The future looks bleak. The last days of 1999 will be filled with unending violence, fires in the middle of every street, and a severe state of martial law. Of course, this is nothing new for Los Angeles.
Strange Days, the new sci-fi cyber-thriller from James Cameron, documents these last 48 hours of the millennium in exactly this fashion. Desolation and destruction have already ruined Los Angeles - and in only 4 years! That Cameron sure has some imagination.
Strange Days tells the story of Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), a dealer of the new, high-tech drug of choice: clips of other people's experiences that can be played back by anyone with the same effect. In other words, if you place the "wire" on your head and play back a clip of someone having sex with 64 women at the same time, you will actually experience having sex with 64 women (though why anyone would want to is beyond me). The odd thing is that most people apparently want to experience things like robbing a liquor store or beating someone half to death, so this is what Lenny deals in. Due to his high morals, however, he draws the line at "blackjacks," or clips where the person dies.
As for the convoluted plot, a brief summary would not do it justice. It wanders around too many characters and too many coincidences. All there is to know is that Lenny has come across a horrible clip (which everybody seems to watch with a hilarious, half-disgusted, half-excited look on their face) of a woman being raped, tortured and murdered. It turns out that Lenny knows the woman in the clip, so he attempts to track down the killer, enlisting the aid of a limo-driver friend (who miraculously turns out to be a martial arts expert), played by Angela Bassett. This seemingly simple beginning leads to such grandiose events, with so many unexplained twists along the way, that after the first half-hour I knew I was watching a very contrived story.
Strange Days does have a few things going for it. Visually and aurally, it is phenomenal. Although they are used too frequently as plot developers, the scenes of actual memory clips utilize surround sound and the subjective camera like nothing I've ever seen before. They draw you in and show the essence of the drug itself.
Aside from its cinematography, however, Strange Days is nothing but a self- indulgent and confusing story cooked up merely to showcase James Cameron's concept of the high-tech possibilities of the all-too-near future. It does have a message, but its impact is limited by the phony story and poor acting. Cameron, best known for bringing us the Terminator, among other things, wrote and produced Strange Days, and seems to have experienced his first failure as a writer. Director Kathryn Bigelow, best known for being James Cameron's wife (Can you say nepotism?), shows here that she can handle action and special effects with just as much aplomb as the big boys. Her failure is in handling actors and plot Ñ a pretty big failure for a motion picture director. Although she is dealing with some extraordinary actors, including three Academy Award nominees (Fiennes for Schindler's List, Bassett for What's Love Got To Do With It and Juliette Lewis for Cape Fear), all she can draw out of them is a mediocre performance at best.
Strange Days is one of those movies with a deceptively enticing trailer that end up only disappointing. With its unrealistically dismal vision of the near future and its self-accomodating, pretentious story, Strange Days is indeed strange, and unfortunately a failure for everyone involved.
There is good news this week, however, and its name is John Travolta. His first film since his amazing comeback in Pulp Fiction is Get Shorty, an engrossing, though forgettable, story about Hollywood. Adapted from Detroit crime-novelist Elmore Leonard's book, Travolta plays a very similar character here, without the violence, and it comes off wonderfully.
Travolta is Chili Palmer, a small-time Miami loan shark and movie fan who gets sent to Los Angeles to collect a large debt from a B-movie producer (Roger Corman in disguise), Howard Zimm (played hilariously by Gene Hackman). Instead of collecting the debt, though, he ends up pitching a movie idea to Zimm, and the two become partners. The plot is complicated by an L.A.-based drug dealer who also wants in on Zimm's new movie. There is a woman involved, of course, played deftly by Rene Russo (best known for comparing scars with Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon 3). Danny DeVito plays the title character, a respected actor who Chili and Zimm are trying to get into their movie.
If the plot seems complicated, it is. In fact, one of this movie's only negatives is its sometimes confusing storyline. There is a multitude of characters and locations, and the story seems to resolve itself rather easily. But just because it is not the typical Hollywood fare is exactly why it works. Above all, Get Shorty is a parody of the shady tactics used in Hollywood and the general feeling that everybody in L.A. wants to be in the movie business. With that in mind, it ranks right up there with The Player for allowing Hollywood to laugh at itself (something which it needs to do more often).
Director Barry Sonenfeld (The Addams Family movies) shows a real flair for satire, as well as flat-out visual humor and sight-gags. Travolta is riveting when on screen, telling everybody he speaks with to "look at me," and you can't take your eyes off him. Walking the streets of L.A. with the swagger he created long ago in Saturday Night Fever, he absolutely oozes coolness. Although it inevitably falls short of Pulp Fiction's Vincent Vega, this is a role he savors, and so should you. MR