root :: movies :: new rose hotel (1998)
Status: filmed
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New Rose Hotel is a 1998 film by director Abel Ferrara, based on a William Gibson story of the same name, starring Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento (Dario's daughter).
Plot Synopsis
Fox (Walken) and X (Dafoe) play corporate extraction specialists, half headhunters, half kidnappers, who specialise in helping R&D scientists relocate from corporations who would rather see them dead than working for their competitors. Fox is obsessed with one Hiroshi (played by Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano), a paradigm-shattering super-genius who is currently working for Maas, the corporation (Gibson employs the pre-WWII term zaibatsu) who crippled him. To that end, Fox and X employ Sandii (Argento), a "Shinjuku-girl", or small-time hustler/call girl, to help "persuade" Hiroshi to defect to Hosaka, another zaibatsu to which Fox is somewhat warmer. Fox is responsible for brokering the deal with Hosaka, Sandii for getting Hiroshi to fall in love with her and defect to a Hosaka lab in Marrakech (Fox and X are based in Tokyo, hence their ability to pick up a Shinjuku girl), and X is responsible for teaching Sandii how to make Hiroshi melt.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Sandii, however, has her own revenge scheme; Hosaka betrayed and killed her father. She takes a double to Marrakech; Hosaka, not knowing the difference, send all their best scientists to study under "Hiroshi"; Maas destroys the compound, all of Hosaka's best and brightest R&D scientists being destroyed with it. Sandii disappears, Fox is killed, and X retreats to the safest place he knows, the New Rose Hotel, a derelict capsule hotel, where he realizes that Sandii and Hiroshi played the game on him that he thought he and Sandii were playing on Hiroshi. He is now alone and broken-hearted.