tieman64 "Virtue has never been as respectable as money." - Mark Twain Abel Ferrara's "New Rose Hotel" opens with murky surveillance footage. Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano), a brilliant researcher, is being observed by Fox (Christopher Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe), two corporate extraction specialists. Fox hopes to manipulate Hiroshi into leaving Maas, the transnational corporation at which he works, in favour for joining Hosaka, a rival corporation. Whoever controls Hiroshi controls big bucks.What's odd about this surveillance footage, though, is that X is also being observed. So who, if not Fox and X, is ultimately behind the extraction of Hiroshi? And who is watching all three characters?"Hotel's" second scene takes place in a shadowy brothel. "There's a war being waged for every shred of information," Fox is told, "and the corporate suits are killing each other by the thousands every year. It's the Holocaust of the 21st century. Everybody knows, nobody says anything and governments are just as culpable." The speaker then tries to sell Fox a job pushing cutting edge viruses, but Fox ignores him, more interested in the sultry female bodies gyrating in a corner. Moments later Fox has a conversation with Madam Rosa, the brothel owner. "I've given up looking for knowledge and virtue", Fox admits, the guy now existing solely to chase after cash and sex. This pursuit's gotten his back broken; Fox limps with a cane. As Ferrara's camera zooms in on Fox, a lounge singer stops singing about "looking for love without love" and starts singing about a woman whose "soul's as black as black". Enter Sandii (the smoky eyed Asia Argento), a prostitute who takes to a microphone. "I loved you for forever and a day but you walked away," she prophetically sings. Fox gets an idea: he'll use Sandii to seduce Hiroshi away from Maas. Afterall, Fox says, Hiroshi has everything – money, riches, status – except love. Fox will provide the love. But is Madam Rosa planting Sandii to get at Fox? Is Sandii ultimately seducing Fox and not Hiroshi? Fox, X and Sandii begin putting their plan into motion. Along the way, X falls in love with Sandii and she, apparently, with him. "Let's make believe," she says in their living room, as she strokes Fox's ego under the guise of stroking Hiroshi's. Fox is hooked. She's his ticket to Hiroshi and Hiroshi, on the brink of patenting "high speed proteins", is Fox's ticket to millions. We then learn that it is Madam Rosa supplying Fox with surveillance footage and that Madam Rosa is being bankrolled by Maas. Fox, unaware that he is being set-up, remains optimistic. "The new virtue," Fox says, "is going to the edge. This plan takes us to the edge!"Holding onto virtue becomes the dilemma of the film's last act. Here Sandii reveals that she is "really in love with X" and that she "doesn't wish to continue a false relationship with Hiroshi". X, in turn, is madly in love with Sandii. The duo contemplate running away together. Whether Sandii is being genuine is unknown – she used the same words and ploy on Hiroshi – but this love affair, be it real or simulated, is nevertheless enough to set in motion a chain reaction, X's handlers (Fox and Hosaka) and Sandii's "real handlers" (Madam Rosa and Maas) now deciding to do a little spring cleaning. Fox is thus killed, possibly Sandii as well, and assassins are sent for X. It is also revealed that Maas was allowing the defection of Hiroshi so that a virus carried by him infects all other scientists at Hosaka. This is the synthetic virus alluded to in Rosa's brothel, a virus that may have been administered by Sandii.That Maas (Maas: "more", "limitless") has won this little game of corporate Darwinism is of no concern to Ferrara. Instead, he devotes the last 30 minutes of his film to a massive flashback sequence. Here, locking himself in a "capsule hotel", X "rewinds" and "fast forwards" through the film we have just watched, searching memory engrams for clues that Sandii betrayed and so did not love him. A reversal of Ferrara's "Blackout", in which a character realizes that he was blind to and so missed the virtues of lovers around him, "Hotel" portrays X indulging in a game of selective memory and mental re-writing. Whereas most climactic flashback sequences seek to quickly and dramatically draw attention to clues which audiences may have overlooked, Ferrara's flashback takes the form of a slow, pathetic descent into, not revelation, but delusion. By its end, X has misread clues, has misconstrued Sandii's love as deception, has convinced himself that Sandii was "never genuine" and has rationalised that it was he who had "been used and betrayed" rather than her. "If you want to, you can walk away," Fox sees himself telling Sandii, the very challenge she in actuality put to him. More importantly, Fox has begun eradicating his belief in virtue. If everyone around you wants something, X rationalises, then nobody could possibly want to give you anything, let alone love. By the film's end, X's philosophy ("How much more money must you make? What else is ahead?") has been replaced by Fox's cynicism ("That's lust, not love!"), and Sandii, whom X refused to run away with out of loyalty to Fox's ethos, becomes the little girl betrayed and lost on the altar of profit."New Rose Hotel" was based on a short story by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson. Like Gibson's novels, it is set in a high tech future rife with social decay, warring factions, technology-savvy low-lives, corporate prostitutes, killer DNA, research which advances faster than it can be stolen and shady bodies who have long realised that the best way to control the opposition is to finance it. Typical of Gibson's work, the tale relies heavily on noir tropes.8.5/10 – Underrated. See the similarly themed "Demonlover" and "Boarding Gate".

