Foster on Film – Page 60 – The Film Criticism of Matthew M. Foster

Ringu 2 (1998)

Oct 111998

Mai Takano (Nakatani Miki), the assistant/girlfriend of the professor and “ex” in Ringu joins with a journalist colleague of the reporter from Ringu to investigate the strange occurrences around a video tape that kills anyone who watches it seven days later. When Yoichi, the child from Ringu, starts exhibiting strange powers, Mia and a scientist decide to drain off the “evil energy” using psychic power, scientific equipment, and a swimming pool.

Ringu introduced J-Horror, a subgenre with compelling characters, nerve-racking concepts, and real frights. Ringu 2 offers up one-dimensional, third-banana characters from the first film in a bland plot that couldn’t scare an anxiety ridden mouse in a catnip canning factory, and serves it up with more techno-babble than ten Star Trek episodes focusing on Data.

Initially, Ringu was released with Rasen, a sequel based on the novels. While Ringu was a hit, Rasen left audiences cold, so director, Hideo Nakata, and screenwriter, Takahashi Hiroshi, were given the task of creating a replacement sequel that varied from Rasen, but did not contradict it. This third Ring-series film of 1998 strove for continuity by following two characters that were of no interest in the first film and continue to be of no interest here. They didn’t bother with plot continuity as evil-ghost-girl Sadako now has a brand new bag, possessing young Yoichi for no particular reason with powers that weren’t apparent before. As for the tape, that is ignored.

Thus begins the achingly slow tale of timid Mia, who, like every third character in this version of Japan, has psychic powers, but has no stake in anything that happens. She hasn’t seen the tape, isn’t haunted, isn’t going to be killed, and has no connection with Yoichi. It’s a little tricky figuring what she is doing in the film at all.

But then this isn’t a film about characters. It’s a film about absurd scientific gibberish. You see, the ghost is really evil energy (a commonly known scientific quantity which can be measured) and fresh water is a superior conductor of evil energy when compared to salt water, because…because… Well, they really don’t say, but it makes as much sense as anything else in this film. So, after a great deal of talking (man, do these people talk) about spirit photography, background information that strips Sadako of everything that made her frightening, and unnecessary psychology, we’re left with one of the dumbest lab scenes put to film as our personalityless scientist wires up Mia (with his psychic energy conducting wires?) and Yoichi (with his evil energy conducting wires?) to a bunch of machines that came from the 1960s but apparently have gauges for ghostly resistance. There’s no way to take this seriously, but no one who made this mess realized that.

Ringu 2 wastes some time on some police that end up doing nothing, and on Reiko Asakawa, who, as the lead in Ringu, really should have done something, but doesn’t.

The only redeeming quality is that it is so silly that it can easily be ignored.

Asian, Foreign Language, Ghost Stories, Reviews Tagged with: One Reel

Whispering Corridors {Yeogo Goedam} (1998)

Oct 111998

Eun-young (Mi-yeon Lee) returns as an instructor to the draconian high school she attended. Her own cruel homeroom teacher was recently murdered by a ghost, and Eun-young sees a connection to the death of her friend many years ago in the school. Four students seem somehow caught up in the horrific events: the nearly catatonic Jung-sook (Ji-hye Yun), the bitchy rich girl, So-young (Jin-hie Park), the psychic Ji-oh (Gyu-ri Kim), and the needy Jae-yi (Se-yeon Choi). The four must withstand constant abuse and humiliation within a system that allows them little peace and no respect, so the very occasional ghostly violence is almost a relief for them. As Eun-young searches for the truth behind the deaths, it becomes clear that the girls will have to face the ghost, but first, they will have to stare off into nothingness for a very long time.

The thing I learned from Whispering Corridors is never go to a Korean school. Dictatorial, vicious, and degrading, it looks like a perfect breeding ground for psycho killers. Since I don’t know anything about Korean schools outside of Asian horror flicks, perhaps I’m overreacting. If so, then so is the Korean government, which tried to ban the film for painting a discouraging picture of their educational system. Hmmm. I think they protest too much.

