New Rose Hotel - Cinematographe

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, in a world that looks not unlike the late 1990s, two colleagues, X (Willem Dafoe) and Fox (Christopher Walken), are tasked with stealing a medical genius named Dr. Hiroshi. For a massive fee of $50m, their plan is to get him to leave his position at a German super-conglomerate and take his services to a newly-formed lab in Marrakesh. Dr. Hiroshi has made waves for his technological advancements in creating a synthesizer that could possibly cure the common cold.

To pull this off, X and Fox enlist the services of a call girl named Sandii (Asia Argento), who will use her sexuality to manipulate Hiroshi. She can seduce him and put suggestions in his ear, and they can even renegotiate with the lab in Marrakesh to double their fee for recruiting the doctor. Curing the common cold is a multi-billion-dollar deal, so what’s a measly $100m in the grand scheme of things? The problem is that X falls in love with Sandii, which complicates his perfect plan, now that his heart is in the game. Jealousy threatens to undo everything he and Fox are working so hard toward.

New Rose Hotel goes on like this. And on and on and on. At a mere 93 minutes, it felt like an agonizingly long time, especially because the last third of the film is an extended flashback sequence that sheds no additional light on things we’ve already seen or any added context to maybe subvert or twist those events for an element of surprise in an unexpected reveal. No. We just kick back and watch Willem Dafoe have sex with Asia Argento and other women for a good twenty minutes, cutting back occasionally to Dafoe, remembering those moments, masturbating to the memories of them.

A movie like New Rose Hotel has a certain vibe to it: This is the kind of movie you rented in the late 90s, or early 2000s, high as a kite, and you either vibed with it, or you were bored to tears by it. You either bought its style, a neon-drenched dystopian nightmare, with a killer score composed by Schoolly D, Willem Dafoe and Christopher Walken riffing off of each other, and Asia Argento in various stages of undress throughout, or you gave it your best shot and abandoned it thirty minutes in.

You simply can’t review New Rose Hotel by supposed “objective” standards. True, nothing substantial happens until the final reel, a devastating, apocalyptic event that we never see, and are only told about in a throw-away line of exposition. Also true, those first two-thirds are so dedicated to establishing the film’s aesthetic that you’re unsure if there even is a plot or a story to follow at all. But who cares? Abel Ferrara is a filmmaker who follows his instincts, for better and for worse. He makes movies like no one else. If the above sounds like your cup of tea, you’re going to love it. 

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-ray

True to the standard set by Vinegar Syndrome's Cinématographe, the limited edition release of New Rose Hotel comes to Blu-ray in a single-disc release, housed in a specially designed, cloth-bound media book and custom-molded disc tray, with a slipcase featuring newly commissioned art. The booklet contains essays by Filipe Furtado, Cinématographe's Justin LaLiberty, and film critic Nick Newman. The full deluxe Cinématographe edition has sold through; currently, only a standard Blu-ray via Vinegar Syndrome is available.

New Rose Hotel is presented in 1080p high definition, from a 2K restoration sourced “from the best surviving elements” that were available. Scene by scene, the quality of the video can vary pretty wildly, but even at its worst, it looks pretty damn good. The worst scenes have extremely minor artifacts, some pixelized blue specs, which made me think maybe these elements were sourced from an HD master tape. The focus can be a bit fuzzy, with the background blurred in a fog of low bitrate. At its best, if you told me it was presented in 4K/HDR, I’d have believed you. Lowlight sequences set in a dimly lit nightclub, illuminated by the glow of neon signs, look exquisite. Blacks are inky and thick, actors silhouetted in a blood-red hue. Other scenes look just as great, including a sunlight-bathed conversation between X and Sandii in a hotel room. Between its best and its worst, your average scene shows off the handiwork of cinematographer Ken Kelsch and his guerilla filmmaking techniques, rich in grain and sharp in detail.

Viewers are treated to a pretty damn good 5.1 surround mix, encoded in DTS-HD MA. Like its video counterpart, there seems to be some difference in quality depending on the scene you’re watching, but in this case, the variance is very slight. On a few occasions, dialogue sounded slightly muffled, with some hissing sounds as actors hit those consonants on line deliveries. Overall, it’s excellent, with good immersion into the sound design, as Schoolly D’s electronic hip hop score encompasses the entirety of the soundstage and ambient effects making their way to the rear with frequency. Since New Rose Hotel is a talky picture (damn, is it ever a talky picture), most of the activity is going to front and center, leveled with precision above the score and effects.

Fans of New Rose Hotel are treated to a robust offering of new interviews from the cast and crew. Also included is a new introduction by Abel Ferrara, who explains how his involvement with the film came to be, his admiration for the source material, and his disdain for traditional narratives that developed around the time he made the film. 

• Audio Commentary - Film critic Adrian Martin
• Video Introduction (HD 6:51) - Writer/director Abel Ferrara
• Wild & Wooly (HD 7:55) - Interview with actor Willem Dafoe
• Doing Your Homework (HD 15:05) - Interview with actress Asia Argento
• I Had to Be Cool (HD 17:16) - Interview with composer Schoolly D
• Checking Into the New Rose Hotel (HD 10:56) - Video essay by film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

Like most of Abel Ferrara’s movies, New Rose Hotel is going to be in the “love it or hate it” school of reactions among viewers, with most probably finding themselves in the “hate it” camp. As an admirer of Ferrara’s punk rock ethos and his ability to take deceptively simple themes and plunder them for all their psychological worth, I have a lot more tolerance for some of his more meandering films, but this one certainly pushes it. Still, the work Cinématographe has put into this disc is impeccable, with terrific packaging, awesome video (when it’s at its best), great sound, and a robust offering of features. New Rose Hotel is Recommended. 
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