Four Rooms

It's New Year's Eve in a Hollywood hotel; Ted the bellboy (Roth) is on his own. In Anders' episode, a witches' coven is after his semen; in Rockwell's he stumbles into a SM marital nightmare; Rodriguez has him looking after two mischievous children; and Tarantino reruns an 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents...' yarn involving a machete, a drunken wager, and a pinkie. Ted is the lynchpin, but Roth's is a gibbering, fidgeting, nervous breakdown of a performance. Only Rodriguez paces and shapes the material; his virtuoso story has the authentic black comic lunacy of a Tom and Jerry cartoon brought to life. And Tarantino? Unwisely holding court as a Hollywood star, he offers further proof of his own acting limitations, with dialogue so patently Tarantino-esque it might be intentional self-parody. Most worryingly, his self-conscious, meandering takes raise doubts about his hitherto infallible cinematic intuition. They should have called this 'One Room' and released it as a Rodriguez short.