Tag: Juliette Lewis

Rapid Response: Strange Days

“Strange Days,” Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film, from a story by Jay Cocks and her then husband James Cameron, imagines through a sci-fi lens what 1999 Los Angeles might resemble had race riots never stopped and perpetuated into a dystopian police state.

StrangeDaysPosterOne might assume that a film set at the dawn of the new millennium and about the fear of Y2K might feel a hair dated. But while that aspect does, “Strange Days” touches on a subject that’s been more than prevalent in 2015.

Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film, from a story by Jay Cocks and her then husband James Cameron, imagines through a sci-fi lens what near-future Los Angeles and Hollywood might resemble had race riots never stopped and perpetuated into a mildly dystopian police state. It was released just four years after the Rodney King beating, and it uses the death of an iconic rapper named Jeriko One to act as a martyr and catalyst for all the unrest. Back when the film was released, Tupac Shakur and his eventual death in 1996 came to mind. Today, any of the black men wrongly killed and captured on video will do.

The reason though “Strange Days’s” concept of race feels so poignant has all to do with its sci-fi parameters. In the near future, the police have introduced a tool called a “Squid” that can capture a person’s live experience, from their point of view, as they’re living and experiencing it. People can then enter into “playbacks” that allow you to relive and feel what that person felt.

Now the technology is used on the black market, and Ralph Fiennes plays Lenny Nero, the “Santa Claus of the Subconscious” who sells sexual and thrill seeking experiences like it’s a drug. At the start of the film, we witness a crew robbing a restaurant and then falling to his death as he escapes from the cops. Bigelow shoots in a shaky-cam, first person POV that pre-dates found footage films and makes for some gripping action. Lenny himself is an addict for “jacking in”, or “wire tripping”, as Lenny says, as he obsesses over old memories of him with his former girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis). But when someone starts leaving threatening videos for him to watch, Lenny and his tough friend Mace (Angela Bassett) are on the run from both a madman and a pair of renegade cops.

The plot twist for what’s causing Lenny to be on the run is captured in a video involving the death of Jeriko, and it inherently brings to mind the cell phone videos that have sparked protests today. But after the events of the past year, one has to wonder if the outrage, animosity and eventual justice seen here is just another part of “Strange Days’s” fantasy.

Part of the problem with “Strange Days” is that the race riots are hardly even the main focus of the film. Made for $42 million back in the ’90s, the film was a giant flop that raked in only $7 million. One of the film’s trailers touches on just how all over the place “Strange Days” is, with a heavy focus on the sci-fi, a conspiracy mystery and the fear of what’s to come on New Year’s Eve 1999.

That’s not to say Cameron and Cocks’s story is bad or unfocused, but it drags to over two and half hours and feels like it has two endings, one to confront the sadistic madman threatening Lenny and Faith, and the other to confront the cops who want the tape Lenny is hiding. And the thread connecting these two plot strands is tenuous at best.

But you wish Bigelow did take a bigger interest in the unique sci-fi angle of the story. “Strange Days” becomes strictly procedural in its last hour or so, whereas other sci-fis that take us inside people’s minds, like “Minority Report,” “A.I.,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Being John Malkovich”, to name just a few, go deep into psychological implications; “Strange Days” only considers these brain-teasing pleasures and consequences superficially.

Bigelow does however put the POV perspective to powerful, action heavy use, implicating the viewer in some of the film’s more depraved moments. If you thought Bigelow was advocating for torture in “Zero Dark Thirty” and that those scenes were rough, try on the rape scene in “Strange Days”. A masked intruder sneaks into a woman’s hotel room and begins to rape and strangle her, but before he finishes, he places a viewing device on her head, forcing her to watch herself die from the eyes of her killer. Lovely.

That scene could be debated for days. More simply however, while Angela Bassett kicks ass and dominates the screen in Bigelow’s stylish fights, and Juliette Lewis commands a a handful of grungy rock performances, Ralph Fiennes seems strangely miscast. Only his fifth film role at the time, it’s hard to imagine him as the steamy count in “The English Patient” or the sinister Amon Goethe in “Schindler’s List”, let alone any of his more recent iconic roles. He has the sleazy, slick, fast-talking demeanor of James Woods and the ’90s haircut of Nicolas Cage. He’s not the action star, but audiences should appreciate the depth he and the cast bring to “Strange Days’s” more melodramatic moments.

If anything, the interesting foibles of “Strange Days” demonstrate that Bigelow was well on her way to becoming a master. It’s just hard to “jack in” to that frame of mind.

Rapid Response: Cape Fear (1991)

Sometimes you wonder when you’re watching “Cape Fear” if Martin Scorsese was making a remake of the 1962 horror movie or of “Vertigo.”

