a5c7b9f00b Lenny Nero deals in dreams. Formerly an LAPD vice cop, he now deals in illegal &#39;squid&#39; recordings - recordings made directly from the cerebral cortex of the participant, which allow the viewer to feel and experience everything the participant experiencesif they were there. One of life&#39;s perpetual losers, he ekes out a lonely, miserable existence at the end of the millennium, still pathetically yearning for his beautiful ex-girlfriend Faith, a beautiful singer, and is dependent on his friend Macey, who both loves him unquestioningly and despairs for him completely, in equal measure. But Lenny&#39;s life is about to be shattered; when he is anonymously sent the recording of the brutal rape and murder of a prostitute he is acquainted with, he and Macey soon find themselves reluctantly embroiled in a dark web of murder, blackmail and intrigue amid the civil unrest surrounding the suspicious death of an influential, politically active rap singer. Lenny and Macey are soon running from Faith&#39;s brutal manager, Philo Gant, and a pair of menacing police officers,they try to uncover the connection between the two and stay alive long enough to see in the millennium. In 1999, Los Angeles is racial war zone with the army and LSPD and SWAT officers fighting Afro-American people. The former cop Lenny Nero is a dealer of illegal recording in CDs that gives the memories and sensations of the recorder to the user. He buys the recordings from the supplier Tick; he misses his former mistress Faith, who was a hooker and now is a singer; his best friend is the private eye Max Peltier and the limousine driver Lornette &#39;Mace&#39; Mason, who has unrequited love for him. Two days before the turn of the century, the black rapper Jeriko One is murdered. The hooker Iris seeks Lenny out but there is an incident and they do not talk to each other. However she drops a recording into Lenny&#39;s car while he unsuccessfully tries to meet Faith at a night-club. However her boyfriend Philo Gant does not let them talk. When Lenny learns that Iris was sadistically raped and killed, he gets involved in a sick scheme and discovers dirty hidden secrets. This is a classic example of the worst kind of mindless hollywood drek. Director Bigelow shows little talent for much other than glittering car chases &amp; stock wide-screen ultra-violence. Anyone who can get such a cheesy imitation of James Woods from a fine actor like Fiennes deserves some sort of booby award. She&#39;s certainly no friend to women or blacks, either. She seems to want to use the LA cops vs African-Americans issuea theme here, but her blacks are some of the worst stereotypes (all negative) since the 30s. The plot sucks big-time, the costumes &amp; attitudes are incredibly dated (this movie is only 5 years old? It looks &amp; sounds like it was made in the 70s). Woof, what a dog! (Sorry, Rover.) The first time I encountered Strange Days was at a home-theater demo, where the section revealing what happened to Jeriko-One was shown. I was fascinated by both the film&#39;s plot and its visual style, and finally had the chance to see it in its entirety on DVD.<br/><br/>This film is a gem – a true &quot;thinking person&#39;s&quot; action movie which doesn&#39;t center around a big man (Ahnuld, Sly, or Bruce) with an even bigger gun blowing his way through the bad guys. Instead, we have characters with complexity and a storyline that keeps the viewer breathless, and guessing, from beginning to end. Compared to this, a recent success like The Matrix (which some might compare it to) seems merely like a rehash of the tired old shoot-em-up papered over with a gimmicky sci-fi plot premise.<br/><br/>I was shocked to see that James Cameron wrote the script. Considering that I think Titanic has one of the worst-written screenplays ever, it amazes me that the same author could turn in work of this caliber. Kathryn Bigelow provides direction that is slick, assured, and stylish. This should be enough to bury the old notion that action films are &quot;guy things&quot; which need a male at the helm.<br/><br/>Also notable is the performance turned in by Ralph Fiennes. Anyone who typecast him (after The English Patient, Schindler&#39;s List and others)an upper-class Brit actor should reconsider. He convincingly creates a Southern Californian character on the seedy side of civilization. The other members of the cast, by and large, are up to Fiennes&#39;s standard.<br/><br/>This is, without question, a graphically violent film, with some scenes of sexual violence that may make the viewer quite uncomfortable. But that&#39;s the point. In Strange Days, violence and brutality are shown for what they are,actions that are repulsive, and not &quot;prettified&quot; for public acceptance.<br/><br/>My only concern about this film is that it may well seem dated in the future. After all, December 1999 has arrived, and we still have no &quot;virtual reality&quot; recording devices, nor are there the outbursts of social breakdown portrayed in the film&#39;s future. I can easily imagine some people seeing this film in 2000 or later and dismissing itthe prediction of a future that didn&#39;t, in fact, occur. But, if we can still appreciate Orwell&#39;s 1984 some fifteen years after the supposed time of that novel, there seems to be no reason why not to enjoy Strange Days well into the next millennium.
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