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Film
New Rose Hotel
- Genre: Dystopia (Cyberpunk..kinda)
- Release Year: 1998
- Director: Abel Ferrara
- Writers: William Gibson, Abel Ferrara
- Running Time: 93min
- Rating: R (Sexuality, Nudity, Language
- Reviewed by: Vradin on Tue 25 Sep 07
Official Blurb:
Two old-school crooks -- Fox (Christopher Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe) -- try to engineer the score of their lives -- a con worth $100 million. The assignment? To train a beautiful, young girl (Asia Argento) to seduce and induce a radical Japanese geneticist (Yoshitaka Amano) to spill his scientific secrets. Director Abel Ferrar's screenplay is a faithful adaptation of a short story by science fiction scribe William Gibson.
Review:
The movie starts out in a dingy brothel with X (DaFoe) and Fox (Walken) hatching a plan to steal away Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano) from the Maas Corporation and delivering him to the Hosaka Corporation These corporations are massive in Gibson's world. They employ private armys, are worth trillions upon trillions of dollars and they practically run the governments. This task will definitely not be easy for Fox and X to accomplish considering they need to infiltrate the multi-trilion dollar corporation. Fox is obsessed with Hiroshi and Maas corp. Earlier in Fox's life it was the Maas corp that hurt his back and which is why he walks with a cane now. Hiroshi has what Fox refers to as "edge" and he admires Hiroshi for his ability to break the rules and break through the barriers of acceptable genetic practices.
The only catch is, they need a girl who can seduce Hiroshi from his dominatrix wife and into Hosaka Corp's waiting arms. They find Sandii, an attractive yet seemingly simple call girl, who they offer $1,000,000 to seduce Hiroshi. The payoff? $100,000,000. But! Everything is a bit more than it seems and they things don't quite go the way Fox had planned when he catches wind that X and Sandii might be getting a bit too attached which could ruin the whole deal.
What to say about this movie? In a word, horrible. It's suppose to be a William Gibson cyberpunk movie about the secretive heist of a corporate geneticist. Instead you get to see X (Dafoe) and Sandii (Argentino) paw at each other for at least 50 minutes.
The Good:
- Walken dances a jig on several occasions.
- The movie captures the atmosphere of the wheelings and dealings of a Gibson book well.
The Bad:
- I couldn't detect anything cyberpunkish or dystopian about this movie considering it was based off a William Gibson book. Granted it was about two rival corps and the desire for one corp to steal a lead geneticist, but that's it! There was one line in the beginning of the movie where they mention the corps and government being of the same ilk and their general displeasure with both, which seemed to be a widely held opinion.
- The movie was 92 minutes long and of the 92 minutes there had to be 46 minutes of reused footage.
- Dafoe and Walken's acting was sub par for what we have come to expect from them.
- Asia Argento just ended up getting on my nerves. She is an attractive lass, but annoying in this flick.
- Dafoe is either naked or half-naked entirely too much.
Rating:
- Genre Feel: 2
- Acting: 3
- Effects: 1
- Production Quality: 2
Final Scoring:
2.0 Soma tabs of a possible
5 tabs
Personal Recommendation: Stay Away! Watch Johnny Mnemonic over and over again if you need a Gibson fix, at least it has a talking dolphin.
Availablity:
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