Whispering Corridors is very successful at shining a light on the social status of young women in Korea, and asking questions about how they are taught and treated. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that in a terribly entertaining fashion. I hated the system and teachers long before it was over, but I didn’t know any of the teachers. I hardly knew the students. There’s not much character development, and not much plot either. For you gore hounds, there’s not much blood. Keeping with this parallel sentence structure, there’s not much horror and not much of an explanation of anything. What is there? Staring. Lots of staring. And pausing, often accompanied by staring. If you can’t get enough of pausing and staring, then this is your movie.

Eun-young is as close to a protagonist as we’re given, but she doesn’t do anything. As a new teacher, she doesn’t teach. We never see her in a classroom. I can’t imagine why she wasn’t fired. She wanders around the grounds, stopping to stare, sometimes at a book, sometimes at a building, but most often, off into space. Jung-sook, who should have “red herring” painted on her forehead in neon green, only stares. That’s her role. She sits and stares and stands and stares. The others make sure to alternate their pausing and staring. First time director Ki-hyeong Park wants us to understand how important each and every line is by surrounding them with silence. That’s only a bit dull when someone is saying something about the murders or ghost, but it gets funny when we get the same long pauses around sentences like “Give me the cleaning buckets” and “Go back to the classroom and get a wash rag.”

I could have put up with the glacial pace if the payoff was more rewarding. There’s a nice twist which most people will see an hour earlier, and more pausing and staring. It’s not enough. There’s a good movie here (not great, but good) buried in all those pauses. Edit out thirty minutes and we’ve got something.

Whispering Corridors is one of the films that started the Asian-horror movement. The distributors would have you believe it is THE movie, but that honor goes to Ringu. However, it did have an effect, particularly in Korea where it spawned three sequels to date. If you’re a fan of the movement, you won’t mind spending a slow hour and a half in these corridors.

It was followed by Whispering Corridors 2: Memento Mori (1999), Whispering Corridors 3: Wishing Stairs (2003), and Whispering Corridors 4: The Voice (2005).

Asian, Foreign Language, Ghost Stories, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

The Faculty (1998)

Oct 101998

Six students (Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Laura Harris, Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall) observe that the faculty members of their high school (including Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Patrick, and Jon Stewart) are changing, and deduce that they have become infected by alien parasites.

Screenwriter Kevin Williamson (Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cursed) may not have had an original thought in his life, but at least he’s clever enough to state that before anyone else can. State it? He screams it while waving his arms wildly over his head and doing a little dance. In each of his Slasher pics, all the characters and every member of the audience know what’s coming next. Everyone, onscreen and off, have seen the standard Slashers films and know the rules. So now Williamson has turned his self-referential sensibilities loose on the alien invasion flick, penning The Faculty. Like his other works, this film tries too hard to be hip. But unlike them, it comes close to succeeding in its trendy goal. Helping it along are a string of worthwhile second string actors and director Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, Spy Kids, Sin City), who isn’t capable of being un-hip.

Constructed as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (or The Puppet Masters—both are specifically mentioned by the horror-aware students) meets The Breakfast Club, there are few of the scares of the former or the laughs of the latter, but there is a paranoid tone and plenty of knowing, fun nods to its predecessors. The characters are stereotypical movie teens: wimpy brain, bad-boy, jock, virgin, bitch, and goth chick. But as cutouts, they have surprising depth, invoking sympathy from all but the most jaded. It doesn’t hurt that the hero is the ring-wielding hobbit, Elijah Wood (he of the eyes-that-can-melt-teenage-girls).

Rodriguez keeps the action flowing fast. He’s got too many movies to reference to let the story sit for more than a moment. Since it’s obvious from the opening credits where the plot will end up, it is a relief that he doesn’t try to build an artificial mystery, instead rushing from one homage to the next. The characters do all their development while fighting or running from extraterrestrials. If some of it is silly, that’s OK as we’re not given time to dwell on flaws.

I’m sure I could paste themes of isolationism or nationalism or conformity onto the The Faculty, as those infused the films it steals from…ummm…pays homage to, but that would be taking it too seriously. It has a few nice moments that demonstrate the mindlessness and cruelty of non-possessed humans. It has even more moments that demonstrate that monsters like to attack teens. Yeah, that’s about as deep as it goes.

The Faculty is the cleverest and most skillfully made of the postmodern teen horror flicks that dominated the late ’90s. It works best if you have seen dozens of earlier invasion flicks so you can play along (note the two scenes lifted from John Carpenter’s The Thing), or seen none so you can pretend the material is fresh.

