New Rose Hotel [Import]

Many complained that they didn't understand what was going on. Sucks for them, I guess they just aren't very bright I know I watched it, and had no trouble seeing what was going on. I read the book afterward, and thought it was quite a well-done adaptation, though I would have thought that they could have come up with a better william gibson story to do a movie of, considering the brevity of this particular one, and the abundance of other stories out there, many of which are considerably longer.

As a story, New Rose Hotel is to be honest way to short to even contemplate making a movie out of it. There's just not enough there and when I watch the movie, it shows immensely. Dafoe and Walken are 2 of my favourite actors and there performance together I found to be of good status. What this movie needed to do was give the viewer a good explanation as to the status of the society , this different world, basically an atmosphere. Instead it gives you a blurred corporate scene and then your thrown into a bar with women that can't sing and the 2 main characters forcing themselves to make out there enjoying the poor entertainment. The exchanging of information should have been more secretive and when people wispered in others ears you should have been given a zoom on that audio. Then there was the main guts of the story, with the nano technologist. This was what could have been the movies saviour, alas it was brushed over and the conversations where the main focus of the movie. This brings me to my last annoyance. The person in charge of camera directing should have been .... Instead of seeing people interacting together at important sections of the story, you got terrible close ups of single faces that were below amateur quality and destracted you from the dialogue. All in all Gibson should have written extra material for the movie and a lot more should have been spent on atmosphere to enhance the intrigue of the story, even if it meant getting more cost effective actors. ...I like to end with a positive note, and the only one I can make as far as capturing the story goes, is that the end scene that Dafoe acted out at the end was effective enough.

If your like me and a fan of William Gibson and these two great actors, you may want this movie as part of your collection, but I tell you now, after your first viewing it's one that will sit and gather dust very quickly.

Like many of Gibson's stories, this is hardly science fiction-- in fact, it's more purely noir than many other more noir-y looking films that come to mind. As such, it's about money, love, betrayal, women, memory, machismo--that sort of stuff. Having read the story after seeing the film, I'd almost say the movie was better, while still being true to Gibson's spirit: less of the narrator's whiny voice, more Fox; more mystery, less pseudo-futuristic-cosmopolitanism. And a much better finish.

The best part is really the much-maligned last quarter, which in its memory flashbacks leads you to discover for yourself who betrayed whom and why. The conclusion, if you care about these sorts of issues at all, is really quite sad and moving. Not knowing when it would end, I jumped up close to the TV to hear Argento's reply to Dafoe's last line. To end there shows that these guys knew what they were doing.