Review: Four Rooms

Four Rooms is actually four movies in one: four short movies, all centering around another room in a hotel, each made by another director. Those directors are Allison Anders, Alexandre Roxkwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. You have probably never heard of those first two, but the other two probably ring a bell. And if their contributions to this movie are any indication of their work, it's not surprising you know only the last two.

Four Rooms more or less covers one workday of a bellboy called Ted played by Tim Roth. Roth is a good actor, but his character is incredibly annoying to watch. Instead of being a nice guy or a clumsy anti-hero, he is just a complete asshole, who is constantly complaining. Although the last thing might be excusable if you see what kind of strange stuff he encounters.

In the first short, directed by Anders, Ted has to provide "room service" (hur hur hur) to a coven of witches that want to resurrect their goddess. The only problem is that they are missing an ingredient: sperm. If this sounds incredibly stupid, it's because it is. This short, which is possibly the worst of all four, looks like someone tried to make Sabrina, the teenage witch into an "adult" short. It ends up being retarded, boring (even with chicks walking around topless, possibly because they all play horribly bad) and just plain not funny.

The short by Roxwell is a little less bad, but not by much. Ted walks into the wrong room with a delivery and walks into a man holding his tied up wife at gunpoint. The man doesn't seem to be right in his head, and Roth tries to talk him out of it. The premise isn't half bad, but the execution of the story makes it much to complicated and, again, pretty boring. This has also a great deal to do with not giving a shit about any of the characters.

 It doesn't even look interesting. And why the hell are the O's interlocked?

The third short is the best, though. Ted has to babysit the demanding children of an incredibly macho guy, played by Antonio Banderas. His offspring then proceed to throw darts at the paintings, find a dead hooker under the bed and set the room on fire. But it's the parts with the father that are the best of the whole movie. Banderas parodies the ubermacho roles he usually plays with great skill and sense of humor. This is also the only short that actually made me laugh.

Tarantino's short, which comes forth, is rather sub-par for the director. Ted is asked to assist in a wager between two drunk actors, one of them played by Tarantino himself. They want to reenact an old Hitchcock film in which someone bets his lighter would not fail him for ten times in a row, or the other guy could chop of his little finger. The dialogue are Tarantinos, so you can't really go wrong, although they really drag on here. On the plus side: I have now seen everything Tarantino made for the movies.

Four Rooms is a mixed bag of two awful shorts, a pretty good one and an alright one. Which, altogether, is a pretty shitty bag. If you like Rodriguez then I can recommend his short, called The Misbehavers. Everyone else should give it a pass.

Alias

I got really lazy with today's music, but A. I didn't like the movie in the first place and B. it's waaaay to hot.