Aliens, Reviews

Target Earth (1998)

Oct 101998

Aliens already on Earth have implanted humans with mind control devices to be used for the upcoming takeover. Little Tammy accidentally becomes part of the secret resistance’s plan, and it’s up to her mother, Karen Mackaphe (Marcia Cross), and police detective, Sam Adams (Christopher Meloni), to save her and the planet.

There’s lots of ways to save money when making a television alien movie, but only showing the spaceships in crayon drawings is a new one. But then, Target Earth could have been written by kids with crayons. The story is tolerable, if underfed, but this is old stuff. Any six-year-old could construct the script from pieces of previous films. I say “construct” as I can’t see that anyone actually wrote anything—Just cut and pasted from a few dozen older invasion films.

The cast is above the material. Meloni gets by as the lead, but Cross is excellent and believable as an average mother tossed into an impossible situation. Too bad the performance wasn’t in a different film. Trace Dinwiddle is also good as the sexy female cop; there’s no reason for her to have had so few decent roles. Dabney Coleman as a Senator in-the-know does the same thing he does in every other film, which isn’t a bad thing. Chad Lowe is the one actor who can’t find his way, portraying the alien leader as if he’s on a high dosage of Prozac.

The film’s high points, which only register as small bumps, belong to John C. McGinley, who boldly attempts to bring some fun to this black hole of mediocrity. His dynamic, Agent Naples even makes a few of his lines enjoyable, but it is far too little.

Aliens, Reviews Tagged with: One Reel

Psycho (1998)

Oct 091998

Marion Crane (Anne Heche), a young, unhappy woman, steals $400,000 and leaves her old life behind, hoping the money can solve her boyfriend’s (Viggo Mortensen) financial problems, and maybe give her a future. During a storm, she stops at The Bates Motel, run by Norman (Vince Vaughn) for his invalid mother. Soon, Marion’s sister, Lila (Julianne Moore), and Detective Milton Arbogast (William H. Macy) are looking for her.

For those of you who missed the hoopla, this 1998 release is Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock genre-defining classic, Psycho. The question raised by…well, everyone, was: why? Hitchcock’s movie was a masterpiece. Apparently Van Sant knew this, because you don’t make a shot-by-shot remake of slop. But if he knew it was a masterpiece, why touch it at all? I suppose I could scream about that all day and not come any closer to making sense of it. I’ll just assume that Van Sant and several executives at Universal had their brains break, and with broken brains, they did foolish things.

OK, so besides being pointless, was Pyscho 98 any good? That answer is easy; No. Oh, there are plenty of worse films out there, and Van Sant had a master to steal from so the basic shots are good. But there is no tension, and no sympathy. Some of the failings are due to the actors. Heche manages meek, and not much else, so anything that happens to her doesn’t engage me. Far worse is Vaughn, who dumps Perkin’s complex portrayal in favor of a generic nutball Slasher killer. It was never clear what Perkin’s Norman would do, but there is no such ambiguity with Vaughn’s. At least Viggo Mortensen is no worse than the original’s John Gavins as the boyfriend, though he tends to draw too much attention to himself. The only unqualified success is William H. Macy as the obnoxious detective.

The very few changes that Van Sant does make are all wrong. He is able to put in sexuality that Hitchcock could not, so what does he give us? Well, there’s a shot of Mortensen’s butt in a scene that should be about desperation and loss. Then we’re given Norman masturbating (with shulurping sound effects that imply he walks around with a pound of KY-Jelly down his pants) while he peeps in at Marian. This should be a creepy moment, but with Vaughn vibrating to the shulurp, shulurp, shulurp, it becomes low comedy. Strangely, where a touch of nudity would have helped, for Marian in the shower, creating more vulnerability while using yet another approach to get the audience’s blood pumping, Van Sant skips it.

