Strange Days

What a batshit awful movie, wow

i liked it but i'm a huge cyperpunk sucker. and i didn't realize until 50 seconds ago that bigelow directed it!

how do u incorporate your cyberpunk fandom into everyday life?

i play http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android:_Netrunner

i used to be a big gibson fan too - i haven't read him in a few years tho

Been on the fence about buying that one, so you recommend it Mordy? To a cyberpunk fan I mean.

The card game I'm referring to btw

oh yeah, it's really really good. as a cyberpunk game and as a game period. really well made, lots of strategy involved, innovative mechanics (well, at least to me - i know a lot of it comes from the original CCG).

There's a certain amusing grandeur to it batshit awfulness, though

i remember very little about the film but i think i remember he had a love interest that he had a sex trid of that he watched periodically where she was skating around on rollerskates??? is this accurate??

the trailer (featuring no footage from the film at all) was amazing imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0zaqWQiXG8

pretty sweet action scenes, solid direction, and ralph fiennes and angela bassett were both great. the story is hilarious, moreso now that we're in 2013. setting it a mere four years in the future at the time of its release was a real bold move, to put it one way. generic story construction, pretty obvious "twist" at the end, some bad attempts at 'future' slang. this definitely came from james cameron's scrap heap. out of the bigelow films i've seen it's obviously no point break or near dark or hurt locker or even k-19. but it's got its moments.

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/cyberpunk%20fashion

It is a terrible movie but Angela Basset looks amazing in it.

I remember when this happened (and then when the film came out people were all "Juliette Lewis doing PJ Harvey covers, wha?") Per Wikipedia:

In order to get the large crowd scene around the Bonaventure hotel, the director hired rave promoter Philip Blaine to produce an event featuring Aphex Twin and Deee-Lite. The event was called Millennium (based on the films plot that it was a NYE party) and tickets were only $10 plus food and drink was free. The reported attendance was 14,000 people. The event went till 2am when the fire marshall called it off because there was several inches of confetti around the entire site and cigarette butts were starting to cause little fires. No one was hurt.

i guess fiennes and basset were good in it, if you can separate performances from the words coming out of their mouths and the nonsense emotions they were being asked to convey, but it is an awful looking movie badly directed with woeful script, design and editing and even the awesome casting couldn't stop it from being a "watch for the lols only" recommendation.

prometheus of the mid-90's

agree with al leong. it's a rubbishy b-movie but nothing like as offensive as being made out itt, you want some real lol suckitude in this vein try johnny mnemonic or something

hurt locker is bigelow's prometheus

It is fresh in my mind and i tell you it's worse than you remember

nah i sat through it quite happily like a month ago

i will say this film has the most patently obvious wig plot twist in cinema history

It is a terrible movie but Angela Basset looks amazing in it.

Vigorously seconded

lol I think Netflix recommended this to me like two years ago and I watched it and felt a little insulted

Lewis skating around in her knickers I recall being one of the better parts

otm

Any part where she's speaking or singing tho, oy

I always remember skunk anansie and the evil cops played by fitchner and d'onofrio.

glenn Plummer as Jericho 1 (rip)

Richard edson in the most edsonest role of his career

Girls last nite were drooling over fichtner wtf

fitchner remains my favorite celeb sighting

this $2.99 DVD has given me a lot of joy.

Hated it at the time, don't remember much about it now.

there's an interesting essay on this film in a book called Screen Violence. some of it is here

http://www.uni-kiel.de/medien/speakingup.html

Loved it at the time, still loved it when I watched it again about a year ago.

Saw an advance screening of this way back when, recall thinking it was pretty much bullshit. Recently read some reappraisals, saw it again, still think it's largely bullshit. Don't like Ralph in it, in a proto-Bradley Cooper role. Don't like Sizemore. Never liked Lewis. Directed well, but she did the best with material that never quite justified itself.

Juliette Lewis is the nightmare that never ends. She's only one of many things wrong with this movie, though.

it's very very bad. I saw it at a test screening though and I think what I saw was even worse than the final edit. Because I distinctly remember a scene where Ralph Feinnes cries and talks about finding Juliette Lewis' character as "a little, tiny hooker" which had me howling for weeks. But when I saw it again on video I don't remember that being there.

it was there

just watched this, darraghmac otm. movie is long, stupid, self-congratulatory, gratuitous, ugly and unpleasant. gesturing at all kinds of areas where it could Say Something, but not saying it. we watched johnny mnemonic six months ago and that was goofy and stupid but i would sooo rather watch that again than this.

thank u

I tried to watch it the other day while I was ill because of positive comparisons to Existenz (which I enjoyed). It started badly and I got no further than that. Also, if it was made in 1995 and set in 1999 what sort of insane stuff would have happened to the world have seen such a dramatic change?

