The duo contemplate running away together. Whether Sandii is being genuine is unknown – she used the same words and ploy on Hiroshi – but this love affair, be it real or simulated, is nevertheless enough to set in motion a chain reaction, X's handlers (Fox and Hosaka) and Sandii's "real handlers" (Madam Rosa and Maas) now deciding to do a little spring cleaning. Fox is thus killed, possibly Sandii as well, and assassins are sent for X. It is also revealed that Maas was allowing the defection of Hiroshi so that a virus carried by him infects all other scientists at Hosaka. This is the synthetic virus alluded to in Rosa's brothel, a virus that may have been administered by Sandii.

That Maas (Maas: "more", "limitless") has won this little game of corporate Darwinism is of no concern to Ferrara. Instead, he devotes the last 30 minutes of his film to a massive flashback sequence. Here, locking himself in a "capsule hotel", X "rewinds" and "fast forwards" through the film we have just watched, searching memory engrams for clues that Sandii betrayed and so did not love him. A reversal of Ferrara's "Blackout", in which a character realizes that he was blind to and so missed the virtues of lovers around him, "Hotel" portrays X indulging in a game of selective memory and mental re-writing. Whereas most climactic flashback sequences seek to quickly and dramatically draw attention to clues which audiences may have overlooked, Ferrara's flashback takes the form of a slow, pathetic descent into, not revelation, but delusion. By its end, X has misread clues, has misconstrued Sandii's love as deception, has convinced himself that Sandii was "never genuine" and has rationalised that it was he who had "been used and betrayed" rather than her. "If you want to, you can walk away," Fox sees himself telling Sandii, the very challenge she in actuality put to him. More importantly, Fox has begun eradicating his belief in virtue. If everyone around you wants something, X rationalises, then nobody could possibly want to give you anything, let alone love. By the film's end, X's philosophy ("How much more money must you make? What else is ahead?") has been replaced by Fox's cynicism ("That's lust, not love!"), and Sandii, whom X refused to run away with out of loyalty to Fox's ethos, becomes the little girl betrayed and lost on the altar of profit.

"New Rose Hotel" was based on a short story by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson. Like Gibson's novels, it is set in a high tech future rife with social decay, warring factions, technology-savvy low-lives, corporate prostitutes, killer DNA, research which advances faster than it can be stolen and shady bodies who have long realised that the best way to control the opposition is to finance it. Typical of Gibson's work, the tale relies heavily on noir tropes.

8.5/10 – Underrated. See the similarly themed "Demonlover" and "Boarding Gate".

Simply not any good

[user-28941 · 3/10 · 22 September 2008]

I'm a big Gibson fan, a big Walken fan, a big Dafoe fan, Asia Argento ain't bad to look at, and here is my favorite illustrator, Amano, in his only film appearance. Wow! I was real excited to find out this short story had been made into a movie with such a great cast.

After seeing it, it's no wonder I'd never heard of it all this time. It just stinks.

Walken is really the only thing carrying the movie at all. The other characters are all unlikeable and easily forgettable. Dafoe is a silly caricature. Argento can't act worth a damn. Amano has no lines.

The plot is fairly straight-forward, but for some reason the director decided to abruptly end the movie about two-thirds of the way through, and then replay the whole thing over again in a series of unnecessary flashbacks inter-spliced with what would be included as deleted scenes on the modern day DVD.

I really wanted to like this movie, but there's just nothing there except for one of Walken's canned sociopath characters (although well done) and Argento's boobs, which are exposed so many times by the end of the movie, I actually got bored of seeing them. Too bad.

Bad Vibe

[frankylamouche · 1/10 · 4 February 2013]

What more could Abel Ferrara ask for: acerbic Christopher Walken, inscrutable Willem Defoe, hot Asia Argento channeling Cat Power, Schoolly D laying beats. Dynamite. Unfortunately, Abe couldn't find the fuse. A dud.

The opening credits, in three different languages like a DSLR instruction manual (German, Chinese, and English), are accompanied by Schoolly D's great soundtrack, the best part of the movie.

Asia, the heroine, is of the kinky persuasion, a denizen of dark underground group gropes. Shades of Jack Smith and Andy Warhol.

The dialog is nonsense like an uninteresting Little Steven's Underground Garage. Someone needs to tell Abel that gangsters spouting philosophy doesn't work. Godard tried and bored us to tears. Like Jean-Luc, Ferrara stretches his scenes interminably with dialog that made its point after the first two lines but for reasons that can only relate to stretching to meet a budget goes on forever. Gangster films are about, as Sam Fuller famously said, emotion and violence, not long interludes of one thief pitching a caper to another.

Abel is a consummate hustler, his packages find big money, but wind up garbage. It's not as if the movie ran out of ideas early on and the director had to pad it to deliver the requisite hour and a half to meet his business commitment, the movie has no ideas. "New Rose Hotel" serves only one purpose, as an investment loss to a tax write off. The last 20 minutes rehash scenes already shot, as if the director had run out of production money and had to make up the time in post-production. Thus the movie is in two parts: the first part bad, the second part, a rehash of the first, worse.

A low brow effort with high brow pretensions clearly beyond the director's capabilities. Abel, stick to street punks.

In summary, the best part Schoolly D. (See the extra on Schoolly D from the DVD of "The King of New York." It's better than the feature.)

LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH

[Bronx · 10/10 · 24 December 1998]

New Rose Hotel is to Ferrara what Videodrome was for David Cronenberg. Gibson's world works as a mirror, through which we're thrown in a maelstrom (vortex) of pain which I consider to be the essence of Ferrara's films. I think that New Rose Hotel is a film about love. About the essence of love. But also a film about regret and frienship. Great actors. Expecially Asia Argento, who lights up the screen with her exotic beauty and electric performance. Abel Ferrara is a great talent, misunderstood by his own country. Shame on America!

Gibson it ain't

[ParanoidAndroidMarvin · 23 June 2002]

New Rose Hotel is based on the short story of the same name by William Gibson. While the film is supposed to be set in the tech infested world of Gibson's stories it fails to convey this feeling, with only a few pieces of technology presented visually. More importantly, however, the film is terribly written and directed. It seems obvious that Gibson's story should have been followed in a more literal manner, as the story finds the narrator (Dafoe's character) reminiscing in his coffin in the New Rose Hotel, talking to Sandii as though she can hear him. Instead, we are subjected to the story twice, the second time around in the form of flashbacks. I imagine the flashbacks are supposed to clarify the disorganized mess that Ferrara weaves in the first half of the film. Perhaps the film appeals to the art crowd, but don't let them fool you. It's a terrible movie, putting to waste the incredible talents of Walken and Dafoe. Gibson's writing is densely descriptive and gritty. Ferrara attempts for the grit, but Gibson's worlds can't be created without a budget [and a competent director would help]. For example: Kill Switch, an episode of The X-Files that Gibson wrote, was the most expensive episode ever filmed during the time the show was filmed in Vancouver. And it's one of the best episodes in the show's history. Why? Because it constructed the visual aspect necessary to tell the story. The fact that New Rose Hotel fails to do this, coupled with Ferrara's horrendous storytelling, is what makes it an unworthy effort. If you're a fan of Gibson, then watch the film, but I doubt you'll enjoy it.

A good but boring movie

[le_pendu · 8/10 · 6 May 1999]

I was very skeptical at the end of this movie. What do we have, here? A director's (bad) joke? A bad director? An intellectual director knowing nothing of entertainment? I don't know. But what YOU must know is that the end of this movie is a Cut & Paste of the beginning, and that the 30 last minutes are awfully boring. Beside that, we have a good story (from William Gibson's Burning Chrome), an extraordinary cyberpunk atmosphere, visions of big cities, smokes and dark skies, good actors (Christopher Walken is excellent, but Willem DaFoe and Asia Argento aren't bad too), a claustrophobic atmosphere and a very very very beautiful woman. We have good moments (the song at the club, the end of 'Fox') good ideas (we never see the japanese) and a little intellectual masturbation. By the way, I was bored but I enjoyed this movie.