The events in the film have been moved to modern times (meaning 1998), which makes the ’50s/’60s style dialog and out of date sensibilities incongruous. And then there is the color. That is the fundamental, structural change. Is that the sole reason for this remake? I think everyone realizes that computer colorization of old B&W films didn’t work out well, but if it was simply a matter of needing a colorized version, then dropping a few million on advancing the field and then colorizing the original would have been a better use of resources. Sure it would have resulted in an inferior film to the B&W version, but it would still have Leigh, Perkins, and Hitchcock, making it far better than this. (Of course I realize it isn’t about color. It’s about money.) To make matters worse, nothing of interest is done with the color. There are no subtle shadings to suggest that something is wrong. No sickly greens or drab yellows. Color can create a dark and troubling mood even more effectively than B&W (Body Heat is a prime example). But not here.

While not the only shot-for-shot remake (the 1952 The Prisoner of Zenda matched the 1937 version in the same way), the 1998 Pyscho is a curiosity that proves that film is a collaborative art form defined not by a particular shot, but by every aspect of a project and created by every person involved. In 1960, all the pieces were in place. In 1998, not nearly enough of them were.

Reviews, Slashers Tagged with: One Reel

South Park: Merry Christmas Charlie Manson! (1998)

Oct 091998

Stan Marsh (voice: Trey Parker), Kyle Broflovski (voice: Matt Stone), Kenny McCormick (voice: Matt Stone), and Eric Cartman (voice: Trey Parker) take a trip to Nebraska to visit Eric’s relatives at Christmastime. Eric’s jailed uncle chooses this time to escape along with Charles Manson. When none of the other adults will take the boys to see Mr. Hankey at the local mall, Manson volunteers for the job. 22 min.

The second season South Park Christmas episode, Merry Christmas Charlie Manson! does a better job than the first’s season’s Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo at being twisted. The idea of a Charles Manson Christmas special is inspired and leads to many excellent comedic bits.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much else except the Charles Manson gag. Stan’s anger with his parents (who refuse to let him join his friends on the trip) goes nowhere. The Cartmans just repeat many of Eric’s catchphrases, and the children being upset at a fake sitting in the big chair at the mall has been done over and over (OK, it’s usually Santa Claus, not Mr. Hankey in that chair, but that changes surprisingly little).

Again, there are nods to other Christmas specials and films, including It’s a Wonderful Life, The Grinch who Stole Christmas, A Christmas Story, and A Charlie Brown Christmas. It all ends in a predictable, but still marvelous gag connecting Manson and Charlie Brown.

Christmas Shorts, Christmas Shorts, Reviews Tagged with: Two & 1/2 Reels

Jack Frost (1998)

Oct 081998

A year after dying in a car accident, a man (Michael Keaton) is reincarnated as a snowman and given a chance to be a better father than he was when alive.

Quick Review: In a way, I feel sorry for director Troy Miller. With the basic concept, it was next to impossible for him to deliver a good film. Perhaps if this project had been given to Tim Burton to turn it into a weird, gothic, pop-culture fable, it might have worked. The fx snowman is halfway to goth-land already (he’s far too creepy to play a straight hero). But no twist saved Jack Frost. Instead Miller gives us jokes about melting and snowball fights and unbelievable snowman-son chats. Jack returns from the dead and all his son can talk about is his hockey team. How about “Gosh dad, what is it like being dead? Are you OK?” If someone escapes death in the form of a snowman, then that momentous event is going to trump scoring a goal for conversation.

Christmas, Reviews Tagged with: One Reel

Deep Rising (1998)

Oct 081998

A miss-matched group, including roguish John Finnegan (Treat Williams), his sidekick Joey (Kevin J. O’Connor), a beautiful jewel thief (Famke Janssen), a ruthless business man, and a band of mercenaries, are trapped on a disabled luxury liner with a giant sea monster. They have a lot of guns and the monster has a lot of tentacles and a taste for people. What more plot do you need?

Loud and fast, Deep Rising is old fashioned fun. It’s boys with toys, blowing away monsters and getting eaten in turn, plus there’s a really hot chick in a white tank top. It’s silly, and proud of it, and proves that editing is the most important part of filmmaking. It doesn’t matter if there are huge plot holes, nothing is original, and the characters have the depth of a drained kiddy pool, as long as you cut it all together so that you’re never given a chance to breathe, or think. Call it a masterwork of choreography:

Step two, kick two, twirl and leap. Run two, joke two, machine guns fire and villain devoured. Hide two, macho stance two, girl smiles and it all blows up.

It means nothing, but why does it have to?