I would have bet money it either (a) started as a generic noir script revolving around cassette tapes and had the scifi stuff grafted on later to make it 'edgy' or (b) started as a serious post-Rodney-King script about LA and police brutality but nobody wanted to touch it, so it languished in Hollywood accumulating plot jetsam. Some combination of the two maybe explains the weird 'three years from now' deal. Or maybe, (c) it started out as a more futuristic thing and someone figured it'd be cheaper to just set it in the present with this one poorly-explained new technology.

so the downtown LA NYE party scene the ends the film was a real party that i attended . Deee-lite played and there were actors in tanks lining the closed off downtown streets .

wow awesome

"In order to get the large crowd scene around the Bonaventure hotel, the director hired rave promoter Philip Blaine to produce an event featuring Aphex Twin and Deee-Lite. The event was called Millennium (based on the film's plot that it was a New Year's Eve 2000 party) and tickets were only $10 plus food and drink was free. The reported attendance was 14,000 people. The event went until 2 a.m. when the fire marshall called it off because there was several inches of confetti around the entire site and cigarette butts were starting to cause little fires. No one was hurt.'

i don't recall leaving until the sun was well up so maybe we just didn't pay much attention to the fire marshall .

Rave Party Extras Are 'Deee-Lited' : Drug overdoses mar otherwise orderly concert for 10,000 who also are filmed for movie scene.

September 19, 1994|STEVE HOCHMAN | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

New Year's 2000 occurred at 10:14 Saturday night . . . and again at 10:29 . . . and again . . . and again . . . and again. Each time with as many as 10,000 people cheering and hooting in a rainbow rain of confetti as soldiers wielding M-16s stood on top of Humvees to deal with spreading civil unrest.

At least that's what happened at the corner of 5th and Flower streets, between the Bonaventure Hotel and the Central Library in downtown L.A.

Of course it was all Hollywood fantasy, with the scene being shot (and re-shot) for a movie and the many paying extras lured by a "rave" concert featuring performances by neo-disco group Deee-Lite and techno composer-deejay Aphex Twin.

The colorful, future-technology orientation of the rave world is itself fairly fantastic, so it made a good match for the film, an action-adventure titled "Strange Days."

One element of reality did interfere in the wee hours when five people were hospitalized for what were believed to be overdoses of the hallucinogenic drug Ecstasy, a common presence on the rave scene.

That led police to order the revelry stopped shortly before it was scheduled to end at 4 a.m., though no other serious problems were reported. A police spokesman said later Sunday morning that the event had gone smoothly, considering its complex logistics.

By the time Deee-Lite hit the stage at 12:35 a.m., the crowd had celebrated so many New Years for the cameras that it really felt like the turn of the millennium. But that didn't mean the throng's party energy was spent, thanks in large part to the, well, delightful performance by the New York act.

Though the new "Dewdrops in the Garden" album may not really show it, Deee-Lite singer Lady Kier has an abundance of the one thing really missing from the techno scene: personality--and enough of it conceivably to bring the group back from the one-hit-wonderdom it slipped into after 1990's irresistible single "Groove Is in the Heart."

In truth, Deee-Lite is not really a techno act, but a frothy disco troupe, bringing the Manhattan club vibe of the '70s firmly into the '90s, with the sexual liberation message still strong. The key difference is that now it's not so much liberation from social repression as from AIDS-era fears.

If the crowd's fashions are any indication, a new generation has been aching to break free of that fear, with decadent gender-bending encroaching on the rave-standard grunge-meets-Dr. Seuss styles. And Kier looked like the perfect trend leader, playfully romping with two agile male dancers through homemade routines that looked like low-rent Madonna, without the ego.

And, oh yeah, Kier is a better singer than Madonna, too.

In sharp contrast, Aphex Twin (Richard Barnes) showed absolutely zip personality as a performer when he went on at about 2:30, merely standing at the back of the stage twiddling knobs and working turntables.