hrg68 Any adaptation of a good book by an author you like is worth watching, at least once. This movie is worth watching MORE than once, and if you look around at current reality, you will see the themes and the images presented in this film to be pervasive and true. I think the director was on the mark with the way he presented the characters; I had imagined Dafoe's character to be younger in the short story, but he portrays disbelief and betrayal VERY well. If anything, the ensemble made the future look like a pretty nice place to be- IF you have the money to afford it...which is exactly the point. Why this movie is a must see: I divorced recently after about a year of my ex being prescribed Xanax out-of-hand by her psychiatrist without my knowledge, or even a request for counseling first. When I searched her Myspace account, turns out she had been "advertising" herself to her "online community" in a seductive silver shimmer dress for months before our final separation. She put our 1.5 year old child in home care and celebrated intensively, doing the "bump and grind" every night while I got to lay alone in bed and and backtrack through our relationship to find out what had gone wrong (just like in the film!)...tantalizing clues revealing themselves on the net and elsewhere that I was the weaker player in the relationship...so yeah, I give this movie 10 stars for the story, and 8 for the actual execution and set quality...it just didn't look "edgy" enough. Reality, as bad as it gets, never looks like a B-movie to me. In the end, it is an effective portrayal of the same old human story...the game played being something like a cross of Chess, Poker and Alan Turing's "10 questions," swilled around in a cauldron of fast food and cable television culture. I thought the ending to be curiously satisfying and appropriate: the chick was the superior intellect in a future that values money, appearance, and perceived worth more than love. Then again, I view Scorsese's Scarface to be a dark comedy rather than a tragedy.

Holocinema SPOILERIn the end it's all about Sandi's treason, Dafoe remembering how she betrayed him, and how he let himself be betrayed (he found the key in her passport and at one time she disappears to get the apartment key...except the key is in the door as Dafoe finds out...he had all the signs that allowed him to realize she was going to betray him, still he didn't do anything) he was seduced in the same way Hiroshi was. He wanted to get away with herself and the money, and all he gets is a stab in the back, she's gone and there's nothing he can do about it except remembering all this in the dark room of New Rose Hotel (the way he remembers the sex scenes reminds me a bit of the character in "Strange Days" that remembers his happy past with the Juliette Lewis character through the mental video engine). Many will find the ending frustrating, and it is frustrating, it's about a man realizing he's been had.

Infofreak Has any living director created a body of work as unpredictable and frustrating as Abel Ferrara?! 'New Rose Hotel' is another wildly uneven movie from the man who gave us the brilliant 'Bad Lieutenant', one of the greatest movies of the last 15 years, a modern masterpiece greatly admired by Martin Scorsese. The original short story of 'New Rose Hotel' by William Gibson was heavy on atmosphere and mood, and not that heavy on plot. The movie is even more so. A very good story but good material for a film? I don't think so. To make matters worse it's obvious the money ran out before production ended, hence the repetitive flashbacks/recycled footage of the last twenty minutes or so of the movie, something which all but ruins what preceded it. However, I can't dismiss the movie completely because you get to see two of the finest living actors working together. Willem Dafoe, and in his fourth collaboration with Ferrara, Christopher Walken are first rate even if the finished film isn't. Plus there's a great supporting cast, testament to the respect Ferrara has among the acting community - Asia Argento ('Scarlet Diva'), Annabella Sciorra, Victor Argo and Gretchen Moll, who all appeared alongside Walken in Ferrara's 'The Funeral' (a very underrated movie!), and musician/actors John Lurie (The Lounge Lizards/'Down By Law') and Sakamoto (Yellow Magic Orchestra/'Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence'). If you are a newcomer to Ferrara's work I suggest beginning with something a bit more accessible like 'King Of New York', not with this one. I was greatly disappointed by this movie, and if I wasn't such a big fan of Ferrara, Walken, Dafoe and Argo I would say don't bother.