Writer/director Stephen Summers has an acute eye for, and deep understanding of, spectacle, excitement, cultural icons, and joy. Plot, he’s not quite so clear on. And as for restraint, sense, focus, the difference between funny and silly, and the concept that more is not always better—those are beyond him. Each of his films has the same general feel. How well they work is a matter of the balance between his insights and his flaws. In The Mummy he got it just about perfect. In Van Helsing, the juvenile won out. Here he’s in good form, turning up the volume with glee, but never going too far.

The characters may be cutouts, but they are identifiable cutouts, and easy to like or hate, as required. Our hero is a close cousin to Hans Solo, a little calmer, but equally glib. Treat Williams (in a part that was offered to Harrison Ford) demonstrates that he can be a charismatic leading man, given a director who understands fun. Trillian, the leading lady/romantic interest/jewel thief/eye candy avoids the old woman-in-peril cliché, instead going for the modern useful-smart-secondary-woman cliché. Famke Janssen is gorgeous, with a smile that makes me feel good every time I see it. She hits all the right notes, combining glamorous lady, girl next door, and sex kitten. Kevin J. O’Connor once again plays the comedy sidekick (as he did in The Mummy and Van Helsing) with better timing than in his other roles. The villains (and there are many) are all stereotypically evil and I’ve no complaints.

Deep Rising was savaged by critics when it was released, many comparing it to Titanic, which was still at theaters. Deep Rising is a lot more fun, but I can’t see any reason to judge those two together. They both involve boats, and that’s about it. Many, including Roger Ebert, wanted to group Deep Rising with Alien, and then denigrate it for not matching the tone and depth of the older film. But they’ve missed what kind of film this is. It isn’t a horror movie, nor is it a drama. This is an adventure pic, pure and simple. You could compare it to Raiders of the Lost Arc (although that’s a little unfair for any film), Romancing the Stone, or to a James Bond movie. You aren’t supposed to be tense or feel real concern (did anyone get upset when Jill Masterson died from gold paint, or worry that James might not make it?). Nor should you feel frightened or learn something about the darkness of the human soul. This is a ride. Grab some popcorn and hop on.

Giant Monsters, Reviews Tagged with: Four Reels

Species II (1998)

Oct 081998

Astronaut Patrick Ross (Justin Lazard) is infected on his way back from Mars with the same alien DNA that had been studied in Species. Now he has an uncontrollable urge to mate and create an army of partial aliens. Assassin Press Lenox (Michael Madsen), Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger), and astronaut Dennis Gamble (Mykelti Williamson) must stop him. Their only advantage is a clone of the original alien Sil, called Eve (Natasha Henstridge), that has a mental connection to Patrick.

While Species had a few stupid concepts, this one is all stupid concepts. Nothing makes sense, humans act in bizarre ways, nonsensical events happen on a regular basis, and the science is on par with ’50s giant turtle movies. A few winners:

Patrick, an incredibly famous and popular astronaut, can leave any destination with a new child and no one notices; women can scream from his room and no one comes and police can’t follow him even though he leaves each room tracking blood.
Patrick has an infinite quantity of prison smocks for his children in a country house (in all sizes).
After several years of research on how to harm the aliens, no one had ever thought of infecting them. Didn’t these people watch War of the Worlds?
Genes are equivalent to viruses, so if you get stuck by a weapon with the blood of someone who has a genetic problem, you’ll get it.
Astronauts are taken on missions to kill aliens instead of using trained military personnel.
The most basic and overwhelming urge of an alien can be overcome by asking nicely.

And there are so many more. However, these are minor problems. The biggest flaw is that the story follows Patrick, not Eve. Patrick is a bland human and (except for a few moments of mental difficulties) a cold-blooded alien. I don’t care about him the way I did about Sil. Eve had potential, and since she’s played by Natasha Henstridge, she’s why anyone coming to Species II bought a ticket. Sure, there are lots of topless scenes, but of nonentity victims. And there’s lots of gore, but from the tentacles of Patrick. It’s OK, and if you liked the first film, you’ll enjoy this to a lesser extent, but an opportunity was missed.