But what twiddling! Artfully sculpting beats, he carved wondrous soundscapes out of the kind of techno repetition that left to others is too often somnolent. If he and Deee-Lite are indeed an indication of what this music will be like in five years, it's in good hands.

The music, actually, has nothing to do with "Strange Days," being produced by James Cameron ("True Lies," the "Terminator" movies), directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett and Juliette Lewis. To the filmmakers, this event was merely a way to provide an appropriate backdrop for what is apparently a climactic scene in the action adventure. Presumably it was worth the reported $750,000 tab for the night (including renting out half the 1,300 rooms in the Bonaventure).

But to the rave-goers--most paid $10 in advance to attend but others apparently just walked in--the filming was merely the backdrop to their main party event, said by promoters to be the largest rave ever held in the U.S. The filming and the setting--with a high-profile police and security presence that had little to do to control the well-behaved crowd--robbed it of any sense of underground cachet, once the currency of the rave world.

And a number of regular ravers complained that it was too "bright" to be a real rave. But maybe it's time for this scene's music to really come into the light.

wow hard to believe this was '94

lol "merely standing at the back of the stage twiddling knobs and working turntables."

i'm just pissed because i dont remeber the free food.

lol Richard Barnes.

hallucinogenic drug Ecstasy

This movie is so awful

I can't believe everyone hates this! Sure, it’s silly, and Tom Sizemore is way over-the-top, but it really commits to its candy-colored absurdity and Angela Bassett is terrific.

gesturing at all kinds of areas where it could Say Something, but not saying it.

Was going to say otm (but, so what?)... Then I read that piece piscesx linked to upthread and now I think there's Something there. And I don’t know how anyone could call it ugly. I mean:

http://i609.photobucket.com/albums/tt171/shieldmaiden_pics/fgt/strange14s.jpg

http://i609.photobucket.com/albums/tt171/shieldmaiden_pics/fgt/strange20s.jpg

thats mad ugly

I didn't hate it, didn't love it. I would take this over JN in a one on one though.

and god Sizemore, urgh.

I felt like the attempts to deal with race relations, police brutality and social injustice all felt superficial, and kind of didn't make sense from scene to scene. (Especially the last scene at the big rave: these cops are just driving through the crowd shooting random protestors down and nobody seems to really notice? And then the cheezy thing where the one child is able to motivate the group to stop the riot police from beating Angela Bassett? And how cheap is it for the whole thing to hinge on "should we release this damning tape???" and then everything's hunky-dory because the Good White Police Chief sees the tape and brings Justice - - - wow, if only there had been a tape of Rodney King for the white police to see oh wait).

The more traditionally sci-fi attempts at depth regarding this weird technology and what it says about identity or memory - there's at least stuff there that you could take away and have deeper thoughts with than the movie does. But the technology itself is kind of poorly worked out so half the time you're pausing to question what's happening and how people are reacting rather than dealing with any number of interesting things that could have (or have) become good movies if they were really the thematic focus: (1) obsessing over your own past through mediated representations of it (even more pertinent in the Facebook era), (2) getting hooked on virtual worlds at the expense of the real (even more pertinent in the ILX era), (3) various forms of media escapism more generally (pornography, torture porn, celebrity life journalism etc.), (4) seeing things through someone else's eyes, philosophically quite interesting (does this mean you actually are them, meaningfully?) and also lots of potential interfaces with the other story about a divided society and political conflict (not explored) or at a personal level how you and someone you know/love really see each other (hinted at, not developed), (5) hyperreality stuff - if this technology can create perfect facsimiles, what does 'reality' really mean (aka what The Matrix would run with a few years later), etc. etc.

There's mountains of material here, but the movie sort of throws it at a wall hopefully. Feels like it was written from "imagine if there's this technology...it sure would be crazy, huh?", rather than "this technology lets us make a movie that's about X, Y, or Z." One of those could have been a stone cold classic sci-fi film.

only on the onion v/r club

No mention of classic ‘90s villain guy Michael Wincott itt — talk about a guy who had the market cornered for a minute. Major bad guy roles in Costner Robin Hood, 1492, rat pack Three Musketeers, The Crow, Metro, and of course his “not a bad guy, just an asshole” role here. Roles seem to have dried up for him but my understanding is he has a decent part in NOPE?

yes, he's great!