FOUR MEMORABLE STORIES FROM "FOUR ROOMS" -

Now this is an interesting project. It’s one of those things you wish you had thought of yourself, you know? I’ll give you the tagline for the film: “Twelve outrageous guests. Four scandalous requests. And one lone bellhop, on his first day on the job, who's in for the wildest New Year's Eve of his life.” Set in a hotel, an old rambling hotel – so down on its luck that the entire staff is down to just the manager and the bellhop – four rooms tells the story of, well you got it… Four rooms. Now, each “room” is directed by a different director and is about 20 – odd minutes long. The writer /directors are Allison Anderson, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.
Ted the bellhop (Tim Roth) is stuck at work on New Year’s Eve. The hotel isn’t exactly what you might call full, but there are quite a few guests (twelve in total) knocking around… They are possibly the last handful of guests the hotel may have, so he runs hither and thither to assist and serve… However, not everything will quite go his way… There is a group of very strange ladies (among whom we can spy Madonna) gathering in the honeymoon suite. A rather rowdy couple in 409 who will prove more trouble than they first seem to be. A gangster (Antonio Banderas) and his wife who desperately need a babysitter for their two rather spoilt children will squarely land on Ted in 309 and just as he is ready to pack the whole thing in and leave, the famous film star in the penthouse (ironically played by Tarantino himself) rings with a rather bizarre list of requests.
Now, I love the idea of this film – and it’s really funny in bits, especially the Rodriguez and Tarantino segments (the gangster and the star in the penthouse. By the way, don’t you love the way Tarantino casts himself in his earlier films? Does anyone know why he stopped doing that?) . But, without presuming to be an expert, I may well have done a few things differently. For instance, the four stories DO NOT interact at all if you don’t count Ted. Except once – and even that was, I felt, a slight push. I kind of like the Balzac approach, you know, he will be talking about a character in a novel and just then another character from another novel will come walking by… Not necessarily for any reason in the plot, just as a cameo as it were. They could at least have done that in my opinion – this result is just too cut off… Tim Roth is VERY good to give him his due. However, there were times where I could swear that he was just trying to be Basil Fawlty from Fawlty Towers and only just failing (you’ve heard of Basil Fawlty right? John Cleese’s character from the British sitcom? Oh never mind, just click here) Thirdly, well, not all the stories were, in my view, that interesting. I mean, the first one is well and good; but I wouldn’t have persisted with the rest if I didn’t know that a Tarantino performance was coming up in the end… However, persist I did, and ended up positively howling with laughter in bits and remembering why it was that I adored Mr. Tarantino. I have also developed a healthy interest in Mr. Rodriguez and will proceed to dig a film of his out of my “to watch” pile for next week… You’re going to have to be patient for that one though ;)