Back to Mad ScientistsBack to Aliens

Aliens, Mad Scientists, Mad Scientists, Reviews Tagged with: Two Reels

The Prophecy II (1998)

Oct 061998

Gabriel (Christopher Walken) is released from hell and sets out to stop Valerie (Jennifer Beals) from giving birth to a half-angel that will end the war in heaven. With attempted-suicide Izzy (Brittany Murphy) to aid him, the only ones standing in his way are Danyael (Russell Wong), the father, and perhaps, the archangel Michael (Eric Roberts).

It made no sense to bring back Gabriel. It was finished. He was in Lucifer’s hands and that was that. Saying that, I’m glad they did because Christopher Walken’s Gabriel is the reason to watch The Prophecy II. The story is standard save-the-baby stuff and I didn’t care about the child, the war in heaven, or Valerie (although Beals does an adequate job). Wong is forgettable and Roberts is miscast. The new vision of angels from The Prophecy is no longer new, and while seeing them perch is still entertaining, there isn’t anything breathtaking here. So that just leaves Gabriel.

Walken is outstanding. If you are a fan of his, this is a must. He’s weird in ways that are so hard to pin down but so easy to feel. The best bits are variations on routines from the first film: Gabriel talking to his sidekick. Here that sidekick is played by Brittany Murphy, and she’s up to the task of being his foil.

The Prophecy is a must see, must own original film. The Prophecy II is a pleasant time when you want a little more Christopher Walken.

It is followed by The Prophecy 3: The Ascent. and two additional films in the series are coming out in 2005.

Christian Mythos, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

Fallen (1998)

Oct 051998

In a corrupt city, honorable Police Detective John Hobbes (Denzel Washington) watches Edgar Reese (Elias Koteas), the serial killer he captured, executed. Soon afterwards, another serial killer starts using Reese’s methods. Hobbes and his partner, Jonesy (John Goodman), investigate the murders, and Hobbes slowly realizes that they are not looking for a man, but a fallen angel that can jump from body to body with a touch. Additionally, there is a connection with a heroic cop who killed himself years ago and whose daughter, Gretta Milano (Embeth Davidtz), knows about the demon. However, Hobbes’s boss, Lieutenant Stanton (Donald Sutherland) warns him not to follow that line of investigation.

Does this really belong on the Christian Mythos list? It’s a close call. I like to see something a bit more Biblical in these films. This one has a demon, but by a small change, it could be any kind of dark spirit or ghost. However, everyone in the film keeps talking about God and fallen angels (note the title) and words in ancient Aramaic, so I put it at the edge of the list.

Fallen is a thriller wrapped in paranoia with a first class lead and a stable of excellent character actors filling in the rest of the cast. There are several inspired twists at the end, and it has one of the few voiceover narrations I’ve ever liked (though it is better the second time through).

Still, with all that’s right, there was no way to make this material fresh. The ’80s saw a crowd of body jumping serial killer flicks. A few, like The Hidden, were mindless fun, but most, like The Horror Show, were oozing boils on the history of film. Fallen may have shown the material some respect, but when it’s been trampled on and reused this many times, it is never going to look really good.

I didn’t use the word “respect” accidentally, as it suggests a larger problem. Fallen is almost reverent with its story, missing myriad opportunities to put some energy into the proceedings. It is edited so that the viewer can treasure every word, taking them in and repeating them once or twice before anything happens onscreen. Plenty of time is given for the viewer to chew over Hobbes’s pain as well. Often, it is enough time to go out and buy a beer or two. A re-edit would do wonders. There are other minor flaws, like the demon-vision used whenever we see what The Fallen sees, or the tendency to make everyone look suspicious, but those are insignificant next to the slow pacing.

The cast and the ending makes Fallen worth looking up on your cable movie channel, as long as you have some free time anyway.

Christian Mythos, Demons, Reviews Tagged with: Three Reels

New Rose Hotel (1998)

