New Rose Hotel (1998) is based on a William Gibson short story but is pretty low-tech in terms of being anything cyberpunk. For director Abel Ferrara (of Bad Lieutenant and King Of New York), it’s more about the raw emotions surrounding what is basically a classic noir plot – a honey trap designed to secure a genius from one corporation to their rival competitor. It’s Willem Dafoe and Christopher Walken as corporate espionage hustlers who organise a sex worker played by Asia Argento to seduce an acclaimed scientist, Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano, actually an acclaimed anime artist/illustrator). I really responded to Ferrara’s low budget style, mainly filming in hotel rooms, or matching grainy video shot in distant lands to a New York street dressed to look like Marrakesh. Then it’s also about Dafoe’s smile or laugh in reaction to Walken’s improv or line readings (Walken reacts to Argento’s character name: “Sandii – terrible name. What, she grow up in Long Island with a roofer for a father?”). Walken’s character, suffering from a broken back, also has a cane that he swings around dancing like he’s Fred Astaire. New Rose Hotel is a moody neo-noir with a fair bit of sex, all with Dafoe falling for Argento and everything consequently going wrong. I liked it even though it keeps going for another 20 minutes as a memory mood piece once the story has actually finished. Also stars New York regulars like John Lurie and Annabella Sciorra in small parts. Soundtrack by Schoolly D. Available to stream on Amazon Prime. Made me nostalgic for when this kind of low budget NY fare was all the rage at the video store shelves in the mid to late 1990s.
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