Strange Days

Science fiction movies often walk a dangerously thin line.  On the one hand, they need to be different enough from the modern day to make things interesting, but if you make things too different, you risk alienating your audience (unless you have a huge budget for cool special effects).  One solution that often works well is to set your film in the near future, so you can make some improvements, but not have to change the entire world; it's economical and takes a whole lot less pre-production to imagine a not-too-future world.  When I say that this method "works well," I mean that it succeeds upon the film's immediate release.  Movies like this can seem awfully quaint after the modern day passes what was once the near future.  Case in point: Strange Days.

In the last few days of 1999, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) has gotten himself into a lot of trouble.  For starters, he is a former Los Angeles police officer who has become a sleazy dealer of illegal technology.  You see, in 1999 Los Angeles, there are Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs), which are cyberpunk tools for recording a person's point of view --- through their eyes, with their emotions and physical sensations --- and Lenny sells the recordings.  Of course, this was over a decade ago, so you probably remember all this.  SQUIDs are stylish, too, often taking on the appearance of obvious wigs.

Either a SQUID or somebody scalped a robot

It's not make explicitly clear why the practice is illegal, but I suppose a demand for "high-risk" memories of criminal acts could be a bad thing.  Anyway, Lenny is a fast-talking sleazebag with a heart of gold.  He spends his non-dealing time pining for his lost love, Faith (Juliette Lewis), and reliving his own SQUID-recorded memories of her.  Not surprisingly, his highlights usually include her in tight clothing or clothing-optional moments.  When I say that Faith is "lost," I don't mean dead; she just left him for the evil and gravelly-voiced record producer, Philo (Michael Wincott).  Philo is a rich jerk with psychotic tendencies and a habit for being over-possessive.  Faith wants to be a rock star, with all the egocentric behavior that implies.

"What a catch."  Apply the statement to either or both.

Man, science fiction movies require a lot of exposition.  Anyway, Lenny winds up at the center of a storm of evil-doing.  Someone is giving him SQUID tapes showing the anonymous user raping, murdering, and --- most disturbing to Lenny --- breaking into Lenny's apartment while he slept.  For one reason or another, Lenny concludes that this killer is going to go after Faith soon.  But who could the killer be?  Could it possibly be the two LAPD officers that are trying to kill Lenny?  Or are they a symptom of a deeper conspiracy?  Dum-da-DUUUUMMMMM?!?


For being a weird sci-fi movie, there sure are a lot of quality actors in Strange Days.  Ralph Fiennes turns in an interesting lead performance; he plays Lenny as a broken man, only a shadow of what he had been.  And yet, he is still capable enough to unravel a few mysteries and avoid getting killed on several occasions.  The cool thing about Fiennes is that his performance would have made Lenny's failure just as believable as his success would --- Lenny is not your typical movie hero, because he actually needs his friends.  Those friends turn in surprising performances, too.  Angela Bassett gets to play a tough, no-nonsense cabbie that also happens to be pining away for Lenny while he bitches and moans about Faith.  I don't know if we needed the romantic angle, but it was more depth than I expected from her buddy role.  The other buddy is Tom Sizemore as a sleazy private detective; while I normally enjoy mid-90s Sizemore, his ridiculous hairpiece was too distracting for me.

...or maybe I got lost in his dreamy eyes.

Vincent D'Onofrio and William Fichtner played corrupt cops (In Los Angeles?  In the 90s?  Suspend that disbelief!), but they weren't great at it.  Fichtner was fine, but D'Onofrio overacted in this one-dimensional role, somehow equating shouting and sweating with complexity.

And from this seed, Law & Order: Criminal Intent would sprout.

Glenn Plummer's character was a blend of Chuck D and Malcom X, so it should be no surprise that he didn't aim for quiet complexity in his limited screen time.  Career character actor Richard Edson (the parking garage valet in Ferris Bueller) had a bit part, too, and was only marginally more casual.  Michael Wincott once again played an evil character with an evil voice, and he is a pretty solid villain.  Juliette Lewis spent most of the film flaunting her body with either limited or tight-fitting clothing; that's fine I guess, but I've always been kind of weirded out by her.  This is in that time period when she somehow got every "crazy chick" role Hollywood had to offer, and she's as rude and obnoxious as ever.  My biggest problem with her part in this movie is that Lenny can't get over their break-up.

Who could ever get over this?

