As the Holiday Season keeps chugging along, New Year’s Eve looms close on the horizon, and if you’re anything like me or Brian, you’re way less interested in dragging yourself to some lame party to ring in the new year than you are in finding a movie to watch into the early hours of the morning. I mean, why bother busting your ass to get to some party that’s probably gonna suck anyway, when you can curl up in front of the TV and watch a New Year’s classic guaranteed to entertain you? To help answer this question Brian and I are offering up some of our favourite NYE films from the Vault this week. Mine? Strange Days.
Written by James Cameron and directed by Kathryn Bigelow (two of the most buzz-worthy names in film this year), Strange Days takes place in the run-up to New Year’s Eve 1999, with the entire world on edge for reasons other than the Y2K bug. What’s the problem? People feel the world is right on the edge of a revolution - an explosion against racial inequality and financial disparity – and our anti-hero Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) holds the match that might light that powderkeg in the form of a video of 2 cops executing a world famous hip-hop rabble-rouser.
In this future concocted by James Cameron, a new gadget has been created that allows people to record their experiences, all five senses included, and play it share it with other people. As one might expect the voyeuristic possibilities are limitless, people step into the life of an armed robber, take a shower in the body of a 16 year-old girl, or pine over a lost love by reliving your favourite moments with them. When a friend of Lenny’s records a traffic stop that turns into an execution, she passes off the recording to Lenny just before she’s murdered by a mysterious sociopath/peeping tom who soon sets his sights on Lenny. Fortunately, Lenny has the ultra-buff Angela Bassett watching his back to keep him just on the edge of trouble rather than way deep in it. This is my favourite performance by Bassett ever, and one of my favourite tough-guy/tough-girl performances ever.
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