Strange Days (Bigelow, 1995): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8pm
This screening is part of the Woman with a Movie Camera strand at BFI Southbank.
Chicago Reader review:
LA, Year Zero: 30 December 1999. Riot police are on the streets. The
angry, poor, disenfranchised - the blacks - are ready to tear down the
walls of the city. Yet Lenny Nero fiddles while LA burns. A sleazeball
in an Armani suit, Lenny's dealing illicit 'playback clips', raw human
experience recorded direct from the cerebral cortex. Bigelow's
spectacular millennial maelstrom has divided critics, and apparently
repelled audiences. Written by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, this is tech-noir,
action movie and love story rolled into one. It also pursues a
sophisticated treatise on the nature of voyeurism, the psychic dangers
of vicarious entertainment and cinema itself. A sequence in which Nero
watches a snuff clip of rape and murder has excited accusations of
exploitation and hypocrisy. It's certainly hard to stomach, but then
shouldn't it be? The impeccable moral centre is to be found in Bassett's
karate-chopping single mother 'Mace', who rescues Lenny from his own
faithless stupor. Nero isn't irredeemable, either: Fiennes makes him a
persuasively seedy knight errant. In fact, despite its own barely
suppressed despair, the film exhibits markedly progressive leanings.
Flawed, but often brilliant, provocative film-making.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
No comments:
Post a Comment