While I wouldn't say that any of the acting is all that good, I think the cast played up to the storyline pretty well and fit the general tone of the movie.  I had some major problems with the direction, though.  This was Kathryn Bigelow's follow-up to the successful and ridiculous bromance that was Point Break, and Strange Days definitely exhibits more confidence as a director than that film.  Unfortunately, I believe that confidence was largely misplaced.  Bigelow has trouble with the point-of-view camera work necessary to convey the experience of a SQUID recording; the sex scenes, in particular, felt like the cameraman was under strict orders to not follow a natural line of sight.  The pacing of the film is erratic, and the tone suffers from a number of action scenes that have no falling action; that's fine in a tightly-wound and taught thriller, but those words do not describe this film, if only because it takes a while to progress anywhere with this story.  And it is a long while, clocking in at almost two-and-a-half hours.  I understand that James Cameron co-wrote the movie, but he is certainly no genius when it comes to the written word; some more editing would have been nice.

There are also a few stupid ideas in this fabricated future.  That's to be expected from a lot of futuristic sci-fi movies, but these weren't errors in judging how we use technology, they are just poor choices.  I liked that most of the characters in Strange Days dressed more or less like normal people (it was set only five years in the future, after all), but the exceptions to that rule looked idiotic.  For instance, I don't care how eccentric the bad guy is, he's not going to hire a dread-locked albino woman wearing a bondage-themed outfit as a bodyguard, especially as a bodyguard who is sometimes called upon to assault and/or kill someone.  Flashy bodyguards with a license to kill tend to stick out in people's memories.  And why do only people in the future dress that stupidly?

Wasn't she in the Matrix sequel?

It also bothered me that this film deals with cyberpunk ideas, including having bionic parts put in your noggin, but we never see anything too bio-technical.  We get the stupid SQUID hair nets --- which are suspiciously bulky, considering they are recording and reading brain waves that include vision, emotion, and physical sensation --- but we never get to see a bionic eye?  Lame.

I would also like to ask what the deal is with characters who presume that their enemy has drowned.  I don't know how many times I have seen a movie where a car goes into the water --- the bad guys may shoot at the underwater car, or they might not --- and the villains wait to confirm that the good guys are dead...but give up a few moments before the hero resurfaces.  What is the big hurry?  Are these bad guys late for an evil henchmen dinner party?  If there's "no way anyone could have survived that," then why not wait a few more minutes until a body floats up?  That happens pretty frequently in action scenes, but I thought Vincent D'Onofrio's impatience in this movie was especially bad.

Despite its shortcomings, Strange Days is a decently effective science fiction adventure.  The story might have a few too many twists and turns to be truly effective, and the "future" is kind of quaint now, but it is a pretty well-realized future, and that deserves some respect.  I thought the relationships between the various characters was pleasantly atypical; while the plot may have been almost stock for suspense/thrillers at times, the characters didn't ever comfortably fit into that mold.  I would give this movie a higher rating, if not for one glaring flaw: there is absolutely no mention of Prince in this film.  That's right, a movie that climaxes on New Year's Eve, 1999, and was released in 1995 (the height of Prince's "The Artist Former Known As" fame) did not have anyone partying to Prince's "1999."  Talk about science fiction.

"I've got a lion in my pocket, and baby he's ready to roar!"

Go

What is she doing?  Tossing a business card?

What is the 1990s worst contribution to popular culture?  Hammer pants?  R and B hooks in rap songs?  Nu-metal?  My vote goes to rave kids.  Don't be confused: I'm perfectly okay with raves, because I can choose to stay away from them and their drug- and sex-fueled semi-mobile dance parties; raves are kind of like the gypsies of the party scene, squatting wherever they can for the weekend and then skipping to a new home next week.  No, I hate rave kids.  Ugh.  Hands swirling, glo-stick wearing, pacifier-sucking, pill-popping, candy necklaces --- I hate everything superficial about them.  Oh, and dude, I don't care if cotton feels AMAZING when you're rolling on ecstasy, stop licking my shirt.  Surprisingly, the first movie I ever saw about the rave scene was the totally awesome Human Traffic (watch the UK version, if you can find it).  So, when a reader requested that I review Go, another rave-themed film, I watched with cautious optimism.

At it's core, Go is a film about a drug deal gone bad.  And, um, a fairly unconnected trip to Vegas, probably because director Doug Liman was coming off of Swingers.  The story is split into three parts (Ronna's Story, Simon's Story, and Adam & Zack's Story) with an integrated ending. It all revolves around Ronna's (Sarah Polley) misadventures filling in as a drug dealer when her local dealer, Simon (Desmond Askew), leaves for Las Vegas on short notice.  Ronna is in desperate need of cash to avoid eviction, and her joe job at the supermarket isn't going to cut it by tomorrow.  Thankfully, fate intervenes when two dudes, Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr), ask her for some ecstasy.  How does she get it?  She goes to her dealer's supplier, Todd (Timothy Olyphant).  Oh, wait...remember how she doesn't have much money?  It turns out that drugs cost money.  Who knew?  Ronna gives Todd what she has and leaves her friend, Claire (Katie Holmes) behind as collateral.  That's okay, though, because Ronna will make some quick cash off of Adam and Zack, and be right back!  Unless they're part of a police drug bust operation, that is.  Ronna is faced with a tough decision.  Does she make the sale and risk going to jail, or should she dump the drugs?  One way is risky, but could make money.  The other is safer, but would leave her without any cash for rent, cash to free Claire, or drugs to sell back to Todd/sell to other people.  Meanwhile, Simon is in Vegas with his buddies and manages to get involved with (in this order):

