STRANGE DAYS
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1995 Ben Hoffman
We are now into computer movies. Suddenly, chips and virtual reality have hit Hollywood. We can expect more of the same and even wilder films involving more than the present state of the art; the state of a screenwriter's imagination.
STRANGE DAYS hinges on a chip (they call it a "clip") which records what a person is seeing, or thinking, or experiencing. This is caught on a digital contraption known as "the wire." Put it on your head and you experience what the person did. Want to know what it is like to be a woman? A man puts the wire on his head and instantly experiences what one woman did, saw, experienced. Anything goes and it happens, where else, but in Los Angeles on December 31, 1999, incorrectly called the end of the Millennium. (The Millenium ends 12/21/2000.)
Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes, quite unrecognizable) is the most prolific seller of these clips. As he tells his customers, "This is not TV; this is real life you will be experiencing." And he has clips of every sort from sex to murder. This is the drug that has replaced the old heroin.
This would all be fine for those into this new genre but the film gets bogged down in murder and the story gets wilder and wilder. The sound track, from beginning to end, is the loudest, most annoying noise of any film I can think of.
Helping Lenny in one way or another are MACE (Angela Bassett) who is a friend. She drives an armor-proof limousine as she chauffeurs the wealthy and powerful around town. MACE, in her way, loves Lenny but Lenny loves Faith (Juliette Lewis) who no longer loves him. Faith dances at night clubs and does a mean wiggle; she never looked that good before. Max (Tom Sizemore) is an ex-cop, a friend of Lenny. But stirring them around in this film leads only to eventual boredom. How about waiting for the videotape?
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
2 bytes
4 Bytes = Superb
3 Bytes = Too good to be missed.
2 Bytes = So so.
1 Byte = Save your money.
-- Ben Hoffman
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews