These Are Strange Days

So Lenny, can you get me a piece of somebody else's life?

Sure, man. That's what I do. I sell other people's memories. After all, one man's mundane and desperate existence is another man's Technicolor.

It's California, in Los Angeles. The City of Angels. December 30th, 1999. I'm sitting across the table from a very well-dressed man who bears an uncanny resemblance to actor Ralph Fiennes. He is Leonard Nero a modern day producer of illicit entertainment, but he doesn't sell drugs. He sells clips, memories that have been stored on disk for future enjoyment. When you play the clip back, you actually see and feel the things the wearer of the recording device felt. It's just like being there-only safer. These clips, he tells me are recorded and played back by a "SQUID", which is worn on the head and looks a lot like a monster from a bad eighties sci-film film. SQUID he tells me stands for Superconducting Quantum Interference Device. It picks up brainwaves, transmits them to disk, and later plays them back. Or something like that. Lenny doesn't want to get technical with me. We're in a back room of a club called The Retinal Fetish a sleazy dive I rarely come to in a part of town I didn't know existed until recently. Lenny's an okay guy they tell me. He doesn't deal in Black Jacks, the "snuff" of SQUID clips. He just lost Faith. But then again, these are Strange Days.

Strange Days, directed Kathryn Bigelow and written by James Cameron, is a dark trip through the two pandemonian days before the turn of the Century. Fiennes (Quiz Show, Schindler's List, and most likely recognized as Voldemort, Harry Potter's antagonist) delivers the goods as Nero. He is stunning in his portrayal of the ex-cop turned street hustler who just can't seem to get over the loss of his girlfriend, Faith, played by Juliette Lewis (Kalifornia, From Dusk Til Dawn, and What's Eating Gilbert Grape). Faith has run off to seek her singing career with a rich rock producer Philo Gant played beautifully by Michael Wincott. You remember him, right? He was the nasty cousin to the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and the nasty slumlord in The Crow, so playing a nasty good for Nothing rock producer, a sketchy parody of Trent Reznor wasn't much of a stretch I'm sure.

Nero's troubles don't stop with his bitch of an ex and being beat up by Gant's henchmen. No, he has impending race riots and dead hookers to worry about. Not to mention the fact that Jeriko One, a hip hop star on Gant's label has been shot dead reportedly by gang members. Someone knows who did it, and they're not talking - except maybe to Lenny. So he might get killed if his friend Mace (Angela Bassett of What's Love Got To Do With It?, Waiting To Exhale, and ER) can't save him.

Bigelow's direction is excellent and the actors are great too. So is anything lacking from Strange Days? With a soundtrack including a cover of The Doors "Strange Days" performed by Prong, Marilyn Manson's "Get Your Gunn", and Peter Gabriel and Deep Forest's collaboration on "While the Earth Sleeps", it certainly isn't the music.

Cameron's screenplay brings us an intriguing idea-selling other people's experience for entertainment, the most personal of home movies, but the characters lack depth. Not that there is much to be done about it, at two and a half hours long, the film is already way too long for the attention span of most people, and development of characters could conceivably add forty minutes to the final length. Without shining performances by all, including Lewis, whose work I usually abhor this would be a bad Sci-Fi flick with no future. But Fiennes and Bassett pull their characters from the gutter in which they would have been left by lesser actors. This salvages the film. It is worth seeing but don't expect to hail it as the absolute best of 1995, rather it should make a top 10 list from films for 1995.

However Strange Days is a breakthrough film and like many other breakthrough films, such as Total Recall and 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is not necessarily a great film, but like its predecessors, it may establish a series of films which follow the same formula. Subsequent films will no doubt be better than Strange Days, but after all they're just reprising the experience of someone else.

www.amazon.com/Strange-Days-Ralph-Fiennes/dp/B00000JSJC/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1

www.overstock.com/Books-Movies-Music-Games/Strange-Days-DVD/75623/product.html

www.moviesunlimited.com/musite/product.asp