He’s got the Saul Bass title sequence, the Elmer Bernstein score channeling Bernard Hermann, Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum in minor cameos, stark fades into solid colors and a film that is intentionally pitched at a level of sheer insanity.

“Cape Fear” was not well received by critics upon its release. It was seen as yet another genre picture by a director capable of so much more, least of all immediately after the masterpiece that was “Goodfellas” a year prior. But it has a lot more style and personality from Scorsese than “The Color of Money” did, because Scorsese isn’t just looking to make a genre picture but a film with dark characters, heavy themes, strong cinematic references, big ideas and even bigger performances.

Robert De Niro is so effing brilliant as the sadistic ex-con Max Cady. It hearkens back to a time when De Niro actually, you know, acted. In terrorizing Nick Nolte and his family, he has this calming, charming, attractive eloquence that puts the rest of the family’s neurotic insanity into perspective. He pulls a lot from Robert Mitchum’s playbook for his performances in both the original “Cape Fear” and “The Night of the Hunter,” but he makes the character his own. He displays charismatic insanity and proves to be capable of surprising violence and intensity.

So thanks to his performance, Scorsese is able to go ape shit. Nolte, Jessica Lange and a young Juliette Lewis are all flawed, weak members of their own dysfunctional family, but ultimately they’re fairly thin, capable of going crazy with just a little prodding. Scorsese has them and us jumping at just the sound of a phone ringing, jolting the camera towards it and blaring its ringing aggressively. Later, Scorsese turns our world upside down and dangles us by a thread, with the camera in a close up of De Niro hanging from a pull up bar, his hair flailing wildly like the Joker in “The Dark Knight.”

This Max Cady character, what with his clever ability to never cross into territory of breaking the law, always finding ways to get one step ahead of Nolte and nitpick at his mind, the bible warnings printed all over his body and finally his superhuman strength against thugs and lighter fluid, he strikes me as more of an allegory about insanity than an actual person. But the sheer madness of the film’s final moments as Cady continues fighting and screaming against all odds even goes beyond the stretches of what could possibly be considered allegorical.

“Cape Fear” is possibly more exaggerated and intense than even something like “Shutter Island,” another Scorsese that veered from his comfort zone into the realm of madness. But it resonated with audiences as the 12th highest grossing movie of 1991 and earned De Niro his most recent Oscar nomination for Best Actor. It’s by far not the finest work from Scorsese but so indicative of how versatile an artist he has become in the modern day.

Rapid Response: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

I recently wrote a story on a film series at the IU Cinema on Disability Awareness Films as part of Indiana’s Disability Awareness Month that you can read here, and although the interviews I did drastically changed the way I thought about disabilities, I wondered if a movie, especially tonight’s screening of “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” could do the same.

The movie is sweet and saccharine with some melodrama that surprisingly never steps too far, but when you consider all it does wonderfully in depicting disabilities as a natural part of everyday life, you begin to realize how special the film is.

The story is of a family of four young adults living and caring with their morbidly obese mother in a small town. Gilbert Grape (Johnny Depp) does a lot of work around the house and around town and is also the primary care giver for his autistic younger brother Arnie (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The beauty of the story in relation to disabilities is that the handicapped individuals are hardly one-dimensional figures made to pose problems or melodrama for the able bodied people. Both the mother and Arnie are endearing, likeable, emotional, display growth and are not defined by their disabilities. For instance, the mother’s disability is not really obesity but grief over the death of her husband.

The film treats the problems of disabled people as just another complication in a normal day, and we see depth in that this is really a story of being stuck and being judged. Gilbert is stuck inside his hometown, the mother is trapped in her home, Arnie is trapped within his own mind, Gilbert’s new-found girlfriend Becky is literally stuck in this town in the middle of nowhere, and a local married woman having an affair with Gilbert is first stuck in a dysfunctional family and is later surrounded by accusations of her killing her husband.

“Gilbert Grape” is perhaps little seen today but well heard of because it happens to be a remarkable time capsule with a million now famous actors doing things radically different from what they’re doing today. Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Juliette Lewis, Mary Steenburgen, John C. Reiley and Crispin Glover all have early, major roles, and just about all of them are wonderful.

You could talk for hours about how good Leo is as someone with autism. He was rightfully nominated for an Oscar, but you watch him act and can hardly see the actor he is today, let alone would be within just years of that performance as a teen heartthrob. He’s so natural, as if he was an actual autistic actor, and his portrayal is considered remarkably accurate.

This is also a great everyman performance for Johnny Depp. It’s very understated and reserved, and yet he displays some touching range and emotion. I wonder whatever happened to that actor.