• explosive diarrhea
• gambling
• three-way tantric sex
• a stolen car
• a stolen gun
• private strip club dance
• a 1970s-style car chase

It sounds like a pretty sweet first trip to Vegas, right?  That's why I couldn't elope to Vegas for my wedding.  Even more meanwhile, Adam and Zack's story tells how these two nice guys could end up being sneaky undercover drug agents, trying to arrest innocent Ronna's all over town.  The short answer is because they love drugs, too.  In the end, all three plots come together with a nice, neat bow on top, and everything is right with the world.  The end.

Man, this movie has a lot of noteworthy actors.  Having Sarah Polley (who is decent enough) as the lead doesn't usually indicate that, but there were a lot of young up-and-kind-of-maybe-comers in this film.  Katie Holmes and her crooked smile make a small appearance.  It's not great work, but I'm not going to pick on someone who presumably has a heart condition.  Seriously, did she have a stroke, or did someone just melt the side of her face?  That broken smile bugs me.  Timothy Olyphant was actually pretty decent, even though it looked like he was doing his best Billy Idol impression throughout.  Desmond Askew is the most likable character in the whole movie, perhaps because his story is the most fun.  Regardless, he overcomes some eye-roll-worthy dialogue early in the film to be the best bit.  Taye Diggs does a pretty solid job as Simon's not-moronic friend; James Duval and Brekin Meyer spent most of their screen time suffering from diarrhea, which is good because Duval is always awful and Meyer's character was a skinny white boy who pretended to be ghetto.  The movie would have been better if those two had died violent deaths, but this isn't a perfect film.  Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf are about as good as you might expect, with both having definite television-actor-level talent and Mohr's amazing ability to seem smug, even when his character tries to be earnest.  I liked to see William Fichtner and Jane Krakowski pop up in this movie; sadly, their parts were poorly written and used mostly for shock value.  Their characters were built up to be one thing, but the joke is that they are something else, completely unrelated to the first thing!  Get it?  It's called wasted script pages, kids.  They're bad.  All in all, the acting is serviceable, with Askew and Olyphant being the stand outs and Meyer and Duval being the fungus in this film's proverbial toilet bowl.

Director Doug Liman does a good job keeping this movie moving, and the pace is probably the best part of this film.  You can argue that the fractured storytelling, quick dialogue, and crime story show that Go stole its style from Pulp Fiction, but left all the drama and compelling characters behind.  And you would be correct.  Still, this movie tries to be clever and the frenetic pace makes most of the plot holes --- if Ronna is seventeen, why does she have her own apartment? --- unnoticeable.  Unfortunately, some of the cuts and edits in this film seem to serve no purpose.  Why do we start the film with Claire talking to Todd the next morning?  Why those two characters?  They are neither the primary plot, nor a linchpin that tied everything together, so it feels like it's just thrown in to make the movie seem mysterious, like they wanted audiences to whisper, "Oh, boy, did you catch all that?  Something must have happened last night for these characters!"  Some of the dialogue is good, some of it is sophomoric, but I will give screenwriter (and frequent Tim Burton collaborator) John August credit for writing a movie meant to be hep with the young folks and have it not feel completely outdated ten years later.  It's nowhere near as great of a script as this movie thinks it is, but it tries.

This really is a busy movie.  It has the attention span of a kid on a sugar rush (or a teen rolling on ecstasy), and a lot happens.  Some of it is dumb.  Why would anyone trust random grocery store customers that want to buy large quantities of drugs for any reason?  Who rips people off with fake drugs and then stays at that party?  If Todd "gives head before [he] gives favors --- and [he] doesn't give head," then why does Simon have his credit card?  If Simon stole the credit card, then why doesn't that ever come up in the story?  And why don't any of the four guys going to Vegas have their own credit card to hold their hotel room?  On the bright side, there is a psychic cat, which was pretty funny.  Unlike most crime and/or drug movies, this film is relatively consequence-free, which cuts the flakier aspects of the film some slack.  It's kind of like a Snackwell's devil's food cake cookie; you know Go isn't going to blow your mind, but it's fun and not that bad for you, so why not enjoy?

Go was a reader request.  Want me to review something?  Maybe I will.