Questionable Taste Theatre Presents: Strange Days

This week's movie is Strange Days, the near-future sci-fi flick from 1995. When it came out it polarized audiences, meaning that I loved it and everyone else in the world thought it was awful. In my defense, I was still so young that I had to be driven to the theatre. And also, I just thought it was awesome, okay? I'll never forget the first time I saw it.

WITH MY GRANDMOTHER HAHAHAHAHAHAH oh god. Sorry, Grandma. I didn't know.

(She liked Ralph Fiennes, I liked the trailer, we thought it was gonna be a cool little noir whatever. I DIDN'T KNOW.)

Nutshell: On the eve of the year 2000, ex-cop Lenny navigates the underworld selling two-bit memories and pretending he's on the cutting edge instead of washed up. When one of his contacts is brutally murdered and the killer sends the experience straight to Lenny, Lenny realizes he's in over his head, and he and his limo-driving pistol-whipping friend Mace have to, you know, save the world. Whatever.


In the future, the leading cause of death is confetti-strike.



We're not going to talk about the first time I saw it, when my grandma insisted we leave about 20 minutes into it and get frozen yogurt instead. We'll talk about the next time I saw it, alone. Like, totally alone. Yay matinees in the art-house theatre in the strip mall!

Okay, here's what I loved about this movie:

- The cast (mostly). I loved Ralph in this movie, I LOVED ANGELA BASSETT AS MACE OMG (we'll get to that later), and the supporting case was formed from my dreams, with Michael Wincott, Vincent D'Onofrio whose name I can't spell, William Fichtner, and FUCKING LOUISE LECAVALIER, you guys. She was in a music video with Bowie, for god's sake! This movie is GOLD.

- The direction. Kathryn Bigelow is still, I'm pretty sure, one of the few women to helm the kind of movie where someone drives a flaming, bullet-riddled car into a river, and there are some images in this movie that are really dynamic, and some that are really beautiful. Say whatever else about this movie, it had some great shots.

- MACE.



See, Lenny is the character we meet first, but Mace is the one who drives the plot. Her mostly-baffling loyalty to a guy who routinely lets her down is telegraphed so beautifully and quietly that they had to add a flashback so you could meet Lenny before he started sucking, just so you would have a concrete reason Mace was so loyal to the skeeze. Also, seriously, she's the ACTION HERO. Lenny occassionally points a gun, but his job is mostly to put on the SQUID and jack in and watch stuff that's delivered to him *cough*Macguffin*cough*, and Mace's job is to drive the previously-mentioned flaming bullet-riddled limo into the river, then shotgun the trunk so they can swim to the surface. OH HELL YES.

- Graeme Revell's score.

- That the rape-and-murder scene was depicted without any of the jump cuts or fade-aways expected, and that absolutely no element of it was played to be arousing. It's horrifying, it's violent, and after Lenny watches it he throws up, because it turns out rape and murder are pretty disgusting! Hollywood's tendency to eroticize the distress/violation/captivity of women is well-documented, so I won't even bother, but until Irreversible came along, this was the most explicit "no, this is a crime and you're going to watch someone committing a horrible crime and you had better be horrified" scene I'd ever seen.

- Totally apeshit cop partners. It took me about two years before I forgave vincent D'Onofrio for being so insane, and that was right about the time he was working on Men In Black, so basically he got that one episode of Homicide where I liked him and then it was right back to the penalty box for another two years.

- FUCKING LOUISE LECAVALIER, YOU GUYS.

- Also, Mace.


Mace is about to shoot the shit out of Louise Lacavalier. WHO DO I ROOT FOR?



Okay, with that out of the way, here is what I did not love:

- Juliette Lewis. Oh, honey. Talk about Macguffin. Also, dd you know she still has a band? That's...very brave of her.

- The plot. I figured it out a third of the way through, and I was fourteen. Come on now.

- The Macguffin. It's a racially-motivated murder by two cops. Mace tells Lenny at one point, "This tape could change things, things that need changing," but in a world where defense contractors are basically overpaid governmentally-endorsed rapists and nobody does anything, it's really hard to believe that this tape has the kind of impact they imply it will have. Sorry, Kathryn. It was a nice idea.

- Mace's loyalty for Lenny being rooted in romantic love. It seriously weakened her as a character. Bigelow avoided any situation where she changes to please him (in fact, he has to prove himself worthy of her by giving her the incrminating tape and allowing her to turn it into the police rather than using it as a bargaining tool as he'd planned), but it still really rankled. Can't somebody be loyal to someone without wanting to bone them?

- The really, really uneasy balance between tongue-in-cheek observerism and drop-dead-serious action. I mean, some of the skewering works - the market for memory chips veers immediately and hilariously to porn - and is fun, but then we get scenes of Lenny mooning over Juliette Lewis's singing, and come ON.


BOOOO.

So, looking at those lists, the "Cons" list has a lot more substance, so I'm going to admit freely that the movie might suck. However, the impression Mace left on me will stay forever (she PISTOL-WHIPS SOMEONE, and it is AWESOME), and sometimes I still put it in, skip all the Tom Sizemore parts and all the SQUID parts, and watch the backgrounds of the crowd scenes.


Happy New Year! Sorry about that incriminating tape that's going to bring down civilization in some way that's never fully explained!

For those who are interested, here's the trailer, which has all the frenetic imagery you like and none of the random talky* bullshit that you don't!

*Talky in the sense of 'unecessary' rather than 'excessively verbal', since James Cameron wrote this and it's not like we're sitting through a Wilde play here.

And for those of you who are morbidly interested, LOUISE LACAVALIER.