Four Rooms

The idea of Four Rooms is simple.  Take four short films and set them in the same hotel, and connect them with one twitchy bellhop character (Tim Roth) who runs through all of them, pulling the four shorts together as one full-length film about his first night on the job.

Then you let four different filmmakers make a short film each, and edit the four together, so you truly get the feel of four stories coming together as one full-length film.

Well, I don't think that's confusing.

This film reminds me of confidence and confidence lost.  This isn't the brightest spot in either Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino's oeuvre, but this is an interesting entry — one that points to a specific type of film made only in the '90s: the ballsy independent that spawned a thousand ripoffs and inspired a legion of posers.

(As far as the other two directors, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell, this film might be their career peaks.  I can't say for sure because I haven't seen any of their other work.)

Until recently, I did not own this on DVD.  For one, the only DVD release boasts such glorious "special features" as "Widescreen" and "Dolby Digital Surround Sound."  In the heyday of my DVD collecting, I refused (and mostly still refuse) to buy DVDs with piss-poor features.  I want more value for my money than "Chapter Selections" and "Interactive Menus" and "Talent Biographies."

However, Four Rooms seemed like a great film to own and revisit once I got to the letter F, so I tracked down a copy.  I've spent a lot of time writing about writing and how I got here.  Four Rooms is an example of the kind of experimental narrative that influenced how I look at storytelling.  I felt like owning this one, even if the DVD features are crap.

I've seen Four Rooms exactly one other time — the time I rented this one on glorious VHS.  Of course, like every other film geek, I rented for Tarantino and Rodriguez, and I wasn't disappointed because those two guys could do no wrong (and still can't — just one man's opinion there).

I idealize '90s independent cinema, but there's a reason — the films were great.  Even the minor films had the support of A-list Hollywood stars who were looking to do something different.  Bruce Willis shows up in Four Rooms.  So does Antonio Banderas.  So does Madonna.

For me, in my early twenties, seeing big timers putting their weight behind quirky little independent projects gave me a confidence boost.  People took chances then.

But Tarantino wasn't the only one getting to play.  Rodriguez, Linklater, Smith, Liman, Baumbach, and many others got a shot, and they made the most of their chances.  Most of them are still working.

I was just stupid enough to think that maybe weird-ass me had a shot, too.  I didn't want to direct or act.  I just wanted to write something, anything, hell I don't know what.  Didn't matter.  I just wanted to know that I could write what I wanted and not feel as if I had to write the next Die Hard or whatever.  If I wanted, I could ignore my teachers, who told me that maybe writing about my personal experiences wasn't enough.

A film like Four Rooms made me think some strange stuff. 

I never wrote anything like this film.  Mostly, I just needed the confidence boost, and still do (in a different way).

What I mean by a confidence boost isn't that I need to feel free to write what I want.  I got over that part.  Now I write what I want and if people don't want to read any of it, I'm okay with that.  Sometimes writing sits in a drawer or on a hard drive and nobody gives a shit.  You have to be okay with that.  You just have to keep writing.

No, my confidence is a little shaken because films like Four Rooms might not happen again.  There might not be another boom in independent cinema quite like the '90s.  There might not be another open window.

So yeah, there's a weird duality to consider.  On one hand, I'm confident, and I write what I want.  I can believe that someday, maybe the best of what I can do will get through somewhere.

On the other hand, what if the window is closed and someday never comes?  Late at night, the walls can start talking to you, and they can tell you some things you don't want to hear.  When you can hear every clock in your house ticking, you get a heightened sense of the passage of time.

I try to drown all of that out by clacking on a keyboard, but I can't quite type loudly enough.