Customer Reviews

New Rose Hotel [VHS]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

when I first saw this, I thought it was possibly the worst, sloppiest film ever made, but it stuck in my head until I finally figured out what the story's really about. we've all had moments in life when we've pondered, over & over again, how someone we loved could betray us, and/or what we could've done to have changed the course of our lives. this film & the William Gibson story it's based on are unique in their storytelling & the screenwriter's commentary explains everything sequence by sequence in this at-first baffling movie experience. if you like off-beat/alternative/experimental film, check this out ASAP! I don't think there's ever been anything else like it. & Asia Argento's the stunning icing on the cake!

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.

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.

Make no mistake this is not Johnny Mnemonic or the Matrix in any way. While the story may come from Cyberpunk Guru William Gibson, there is almost no tech to be had in this film.

That being said, the film is very true to the source, and it's languid and impressionistic style makes it perhaps the most literary of the works inspired by WG.

The movie is slow and a lot of it is tedious, but that may be because the real story here only occurs in the final act, the whole rest of the film being the back-story.

Its an interesting approach though not completely satisfying, but in a story about loss, self-doubt and paranoia, nothing really should be.

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.

This is a very good, intelligent B-movie in the science fiction realm- especially if you have ever enjoyed some of William Gibson's stories. Having Wil Dafoe and Asia Argento in this is a very nice bonus, but not the only things that make this film so good. It is this director's raw talent in directing, as seen in all his gritty thrillers, combined with a great SF author and good job by the screen writer. I do not write reviews about romances or comedies, and I wish some others who do not care for a genre would offer the same courtesy. This is an excellent film. I had no trouble following the story, but had read the short story 10 years prior- so was vaguely familiar. Have also read nearly all William Gibson's novels, so very familiar with the concepts which some might find hard to follow.

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.

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.

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.

I started watching the movie, finally having had it on hold, i'd heard about it and how hated it was apparently. As a film it's great, obviously not the greatest thing, but it was pretty intimate. It wasn't a big ending or it wasn't much an action thriller, it wasn't that kind of picture at all. But, it was definitely a picture about the characters. The look of the film was very interesting and very dark, the score was pretty great, the acting too, great. I think Ferrara made a great film, that seems to really be something that's been misunderstood. I haven't read the William Gibson short story so i don't know how much it differs from the original story, but adaptations are hardly ever perfect, maybe a few times, but what counts is the film on it's own. How the film performs and if it does anything for you.