Oct 051998

Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe say some lines about being freelance corporate spies. Normally, I would name the characters (Fox and X in this case) and write that they were freelance corporate spies, but that would imply that there are characters in this movie. There aren’t. Walken comes up with a pseudo-plan to get a research scientist to switch companies by tossing a hot prostitute at him (Asia Argento). Dafoe agrees, but whines a lot because he says he’s in love with her. He doesn’t act like he loves her (I’m talking about Dafoe, not X), but he does recite lines indicating that he does. The plan goes off perfectly (well, I assume it does because we don’t see it; we just see Walken and Dafoe hanging out in hotel rooms and bars), but then things fall apart. Dafoe finds himself in a Japanese coffin hotel dwelling on what went wrong. Hmmmm. Let’s see: Only three people have more than four lines in the film, and we know that Walken didn’t betray Dafoe (a scene makes that clear), so who could be the traitor? Three people. It can’t be Dafoe because he’s doing the thinking and it can’t be Walken. Hmmmmm. Who could it be? Tricky. Since director Abel Ferrara isn’t good with math, he assumes we’ll never figure it out, so we’re presented with 20 minutes of flashbacks (in a 90 minute movie!!) to clear up this vast mystery.

It’s not a clever idea to make a Cyberpunk movie and leave out the “cyber” part. That only leave the “punk,” and New Rose Hotel doesn’t even have a lot of that. It has few characters, almost no outdoor scenes, and not much plot. So what does it have? Flashbacks. Yeah, if you like flashbacks, and I’m talking about flashbacks of scenes you’ve already watched, then you’re going to be in heaven. And if you enjoy rewatching scenes that were unnecessary and really, really dull the first time, then WOW! I mean WOW!! You’re going to absolutely love this film. Yeah, this is THE flashback movie.

I’d rather have ignored that this is a Cyberpunk movie, because it isn’t one, but I can’t. Every list puts it in the genre. I’ve never heard anyone speak about New Rose Hotel without using the term at least once. It’s based on a short story by William Gibson (Johnny Mnemonic), the father of literary Cyberpunk, and does contain conflict between powerful multinational corporations. But I can’t even tell if the movie takes place in the future (which is pertinent in a science fiction sub-genre). It might. Nothing looks futuristic, and we’re given only a couple of brief stock footage shots of cityscapes. The story (if it deserves that title) is set in old bars and hotel rooms, so who knows what year it is supposed to be. The scientist’s research sounds sci-fi, but we’re not told enough to make that clear. Perhaps the best way to classify New Rose Hotel is to say it is a three person non-character study based on a work of literary Cyberpunk.

OK, I’ve dealt with its pedigree. Let’s get back to its sucking. We see none of the important events. Nothing. Fox trains Sandii the prostitute on how to pick up the scientist, but that happens off screen. Sandii does pick him up, but all we see is a text message. When people die in the lab, there’s a few seconds of a grainy security cam picture. That’s it. What the movie focuses on is Fox and X talking, and occasionally them talking to Sandii. None of them have anything interesting to say. The conversations don’t develop their characters nor do they advance a plot. It’s just chatter. Walken is a master at delivering dialog in an entertaining fashion, but he’s given nothing to work with. He’s far too “wacky” for the nothing he’s spouting, but what could the poor man do? Well, I guess he could have followed Dafoe’s lead—he’s in somnambulist mode. As for Asia Argento, she’s a beauty, but I’m not sure she knew what the words she was saying meant. She’s not a native English speaker, and it shows. I don’t mean that she appears to be playing a character who’s English is poor. No, I mean as an actress, she’s sounding things out phonetically, and can’t quite work out what her part is. She does bare her breasts and show off her impressive winged tattoo, but since that’s all the movie has to offer, might I suggest buying a poster of her.

Yeah, there’s much sucking, but at least for the first sixty-five minutes it is a movie. It’s a bad, cheap-looking, amateurish, dull movie, but it is a movie. Then it ends. It runs out of what little story it has; you know, the story it doesn’t show onscreen. But the film keeps going. It’s time for 20 minutes of flashbacks (20 minutes for God’s sake!). X dreamingly dwells on the events we just suffered through, and we get to see them again. Oh boy, conversations that put me to sleep the first time are back. There’s a few new scenes (of things we already knew about), and it’s all mixed with shots of Dafoe flopped on the floor, but mainly it is exactly what was shown before and wasn’t worth seeing once.

People, people, is this really the way to make a movie? Was there brain damage involved in the planning stage? Even technically the project is a mess. The picture is grainy, looking like it was shot on super-eight or a cheap video camera. The lighting and contrast are off so you can’t make out faces in the clubs and all the color is washed out the few times anyone enters the light. But why worry about basic filmmaking skill when talent is so lacking.

Cyberpunk, Reviews Tagged with: Toxic

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