New Rose Hotel
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NEW 2K RESTORATION PRESENTED BY SLIDE WHISTLE
Overview
Abel Ferrara’s dreamy, prescient and underappreciated take on the work of William Gibson (Neuromancer), the newly restored New Rose Hotel is ripe for rediscovery. Fox and X (Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe) are corporate espionage specialists hired by a rival company to lure out a genius scientist named Dr. Hiroshi (Yoshitaka Amano) and get him to defect from his current employer, the German company Maas that once crippled Fox. As the duo plots a honeytrap with the aid of Shinjuku sex worker Sandii (Asia Argento), matters complicate when X falls in love with her.
“Ferrara doesn't need to show us the events of Gibson's story, or the details of his imagined technology. New Rose Hotel can do without these things, because film itself is already a kind of virtual reality. But then, so is memory. And so is yearning. And so, for that matter, is corporate finance... Ferrara makes these ghostly realms almost palpable.”
“Part of a tradition of alienated sci-fi that rarely makes it to the screen—the sort that deals not with how basic tenets of the human experience might endure, but how they could be irreparably damaged. And its future, in theory, is a lot like our present.”
“Deeply weird how prescient this was about phones, specifically the form they would take and how we would use them in the future. Ahead of its time in form... Better sex worker cinema than Sean Baker could ever dream of”
“Like a dream that you keep having but can never remember more than its feeling - sad and frustrating and beautiful all at once.”
Why You Should See This Film
Cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson's 1984 short story New Rose Hotel nearly became an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle in the early ‘90s (with Kathryn Bigelow at the helm); the only other big screen adaptation of Gibson's work is the kitschy '95 Keanu actioner Johnny Mnemonic. In the hands of Bad Lieutenant and Ms. 45 director (and recently, Marty Supreme scene-stealer) Abel Ferrara, Gibson's tale of corporate skullduggery is as far from the multiplex as imaginable: a radically fragmented, sleazy-sultry sci-fi-adjacent noir poem on desire and alienation in the age of escalating deregulation. Largely maligned on its release – and in Australia it’s barely been publicly screened, or even available on home video – Ferrara’s film has since grown in stature as an intoxicating mood piece and a prime example of the director’s brand of scuzzy outsider art, with a Walken performance that somehow makes every other Walken performance look very normal...
–Ian Barr, Slide Whistle
Presented by Slide Whistle
Slide Whistle is the new screening imprint of local film critic and programmer Ian Barr, highlighting forgotten and neglected films: high, low and in-between.
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