Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

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.

lemon_magic 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.

dcyspm I thought it was reasonably faithful to the story, and it had some nice touches. I consider it an iteration, along with Johnny Mnemonic, toward actually making a reasonable screen version of Neuromancer.Not worth watching if you have not read the Gibson short story, though.

karlitos What bothered me: 1- Needless and pointless erotic scenes in the bar. I appreciate an erotic scene if it is truly erotic, which these scenes weren't, and if it forwards the plot, which these scenes didn't. 2- The low budget. Some directors can turn a low budget into a virtue, but I'm afraid Ferrara isn't one of them. 3- Boredom. Almost nothing happens, and what does happen, happens over and over. 4- Improvisation. Some scenes seemed improvised, and while Walken is up to the task, Argento is definitely not. 5- Wasted Dafoe. A great talent is given nothing to do. 6- Too clean. The cyberpunk world should be grittier.What I liked: 1- Christopher Walken, or rather the juicy dialogue he is given. 2- Atmosphere. While I don't feel it captures the same feeling of atmosphere one gets from reading Gibson, it does create an effective environment of stress and oppression.Overall: It could have made a good short (after all, the source material is a SHORT story). As it is, it is a wasted effort and should be avoided.