Pure Cyberpunk

[XweAponX · 10/10 · 26 March 2012]

And unless you are very familiar with William Gibson's style and stories, this film will make no sense at all to you. So I encourage anyone who is NOT very familiar with William Gibson and the whole Cyberpunk genre of Science Fiction to avoid this book and film if at all possible-It will make no sense to you and you will not enjoy it, but if you are familiar and if you know what Cyberpunk really means, then this is for you, because it is a graphic and true representation of William Gibson's works.

Gibson himself never really describes things - He uses imagery and future slang to paint his tapestries.

So, unless you know anything about Gibson's "The Sprawl" - This film will make no sense whatsoever. If you are however a reader of Gibson's works, then this film captures perfectly the bleak future created by him.

In the future, after a short Third world war, the governments of the world and economies thereof have collapsed, leaving only Corporate Entities who war between themselves. The Corporation's ammunition are the minds they can accumulate to do their work.

This story is about two guys, named here "X" and "Fox" (In the short story, "X" is the narrator of the story) who play the two main corporations against each other by brokering personnel between the two.

This time, they have a man, Hiroshi who they can get to change sides by using the services of a "Shinjuku-Girl" (Basically, a whore). "X" Is warned by "Fox" not to get involved with the girl, but he does.

And she basically betrays them, by replacing Hiroshi's "Hosaka Chip" with one that would scramble a DNA Sequencer he would work on causing a Virus.

Now, I had to look this up on several websites because it had been a while since I read The Sprawl Trilogy, but within the context of Gibson's works, this film is remarkably well done.

The corporation that was to pay these guys sends out assassins, who kill Fox, while "X" finds a "New Rose Hotel" to climb into and die. A "New Rose Hotel" is kind of like a Roach-Hotel, but for humans. They are basically a honeycombed network of free rooms that can be used for homeless people to crawl into and die in.

As "X" (Played by Willem Dafoe) waits to either die or be assassinated, he has a number of flashbacks where he realizes, with 20/20 Hindsight, the Duplicity of his Shinjuku-Girl, played by Italian Actress and Director Asia Argento. Whose Tattoo is real, by the way. Christopher Walken plays "Fox" and I keep thinking of Mulder for some reason.

The only dialogue filmed is between X and Fox and Asia, the rest are filmed in a kind of dream-fugue, it is like we are seeing these people through the eyes of the AI which is always in the background of these stories.

If you want some background into the world of "The Sprawl" then I suggest a short story by Gibson called "Skinner's Room" (And once again, the name Skinner brings to mind The X Files)-Remember, these stories were written in the 80's and very early 90's - So The X Files may have been influenced by Cyberpunk long before Gibson ever wrote "Kill Switch" in that series.

(Note - Actually I was wrong, "Skinner's Room" is part of "The Bridge" books)

You'll either love it as a character study or hate it for being a boring, muddled mess

[lemon_magic · 5/10 · 1 April 2007]

I was very disappointed by "New Rose Hotel" - how can something featuring Christopher Walken and Willen Defoe be this bad? - but I should have seen it coming, given the nature of the source material.

William Gibson is a great writer who I hardly ever read anymore. He's incredibly inventive and is a master at fabricating convincing, compelling future societies...but his world-view and opinion of human nature is just too glum and depressing. And, unfortunately for a film adaptation, Gibson dialog that sounds convincing and right in the context of the printed page often rattles in the ear like a tin washer when declaimed by a human actor. Simiarly, 90% of the plot development in Gibson's fiction is mysterious, ambiguous, muffled, and cryptic - much like a John LeCarre "Smiley" Cold War novel, there is so much dealing, double dealing, betrayal and backstabbing going on behind the scenes, much of which the reader is not privy too, that it required intense concentration on every aspect of the plot to keep from being completely buffaloed by the events.

