New Rose Hotel is a movie directed by
Abel Ferrara, released in 1998. It is based on the short story of the same name by
William Gibson.
Christopher Walken and
Willem DaFoe star as partners trying to arrange a
corperate defection.
Asia Argento plays a prostitute they hire to help.
Now that I have all that
objective information out of the way, I can safely digress into my own
personal feelings about the movie. Let me start by saying that I have seen this movie one and a half times. The first time I saw it, a few friends had rented it, and I decided to watch it with them without knowing anything about it, including the title. We only made it an hour in before
turning it off. I forgot all about it. Fast forward a year. I saw a box at the movie rental store with
Willem DaFoe and
Christopher Walken on it. I read the back and thought to myself "A
William Gibson movie without
Keanu Reeves? Great!" When I started it, I realized that I had already seen the first bit of it, but I was determined to give it a
fair chance. Never before have I prayed for my own death during a movie, and I've seen
Manos, Hands of Fate without the benefit of the
MST3K crew. Never before have I hated a director so much for including
nudity simply to keep me from falling asleep. Avoid this movie. Avoid it like the
plague. It is 92 minutes of pure pain,
masquerading as an artistic treatment of espionage and lust. Some may argue that I'm glossing over
Abel Ferrara's usage of
mediated experience and
ubiquitous technology. They would be right. However, they would be guilty of ignoring the absence of meaningful plot, characters the audience cares about, convincing dialogue and an ending that's more than 20 minutes of
Willem DaFoe crawling around while having extensive
flashbacks.