-== FOUR ROOMS ==-

In the Encyclopedia of Bad Ideas, the anthology film ranks right up there with the eight-track tape player. This kind of collection didn't work in the sixties for the New Wave auteurs. It didn't work in the eighties when Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola got together to make New York Stories. And it doesn't work any better now, with Four Rooms, a frantic and tedious collection put together by enfant terrible Quentin Tarantino and three of his cinematic compadres. This quartet of shorts, each written and directed by a different filmmaker, is tied together by a bellhop. It's New Year's Eve, Ted's first day at the Hotel Mon Signor, and he's a little green around the gills. Tim Roth plays the antic little factotum as a twitchy, deeply unfunny cross between Jerry Lewis and Stan Laurel. That's just the beginning of the movie's problems. While this kind of collaboration naturally lacks dramatic unity, Four Rooms is particularly uneven. These four directors have nothing in common, and neither do their films, which are linked only by Roth's hammy performance. Worse than that, though, is the fact that the first two segments--by Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell--are simply awful. In Anders' piece, Ted is summoned to a suite where a coven of witches (Madonna, in Mae West drag, is the group's leader) are at work on a magic potion. They need only one more ingredient, sperm, which the unwitting Ted will be asked to supply. That's the whole joke. Anders fleshes things out by having two of the witches take their tops off as they woo-woo over the cauldron. Rockwell's chapter is equally bad in a different way. Jennifer Beals sits tied to a chair with a gag in her mouth, while her husband screams, waves a gun, badgers the bellhop, and finally plants a wet one on Roth's surprised lips. The best of the four is Robert Rodriguez's zippy "The Misbehavers," in which a couple of kids are left in Roth's care by their haughty, macho father (Antonio Banderas), who doesn't want them ruining his New Year's Eve. Rodriguez brings his trademark roller-coaster style to the segment; his camera swoops and darts and prowls. The two little brats are hilariously deadpan--one of them performs that appetizing childhood feat of sucking on his own big toe. Tarantino gets the place of honor--the final segment--but his film is nowhere near as good as Rodriguez's, mostly because Tarantino himself is the star of it. Doesn't this fellow have a sister-in-law, or somebody who could tell him to keep his own jumbo face behind the camera? The director plasters his mug all over the screen, in macro close-up, for endless long takes. The story itself is a nifty little homage to Hitchcock, but Tarantino's dreary, overbearing performance takes most of the fun out of it. He should probably go to the gas station and have some of that hot air let out of his head, before he floats away. In this case, Four Rooms is three too many. --Mary Brennan

PRODUCTION: