Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.

One minute, Asia Argento is a European sex bomb known mostly to fans of Daddy Dario's Italian horror films. The next minute she's on the cover of national magazines, heavily promoted in movie trailers, and a major international superstar. Only time will tell if this is the best or worst thing that Vin Diesel has ever done, bringing Asia Argento into the mainstream. Because if this is going to be her entree into American leading lady-hood, there might be problems. However, I don't see the director/writer/star of Scarlet Diva taking the Julia Roberts route to stardom.

Plus, it's not like this is the first time that Asia (whose name, for the last time, is *not* pronounced like the continent) has run the risk of being absorbed into the American consciousness. Back in 1998, she was to co-star in two films from major directors. B. Monkey was to be Michael Radford's follow-up to his totally undeserved Oscar nomination for Il Postino. Featuring Rupert Everett, it seemed like B. Monkey would also get a boost from Everett's increasingly high profile. Instead, B. Monkey averaged four or five release dates per year for every year from 1996 until it was unceremoniously dumped in theatres for thirty seconds in fall of 1999. Ooops. Guess that one didn't make Asia a star. I haven't seen B. Monkey, so I can't speculate as to its quality. But there's no question it's one of the worst marketing botches of the 1990s.

And then there was New Rose Hotel, from New York's junior answer to Martin Scorsese, Abel Ferrara. Ferrara had just made the unreleaseable Blackout with Matthew Modine (which, outside of festivals and a one week NYC release never saw American screens) and New Rose Hotel reunited him with frequent star Christopher Walken and added a seemingly inevitable (to Ferrara's body of work) Willem Dafoe. And then into the mix, toss Asia Argento and to somebody it must have seemed inevitable that between this and B. Monkey, Dario's raunchy little angel would be an international sensation.

But I can't explain what happened with New Rose Hotel. And I doubt that Abel Ferrara could explain either. After this debacle, he disappeared for four years. His latest, 'R XMAS premiered at Cannes two years ago and is only getting a token release next week (amusingly, it's actually a good movie, but nobody will every know that). All I know for sure is that New Rose Hotel is nearly unwatchably bad and hardly even qualifies as a fascinating train wreck. As my title suggests, Asia Argento may get naked, but even that isn't worth it.

With New Rose Hotel Ferrara left the comfort of the New York City street, and the grim reality that earned him critical respect for films like King of the City and The Bad Lieutenant. He replaced his normal urban authenticity with a series of bland hotel rooms and single establishing shots of Tokyo and Marrekesh. And he replaced his normal contemporary urgency with a bland generic future in which technology seems to have regressed rather than evolved. Is this actually the movie that Abel Ferrara wanted to make? All too often it feels like Ferrara left bins of useless film footage out on the floor at night and hoped that the editing gnomes would come in the middle of the night to cobble something together. And this is what those little gnomes came up with.

Based on a short story by cyberpunk godfather William Gibson (and adapted by Ferrara and somebody named Christ Zois), New Rose Hotel takes place at some point in the future in what's finally just a generic Asian city. And it hardly matters what city it is, because Ferrara is only interested in a bar and two or three hotel rooms. In that bar, a man named Fox (Christopher Walken) meets with an informant (John Lurie) who informs him that somebody is going to be in Geneva (or Vienna or something). Huh? Further information is slowly to be provided by the bar's Madame (Annabella Sciorra in what doesn't even rise to the level of a cameo) and Fox's mysterious friend X (Willem Dafoe). Not much information, though. The man going to Geneva (or Hoboken or something) is a scientist named Hiroshi (Yosh*taka Amano[Epinions won't even let me spell his name, which proves that the censor is both silly and racist]) who is, apparently working on a virus to cure the common cold and, apparently, again, Fox and X see the possibility to make some money. Fox is, apparently, something of an industrial terrorist, making money off of screwing over wealthy businessmen. However, a couple years earlier, he went a step or two too far and some of those businessmen broke his back. Now he can only walk with a cane. That cane is the only sign you have that Christopher Walken is acting. It's his "character." So enjoy it. Or rather, enjoy it while you can. Some scenes he's all hobbling around like 2000 year-old man, while other times he's dancing around. But whatever.

In order to get close to Hiroshi, Fox and X compose a not-so-elaborate plan involving an Italian ho, Sandii (Argento). Fox and X will train Sandii so that Hiroshi will fall in love with her at which point he'll leave the country with her and... I HAVE NO IDEA! Hiroshi's going to leave the country with Sandii and therefore sign on with another company and somehow that will make 100 million dollars for Fox and X. But Fox doesn't know that X is already emotionally involved with Sandii. And that's never a good idea. Everything goes wrong. Well, I'm actually not sure if everything goes wrong because I'm not really sure what would have happened if everything had gone right. All I know is that if everything had gone right, Asia Argento wouldn't have disappeared with forty minutes to go.

