New Rose Hotel

New Rose Hotel
by Abel Ferrara

List Price: $29.98
Our Price: $20.80
You Save: $9.18 (31%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $2.15 (click here)
Category: DVD
See more DVD details

DVD details

DVD Reviews of New Rose Hotel

DVD Review: William Gibson: Great in Print...
Summary: 1 Stars

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.

Description of New Rose Hotel