Past
NEW ROSE HOTEL
1998
The world balked at maverick filmmaker Abel Ferrara’s woozy piece of existential techno-erotica when it first appeared, but it now stands as one of the most prescient and affecting films of its decade—a haunting exploration of desire in a transactional world which has rendered genuine emotion completely immaterial
A scrupulous adaptation of the short story by the cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson, Ferrara envisions futuristic industrial espionage the best way he knows how—with a heavy dose of lo-fi sleaze, sex and delirium. The story follows Fox (Christopher Walken) and partner-in-crime X (Willem Dafoe), two extraction specialists hired by a rival company to lure supergenius Hiroshi (artist Yoshitaka Amano) away from his current employer. Fox enlists slinky Shinjuku call-girl Sandii (Asia Argento) to set a honey trap sticky enough to draw Hiroshi away from his wife and kids. But soon unexpected passions throw the whole plan into meltdown.
“Ferrara's nightmare of the future is a world where love is literally dead, and capitalism dominates not just physical but mental structures. For me, it's certainly the greatest film of the '90s.” - Neil Bahadur
“A movie made against a world it abhors. It’s a movie very much concerned with the idea of consumption and spectatorship and one predicated on how lived experience and imagined performance go together in a contemporary world based on customer satisfaction. It is in some ways the greatest movie of the 21st century, it just so happened that Ferrara was putting it together a little ahead of schedule in 1998.” - Felipe Furtado
A scrupulous adaptation of the short story by the cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson, Ferrara envisions futuristic industrial espionage the best way he knows how—with a heavy dose of lo-fi sleaze, sex and delirium. The story follows Fox (Christopher Walken) and partner-in-crime X (Willem Dafoe), two extraction specialists hired by a rival company to lure supergenius Hiroshi (artist Yoshitaka Amano) away from his current employer. Fox enlists slinky Shinjuku call-girl Sandii (Asia Argento) to set a honey trap sticky enough to draw Hiroshi away from his wife and kids. But soon unexpected passions throw the whole plan into meltdown.
“Ferrara's nightmare of the future is a world where love is literally dead, and capitalism dominates not just physical but mental structures. For me, it's certainly the greatest film of the '90s.” - Neil Bahadur
“A movie made against a world it abhors. It’s a movie very much concerned with the idea of consumption and spectatorship and one predicated on how lived experience and imagined performance go together in a contemporary world based on customer satisfaction. It is in some ways the greatest movie of the 21st century, it just so happened that Ferrara was putting it together a little ahead of schedule in 1998.” - Felipe Furtado