On top of this, this is a science fiction story that requires a convincing visual setting to pull the viewer in, the way Gibson's telling details and rolling "techno-speak" pull his readers in. "New Rose Hotel" didn't seem to have much of a budget, so it had to skimp on the settings and the props and just concentrate on the characters and the plot.

All these issues can make for very problematic material for a cinematic adaptation, and alas, the director and screenwriter don't come close to solving those problems. They seemed to have opted for mood and character study over plot momentum and story arc, and as a result, we spend vast amounts of movie time watching Defoe sit glumly in a tiny hotel "capsule", brooding over his mistakes while the movies interrupts with recaps and flashbacks of various scenes of people sitting around drinking and talking at each other. As much as I like Defoe and Walken, even they can't carry this for entire film. The overall impression I get is of a movie just sits around and mopes whenever it isn't being cryptic and dull.

Much has been made of the supposed "hotness" of actress Asia Argento, but since this is a movie where sex is just another tool for corporate espionage, the screenplay itself seems to strip her character of any real humanity, and she comes across as a simple "hooker Barbie" character. That may actually be a tribute to deliberate efforts of both Argento and the director, but it doesn't make for on screen erotic charge. I will say that I've seen her in other roles, and I have to admit she can be a tasty dish. But not so much here.

I liked the original story - it's pure Gibson through and though - but this version of it just doesn't work unless you're an obsessive fan of moody lighting and muffled, expressionistic nihilism. It's too well made to give less than a 5, but that score is a grudging concession to how hard the actors and the cinematographer worked to pull off impossibly stilted and scrambled material.

An intriguing and beautifully stylish movie

[aahalai · 10/10 · 2 December 1999]

I saw the reviews different people have given this movie, and there seems to be a rather diverse opinion of this movie going around. From people loving it, to absolutely hating it.

IHOP i believe this movie was a beautifully filmed tale, that uses the medium of film to its fullest extent. The movie takes an intriguing approach, very drastically different from mainstream hollywood movies, in that there is no buildup of traditional suspense, or tension so to speak. The majority of the movie leads up to the seduction and eventual defection of Hiroshi, without actually having a single frame of Hiroshi in first person perspective. A typical hollywood recipe would be to set up the plot (if they can manage it...if not, the heck with it!) and carry out the con frame by frame throughout the movie, tediously building up suspense along the way...(if there was lots of things blowing up everywhere, all the better). Here however, we are merely informed of Asia's progress as a background occurrence, or an aside. It almost seems as if her success or failure is irrelevant, since that is an entirely different story altogether. It is a background story, because Hiroshi himself is part of the background. The story focuses on Walken and Dafoe as they correspond back and forth.

A truly intriguing film, of a quality and style i have very rarely seen.

Very disappointing

[dave13-1 · 4/10 · 19 July 2008]

The film never creates the tense, doom-laden atmosphere of William Gibson's short story about corporate espionage in a grim near-future setting, leaving the viewer to spend a numbing hour and half with unheroic and uninteresting characters doing not much of anything. The original story had little in the way of plot as well. It did, however, have a great overlying menace, set in a world where cutthroat corporate Gestapos kill to protect the technology they control. Here you only get a vague hint of that for the first ten minutes, at which point the film settles into a slice-of-lowlife study of its downbeat characters and loses all forward momentum. Watch DEMONLOVER instead for a similar story done right.

utterly awful, waste of good actors and a great story

[pooklord · 1/10 · 21 January 2000]

William Gibson must be getting awfully desperate or greedy to sell his story's name to such a pointless and dull piece of trash. It has nothing to do with the great story found in the "Burning Chrome" collection. It's dark, the dialogue is meaningless, the acting is directionless, the movie goes nowhere. All William Gibson fans should avoid it.