Subject: REVIEW: STRANGE DAYS

From: [email-masked] (Bryant Frazer)
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 17:26:41 GMT

STRANGE DAYS
                       A film review by Bryant Frazer
                        Copyright 1995 Bryant Frazer

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, and Juliette Lewis
 
     There's a lot of sex in STRANGE DAYS.  A lot of sex, and a lot of
violence.  Director Kathryn Bigelow and her screenwriter cronies James
Cameron and Jay Cocks understand well that the sleekest new technology
is immediately turned to the seediest purposes.  Their protagonist,
L.A.  ex-cop Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), understands it too, and he's
the consummate salesperson for virtual sleaze, circa 1999.  When Nero
watches a potential client "jack in"--a contraband silver rig on top of
the mark's head wires the contents of a mini CD recorded with the full
sensory experience of another person directly into his brain--he sports
the sharp grin of a guy who loves the junk he's dealing as much as the
junkies do.  After the client's spent a few quality moments feeling
himself up through his business suit, Nero cuts off his feed.  "You
were just an 18-year-old girl taking a shower," he tells the client.
And, of course, there's more where that came from.

     The filmmakers also understand that good help is hard to find.
After he's just played back a pornographic disc of a half-hearted
lesbian encounter--from the point of view of one of the women,
naturally--Nero coaches one of the two performers from the clip. "You
should move your eyes a lot slower," he explains.  "Like you're making
love with your eyes." The girl stares back at him silent and
uncomprehending, her eyes a complete blank.  Nero's a lost romantic in
the age of sensory overload.

     The minidisc system is called SQUID, a charming acronym for
Superconducting Quantum Interference Device.  That's just another way to
say The Movies, for which SQUID is sort of a doublespeak stand-in.  Nero
is the director, who lives vicariously through the exploits of
criminals and neo-porn stars as his own life moves in ever contracting
circles.  Among the clips in highest demand are the ones recorded in the
most extreme of circumstances, like the botched robbery sequence that
opens the film.  The scene is one long take from a criminal's p.o.v.,
and the event doesn't end happily, which pisses Nero off.  Nero doesn't
deal in "blackjack clips"--that's snuff clips, the ones where some
poor sucker winds up dead before it's over.

     The clips that Nero loves best, the ones he keeps in a shoebox
back at his house, are home movies, full-sensory snippets from his life
with Faith (Juliette Lewis), the girl who used to love him but now
sings in a nightclub for sleazy music mogul Philo Gant (Michael
Wincott).  This shady circle of friends also includes a flunky named Max
(Tom Sizemore), a tough cab driver named Mace (Angela Bassett) and a
prostitute named Iris (Brigitte Bako).  When Iris comes running to Nero,
begging frantically for help, he shrugs her off.  But the next day,
when a blackjack disc of a particularly traumatic murder is anonymously
delivered to him, Nero starts to wonder what Iris had to tell him that
was so important, and whether he might be next in line.

     What a kick--STRANGE DAYS is an action movie with real
characters and uncommonly skillful actors.  Ralph Fiennes as Nero is a
real tragic hero, one who's fallen from grace with his former employer
(the L.A.P.D.) and his former lover.  Fiennes is s o damn likable in the
role--he gives the scuzzball a fuzzy surface.  Angela Bassett's
ass-kicking turn as Mace, the only woman who's willing to stand by Nero
through and through, is actually a secondary role, but she brings it
straight to the fore and rein forces the star status she won in WHAT'S
LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? Juliette Lewis gets to stretch out just a
little, even though she's once again typecast as a sexpot for scumbags
(can't she talk to her agent about this?).  The supporting cast, which
includes t he chameleon-like Vincent D'Onofrio as a rogue cop, is
excellent as well.

     In very literal ways, STRANGE DAYS is a movie about sensory
overload.  If you see the movie in a house wired with digital sound and
a big screen, it will undoubtedly get your blood flowing.  Tellingly, in
this age of bright lights and big sound, one character from the film is
knocked into a coma when his SQUID unit is wired to overamp the signals
to his brain.  Moreover, the interaction of people wearing the devices
and crossing their own experiences with the playback amounts to a
conceptual tour de force, with one experience informing another,
brutality overlapping terror, and pleasure licking the heels of
sadism.  The single most punishing moment of STRANGE DAYS owes a
specific debt to Michael Powell's definitive treatment of voyeuristic
pleasure, PEEPING TOM (1960), and I could see couples huddling closer
together and others slouching lower in their seats as a true high-tech
perversion played itself out on-screen.  STRANGE DAYS isn't always an
easy or pleasant film, and in the age of the easygoing bullet-laden
blockbuster, it's sobering to see a movie where representations of
violence are, well, violent.

     More to the point, Kathryn Bigelow cements her reputation as a
stops-out action director who encourages audiences to keep their brains
engaged as she steps on the pedal.  I'm not a big fan of her ex-husband
Cameron's movies (they include ALIENS and TRUE LIES), but it's hard to
explain how his admittedly exhilarating approach to an action scene
differs from Bigelow's similarly expert tactics, which also work
wonders.  Maybe it's her background as an artist that shapes these
quick cuts into a montage that makes sense, or her intellectual
fascination with the first-person point of view that shapes the SQUID
sequences.  You don't have to be intellectually aware of how good she is
at all of this to appreciate the sheer rush of the fast action, but the
experience is heightened by her sure control of thematic concerns.  And
at any rate, this is miles ahead of her previous POINT BREAK.

     The special effects are so well done that they're nearly
unnoticeable, and aside from a couple of fireworks in the night sky
over L.A., I can hardly remember what the digital effects shots were.
The throbbing soundtrack, featuring the music of bands like Tricky and
PJ Harvey (who might actually still be current in 1999), is a savvy,
welcome switch from SF movies with pop soundtracks comprised
exclusively of 70s retreads or bad techno.  Despite a fairly contrived
screenplay, STRANGE DAYS is altogether hip, slick, and wicked.  What
you get out of it it is probably proportionate to how much credence
you're willing to give it, and it seems that most folks will love it or
hate it.

     When the end credits started rolling, the crowd at STRANGE DAYS
was fractured in a way I haven't seen in a long time.  There was
spontaneous applause--that much you expect--but then the clapping hands
were overwhelmed by a loud chorus of hisses.  Couples left the theater
engaged in heated arguments, and larger groups stood in the lobby
afterward, flashing back to the movie's most violent moments.  One point
of contention is the ending, and that's definitely a cop-out.  Any $40
million production has to be mediated by the aesthetic needs of a mass
audience, but the tidy 15-minute denouement here is so at odds with the
controlled chaos that brews for the first couple of hours that it
leaves a bad taste.

     All that having been said, what's up on-screen is still quite an
experience.  It is rare that a Hollywood blockbuster can encourage
debate in a movie-going audience, and rarer still that there might be
something truly disturbing lurking under a high-gloss surface, but
there is substance in STRANGE DAYS.  Nero is the vessel for the
knowledge it imparts, which has to do with sorting out desire, regret,
and nostalgia and learning to make the best of this world.  Like Nero,
who has to learn to give up his aluminum-coated memories of what once
was to live in the here and now, STRANGE DAYS struggles to come to
terms with the relationship of memory to reality, the future to the
present, and what could be to what is.

-- 
DEEP FOCUS: Archived Movie Reviews by Bryant Frazer
http://www.panix.com/~bfrazer/flicker/
[email-masked]