SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Humbersi The first must-see film of the year.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Hoccomocco Pictures 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.)

proterozoic 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.

overlordofmu 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.

Jemiah 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?