directors/screenwriters
Allison
Anders (1)
Alexandre Rockwell (2)
Robert Rodriguez (3)
Quentin Tarantino (4)
producer
Lawrence Bender
cinematographers
Rodrigo García (1)
Phil Parmet (2)
Guillermo Navarro (3)
Andrzej Sekula (4)
music
Combustible Edison
editors
Margaret Goodspeed (1)
Elena Maganini (2)
Robert Rodriguez (3)
Sally Menke (4)
cast
Tim Roth (Ted the bellhop)
Sammi Davis (Jezebel)
Amanda De Cadenet (Diana)
Valeria Golino (Athena)
Madonna (Elspeth)
Ione Skye (Eva)
Lili Taylor (Raven)
Alicia Witt (Kiva)
Jennifer Beals (Angela)
David Proval (Sigfried)
Antonio Banderas (Man)
Lana McKissack (Sarah)
Patricia Vonne Rodriguez (Corpse)
Tamlyn Tomita (Wife)
Danny Verduzco (Juancho)
Salma Hayek (TV dancer)
Paul Calderon (Norman)
Quentin Tarantino (Chester)
Bruce Willis (Leo)
Kathy Griffin (Betty)
Marisa Tomei (Margaret)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 98m
u.s.
release: 12/25/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other quentin
tarantino films
reviewed on this website:
- jackie
brown
- kill
bill vol. 1
- kill
bill vol. 2
- pulp
fiction
- reservoir
dogs
other robert
rodriguez films
reviewed on this website:
- desperado
- the
faculty
- from
dusk till dawn (short
review)
- once
upon a time in mexico
- sin
city
- spy
kids
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It must have seemed like a
great idea: Take four of today's hippest and/or hottest writer-directors
and turn them loose on an anthology -- Twilight Zone: The
Movie for Gen-X. The result, Four Rooms, earns the
comparison in more ways than one. The episodes themselves are
like wilder, dirtier Twilight Zone segments -- a fusion
of Rod Serling and David Lynch (who did a similar omnibus, Hotel
Room, for HBO) -- and one of them is in fact an acknowledged
swipe from the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "The
Man from Rio." And Four Rooms, like TZ: The Movie,
is ideal for video: Both anthologies begin with two awful segments,
which you'll want to fast-forward past to get to the third and
fourth segments. Like some other anthologies, this one has a
unifying figure: Tim Roth as Ted the bellhop, who finds himself
stumbling into one outrageous situation after another. But even
Roth isn't a very good unifying element, because he's awful in
the awful segments -- the directors let him twitch and overact
shamelessly -- and much better in the other two pieces, where
the directors keep a lid on him.
Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging, Mi Vida Loca)
takes the blame for the first segment, "The Missing Ingredient."
I'd rather not sink to the level of the piece and say that the
missing ingredient here is humor. Actually, Anders' idea isn't
bad -- a coven of witches need semen for their ritual and enlist
Ted to provide it -- so I was shocked that she didn't do anything
with it. The story has extremely shaky logic (has this hotel
room been set up for the witches for the last forty years?) and
even less point, except to showcase Madonna, who proves once
again that she has no presence as an actress (Courtney Love might
have brought more outlaw snap to the role of the coven mother).
A classic case of a good filmmaker having a bad day.
"The Wrong Man," by Alexandre Rockwell (In the Soup),
probably won't do much to change Rockwell's status as a little-known
director. Here, Ted enters the wrong room and stumbles upon weird
sexual games between a man (David Proval) and his wife (Jennifer
Beals, who is Mrs. Rockwell). It's good to see Proval again --
he hasn't been around much since Mean Streets -- and there
are a couple of nice visual gags involving Ted stuck in a window.
But generally the piece is monotonous and unpleasant, and when
Beals rattled off a list of nicknames for Ted's penis, I laughed
but was ashamed of laughing; it's a pure sign of screenwriting
desperation (and our desperation to laugh at something).
Fortunately, Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi) swoops in
and almost erases our memory of the first two misfires. "The
Misbehavers" is easily the best of the four rooms; Rodriguez's
infectious sense of play catches you up immediately. In this
one, Ted is pretty much intimidated into babysitting the two
active children of an imposing bruiser (Antonio Banderas). Playing
this cartoon heavy, Banderas at last recaptures the wit he showed
in Pedro Almodovar's films but has forgotten in his American
movies until now. The segment itself builds to an uproarious
finish, made all the more effective because the audience at this
point doesn't expect anything funny. It's a beautifully
shaped comedy short, establishing Rodriguez as a director who
can move beyond bang-bang.
The final entry, "The Man from Hollywood," is by Quentin
Tarantino, and Quentin Tarantino makes damn sure we know it's
by Quentin Tarantino. No more acting attempts, please.
Quentin plays an obnoxious movie star who pulls Ted into a wager
based on (you guessed it) "The Man from Rio"; in other
words, Quentin basically plays himself. To say he's better here
than he was on Saturday Night Live isn't saying much.
The piece is redeemed by Tarantino's usual crackling dialogue,
but it dawdles far too long before its "shock" ending.
Some of the dawdling is amusing, some isn't. Rodriguez's piece
is a hard act to follow anyway. Tarantino's name may have been
the key to getting Four Rooms to open, but only one guest
in this hotel throws a good party -- and it isn't the man from
Hollywood.
· POSTSCRIPT:
The movie was a wretched failure at the box office. I submit
the following four reasons:
(1) It sucked.
(2) By the time it came out, at the end of 1995, people were
really really really really really really really really
sick of hearing about Quentin Tarantino.
(3) Anthology films always bomb. Why? I think it was Roger Ebert
who pointed this out in another context: Anthology films are
the cinematic equivalents of short-story collections, while normal
films are novels. Our appetite for short stories is more than
satisfied by half-hour sitcoms and one-hour dramas on TV. When
we go to a movie, we want to be enveloped in a larger story,
and we almost resent the stop-and-start rhythm of an anthology,
which keeps discarding one entire cast of characters and bringing
out another batch. (Many readers also prefer novels to short-story
collections for this very reason.) Now, you may say that the
$100 million-grossing Pulp
Fiction is the exception that proves the rule. Yes and
no. Pulp Fiction, with its sideways structure and its
overlapping plots and characters, is a trio of short stories
brilliantly disguised as a novel.
(4) It sucked.
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