Spoiler-free Reviews of older movies! Facetious remarks in red.

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Saturday, January 19, 2013

Four Rooms (1995, R)

This movie stars Tim Roth (Rob Roy, Lie To Me tv series) playing a bellhop in a hotel in a series of humorous vignettes with each story by a different writer/director.  This is no less than the third Tarantino film Roth has acted in (also, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction), so I think this movie was basically a bunch of friends getting together to make a film.  Among the various famous faces in this movie are Madonna (Evita, though she's most famous for her music... now that I think of it, she was a topic of discussion in the first scene of Reservoir Dogs... interesting), Kathy Griffin (comedian), and Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinny, The Wrestler).  It's a comedy, sometimes darkly humorous, and there was one scene (thankfully only one) of gross-out humor.  I was shocked by how young Roth looked in this role.  Tempus fugit.

Another of the directors was Robert Rodriguez who is most famous for Desperado (we'll pretend he never made Spy Kids), but who also co-directed From Dusk 'Till Dawn (also starring Tarantino and Harvey Kietel who were both in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs) and Sin City with Tarantino.  The Rodriguez sequence was probably my favorite in the film (funniest) and starred Antonio Banderas (Desperado, The Mask Of Zorro), an old favorite of Rodriguez.
The final sequence featured (acting) and was directed by Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained); you could tell by the idiosyncrasies of the various characters (including Bruce Willis [Die Hard] and Paul Calderon ["Hey, my name is Paul, and this is between y'all."], both of whom acted in Pulp Fiction as well).  This sequence was also very good in that certain Tarantino way, so if you liked his other movies then you'll like this scene.  And in true Tarantino style, he makes various film references (verbally through his character this time).

Largely this movie reminded me of a Tex Avery style cartoon or a Tom and Jerry (minus one character trying to eat another), but with a more adult twist (there were lots of boobies in the first sequence) and peppered curses throughout.  One cartoon-like quality was that (especially in the first sequence) Roth was largely silent but animated in gesture.  So actually, if you liked The Mask, then you stand a good chance of enjoying this movie.  It's nothing groundbreaking, and it won't be anyone's favorite film of all time, but if you're in a chill mood you can find it very enjoyable.  For me, this movie is 3.4-4 stars.

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