Four Rooms

1995 comedy

Rating: 8/20

Plot: New Years. It's Ted the bell hop's first night at a ritzy Los Angeles hotel, and it's not the smoothest of first nights on the job. He encounters a coven of witches trying to resurrect the goddess Diana, stumbles into a perverse psychosexual drama, babysits Antonio Banderas's children, and participates in the reenactment of something some guests saw on an Alfred Hitchcock television show.

Way too bizarre to be entertaining and way too silly to be funny, Four Rooms nearly fails on every level. There are four directors, and while all show signs of being able to add a personal stamp to some unique stories and situations, none of the stories manages to be anything I'm glad I watched. In fact, they all kind of float by like off-color jokes that make you groan. The jokes you forget to tell people later. It's almost like they're all trying to outdo each other and are left with giant messes, like preschoolers painting and peripherally spotting their peers adding more and more colors and feeling they have to add more and more color to their own work until one of them winds up drowning so that the news people can stand outside the preschool with giant microphones talking about how this is a tragedy that nobody in the neighborhood wanted to happen. Allison Anders' lesbian witch fantasy is strangely boring. Although I will admit that I enjoyed hearing another movie so soon after Naked Lunch that takes advantage of the beauty of the word jism. There's far too much showing off that gets in the way of Alexandre Rockwell's part of the story, and there's not really much of a punchline to that joke. Rodriguez's "babysitting" story is disturbing in all the wrong ways. By the time Tarantino's turn comes around, you're already frustrated enough to really hate his wordy script or his acting ability instead of just sort of hating them. Tarantino isn't always horrible as an actor, but he's always funny looking. And sometimes it seems that instead of becoming a character, he's instead decided to make a mannequin of himself and beat you over the head with it. This is one of those times. And glueing it all together is Tim Roth's bell hop in what has to be considered one of the most obnoxious performances of all time. He twitches, screams like Miss Piggy when she's angry, talks like Miss Piggy when she's in a loving mood, and almost blinds you with over-emoting. It's the type of performance bound to make almost everybody watching it completely uncomfortable. The lowest point of this movie is right before the last story in which Tim Roth calls his boss and wastes more of my precious time by giving a synopsis of what happened in the first three sections. Completely superfluous, and completely superfluous movie scenes is a pet peeve of mine. But it gets worse as another pet peeve finds its way on to the screen--Kathy Griffin, one of the few people I know of who can singlehandedly guarantee a jism-free evening. To say something nice, the music in this, the neo-lounge sounds of Combustible Edison and stuff from Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh, was a lot of fun. I'd much rather have just heard the soundtrack to this film than actually seen it.

In other news, somebody gave her an award??