MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Strange Days [de])

USA 1995
d: Kathryn Bigelow
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (Region 1 us)

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LA, Year Zero: 30 December 1999. Riot police are on the streets. The angry, poor, disenfranchised - the blacks - are ready to tear down the walls of the city. Yet Lenny Nero fiddles while LA burns. A sleazeball in an Armani suit, Lenny's dealing illicit 'playback clips', raw human experience recorded direct from the cerebral cortex. Bigelow's spectacular millennial maelstrom has divided critics, and apparently repelled audiences. Written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, this is tech-noir, action movie and love story rolled into one. It also pursues a sophisticated treatise on the nature of voyeurism, the psychic dangers of vicarious entertainment and cinema itself. A sequence in which Nero watches a snuff clip of rape and murder has excited accusations of exploitation and hypocrisy. It's certainly hard to stomach, but then shouldn't it be? The impeccable moral centre is to be found in Bassett's karate-chopping single mother 'Mace', who rescues Lenny from his own faithless stupor. Nero isn't irredeemable, either: Fiennes makes him a persuasively seedy knight errant. In fact, despite its own barely suppressed despair, the film exhibits markedly progressive leanings. Flawed, but often brilliant, provocative film-making.
— TCh, Time Out Film Guide
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A movie that gives a new meaning to the word "punchy," Kathryn Bigelow's hyperventilating, violent 1995 thriller--entertaining if often over the top--is set in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve in the year 1999 and has something to do with snuff tapes (with several nods to Peeping Tom), racial violence, and police corruption. One feels at times that these matters have been worked into James Cameron and Jay Cocks's script like fashionable teasers rather than as subjects the filmmakers have much to say about. Ralph Fiennes stars as a black marketeer who traffics in virtual-reality tapes, and one wonders if surviving fragments of four or five different script drafts are responsible for his changes of personality every half hour or so. I wasn't bored at all by this movie, and Angela Bassett's charisma as an action heroine often blew me away, but fans of Bigelow at her best (e.g., Near Dark) may be put off by the acres of calculation, which don't always fit with the intellectual pretensions.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
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The fission that Bigelow (BLUE STEEL, POINT BREAK) lets loose in STRANGE DAYS is thrilling -- so much so that it almost convinces you to forgive a TV-movie-of-the-week plot. Sadly, all the furious, spellbinding energy is betrayed by the final half-hour, when the anticipated apocalypse fails miserably to arrive and a train wreck of awkward exposition derails the narrative.
Maybe endings don't matter anymore in Hollywood pictures, and audiences simply disregard them, knowing that the fix is in and the fun is up front. But it hurts to see this story reach for a tidy ending, sealed with a fade-out kiss. STRANGE DAYS hurtles down the track for two hours, frantically trying to warn us en route to the Big Switchback, only to pull up in a hiss of smoke and hot air.
— Harlan Jacobson, TV MovieGuide