In fact, the entire final twenty minutes of the movie is Willem Dafoe curled in a ball in the air ducts of the New Rose Hotel flashing back over all of the points where he should have known that he was getting too close. That means that New Rose Hotel is a sixty minute movie followed by a clip show of things that already stunk when you saw them the first time. Or, rather, make that "a clip show with slightly different music." Regardless, everything you need to see happens within an hour. I've been led to believe by people who have read Gibson's story, that it's basically an internal monologue by X's character flashing back over, well, the things that went wrong. So why didn't Ferrara structure the entire movie like that, beginning with Dafoe in a vent and then explaining how he got there? Just curious.

What else am I curious about? The indiscriminate use of "surveillance cam" point of views in the film confuses me. The "point" that Ferrara's making, I guess, is about a futuristic society in which somebody is always watching you. However, it's tough to distinguish between when Ferrara's showing the perspective of unseen voyeuristic characters and when Ken Kelsch's cinematography is just badly lit. There's no consistent visual representation of the security cam POV and sometimes it just looks as if Ferrara never got around to color timing some of the scenes. New Rose Hotel often has the unfinished look of a work print.

The technical glitches are everywhere. Bad cuts. Underexposed film. And that's saying nothing about all of the scenes where dialogue becomes voice-over to bridge scenes. It happens so frequently that it's clear that Ferrara just didn't get the shots he needed to complete the film properly, so he overlaid voice-over on top of nearly unrelated footage and used it as transition points. It's a mess. The film's editor, Anthony Redman, is a longtime Ferrara collaborator and I don't envy his job here. None of the film's flaws are his fault, I don't think. He was mostly just making do.

I'm also a bit curious about the legion of plot holes — Much more of the story isn't onscreen than is. Now, take for example a movie (and play) like The Winslow Boy. Most of the major events take place off stage and the story is composed of small aftermaths. Somehow that works because we get invested in the characters and are able to follow the plot because of a consistent level of emotional involvement. There are no characters in New Rose Hotel worth paying any heed to and so we don't know enough to take any of their decisions on faith.

Walken's Fox is, I guess, sly like a fox. He's a salesman, an idea man. He's also one of those rare characters who somehow manages to be neither good, nor evil, nor ambiguous. How do you pull that off? To begin with, Walken looks old and tired and if you remember his charismatic drug kingpin Frank White from King of New York, it's just sad to watch him. Fox would be the Willy Loman of con artists, never getting respect, never getting that big break, except that Willy Loman evokes emotion. Fox, instead, comes off as the dullest Henry Higgins ever to appear on screen. In theory he's instructing Sandii on how to be a seductress, but Ferrara chooses not to show us any of the lessons. Instead, he just shows Sandii hidden camera videos of Hiroshi with his wife (Gretchen Mol's career hitting an all-time low with this dialogue-free part). Then there's a transformation on her part. But we don't see it. So any active elements of Fox's character have just been stripped from the movie.

He's still better off than Dafoe's X. At least Fox has a backstory involving that broken back. X is just a gullible sidekick who ends up being somewhat responsible for everything screwing up. Dafoe is an actor who always can be relied upon to provide intensity, so his weakness in the face of love is especially perplexing. Nothing involving X's relationship to Sandii is ever really explained anyway. Dafoe is crazy in love, but he's also party to two different mini-orgies that cause him no guilt and seem distanced from the broken man in the vents. We also see much more of Dafoe's scrawny butt than I really needed.

On the other hand, we see a very pleasant amount of Asia Argento's Sandii. The problem comes when she opens her mouth. Argento is lovely and sultry and has a to-die-for body. She gets naked in bed. She gets naked in a swimming pool. She gets topless on the dance floor. But when she opens her mouth to read her character's dialogue, it's clear that Hooked on Phonics did not yet work for her. In xXx Argento's English seemed much improved, but here she's just mumbling away. Here's a possibility: Sandii's every line of dialogue was crucial to the plot. She explained every character motivation, every action, and every emotional linkage. And I just couldn't understand Asia Argento's English, so I missed all of it. Somehow I don't buy it. If Fox is her Henry Higgins, then this is one Eliza Doolittle who makes the remarkable transition from street urchin to street urchin in a different dress. Disappointingly, the sex scenes here aren't even any good, though Ferrara pays proper homage to Argento's angel (or Virgin Mary) tattoo that rises up from her underwear. It got no play in xXx, but it's classic.

Let's see... Things I liked about New Rose Hotel? Besides Asia Argento's breasts, I mean? Well, Schoolly-D's score defies easy categorization, melding hip-hop with an Asian flavor. And there's something strange about character actor Victor Argot as a businessman with a mysterious accent (IMDB says Portuguese).

But there are just too many horrible things for this to even rise to the "2 star" level. There's a painful conversation between Dafoe and Argento about whether she enjoyed giving Hiroshi blow jobs that made me want to wash my ears out with soap (probably not a bad idea anyway).There are the claustrophobic and minimalist sets . And, again, there's that horrible final twenty minutes of recapping! Mr. Ferrara, it's not that we didn't understand what happened earlier. It's that we were TRYING to forget.


Recommended: No

Viewing Format: VHS