New Rose Hotel
Director: Abel Ferrara
Year Released: 1998
Rating: 1.5
Christopher Walken and cohort Willem Dafoe devise a plan to get a prostitute (Asia Argento) to seduce a brilliant Japanese scientist (Final Fantasy designer Yoshitaka Amano) and lure him to working for a corporation (embodied by Ryuichi Sakamoto). In terms of plot and structure, this is an absolute wreck - Ferrara pays little mind to the story and dialogue and experiments with mood lighting, gets Argento naked often (she rolls around with Dafoe) and allows Walken to do whatever it is Walken feels like doing: he dances a jig, he delivers bizarre punch lines, he limps around, he mocks his own eccentric on-screen persona. Ferrara, on a budget, works around the potentially costly CGI/sci-fi elements of the William Gibson short story - he restricts the events to mostly hotel rooms and a bar - but the third act is virtually nonexistent and essentially a rehash of earlier scenes from different angles.
