Strange Days. - movie review

National Review, Nov 6, 1995 by John Simon

SINCE everybody writing about film, and everybody not writing about film, has seen fit to carry on about sex and violence in the movies -- as unsunderable, it appears, as a bicycle built for two, hence to be discussed only in tandem -- I resolved to abstain. But a time comes for all good resolutions to be relinquished, and when a bunch of pictures from Seven (which I have yet to see) to Dead Presidents (which I have yet to forget) is ravaging our screens, I must lock horns with the inevitable. Let me concentrate on Strange Days, which has garnered critical enthusiasm; Assassins, on which reviewers are divided; and Showgirls, which has aroused universal ridicule.

One problem with film criticism is that it is probably the most disregarded branch of reviewing. Books take time to read, serious music and fine arts require specialized knowledge, theater is expensive, and dance is bedevilingly ubiquitous. In all these, some guidance is welcome. But everyone knows everything there is to know about movies, right? So why bother with reviews? Considering who writes them these days, I must reluctantly agree.

A general consideration first. Sex and violence may or may not be damaging to young minds, but they are certainly stultifying to older ones. We must, of course, distinguish between films that include sex and/or violence, and films that are sex and/or violence from end to end. Abuses, possible among the former, are almost inevitable in the latter. Why? Because whereas other subjects -- e.g., love, politics, war, human stupidity -- are susceptible to endless permutations, sex and/or violence, stretched to fill an entire movie, can do only one thing: escalate. Sex must become bigger (in duration, number of participants, unsubtlety) or kinkier -- usually both; violence has to become, simply or complicatedly, more violent. Those are the only possible progressions, and while intelligent people may disagree on the moral issues, anyone with an iota of aesthetic sensibility (a/k/a taste) ought to be able to spot surfeit, monotony, boredom.

Alas, it ain't so. To an entomologist, the dung beetle provides endless fascination; for the aficionados of sex or violence, the approach is similarly entomological. Many, probably most, people have some curiosity about sex and violence, and both can be decidedly photogenic. What I find hard to concede --or even to fathom -- is the current insatiability: two to two and a half hours of S&V keeping viewers as contented as pigs in clover -- the three- leafed variety at that, with no hope or desire for the four-leaf.

Showgirls, however, has managed to disappoint even the most assiduous seekers of sex in movies. Written by Joe Eszterhas, who gets millions for a screenplay, and directed by Paul Verhoeven, considered a specialist in sex, Showgirls (so much beneath this team's interesting Basic Instinct) merely shows that you cannot make hardcore pornography as a big-budget, major-studio release. Even though, as here, the NC-17 rating was happily accepted -- indeed, sought -- the kind of hardcore that thrives unrated in obscure fleabags was shied away from. Hence the movie was obliged to substitute for certain impermissibles a plot, a story -- something unconscionable in the realms of pristine pornography.

The idea was to explore what goes on in the hotels, dance halls, and strip joints of Las Vegas -- to go behind the scenes and expose the private lives behind the publicly exposed bodies. I have no doubt that such backstage and bedroom goings-on are seamy, and that some of the language must be the kind used in this film. But to keep up my interest for 130 minutes would take more than generally splendid naked or near-naked bodies plastered all over, with generally trite and improbable dialogue and action filling the interstices.

The dialogue includes the possible, such as a showgirl saying, "I want my nipples to press, but I don't want them to look like they're levitating." Also the impossible, such as the manager of the low-grade Cheetah coming to see his ex-star now featured at the high-grade Stardust, and saying to her backstage, "Must be weird not to have anyone coming on you." The latter also explains the raucous guffaws with which the audience generously salutes much here that is meant to be erotic or serious.

Assassins, directed by Richard Donner, is the kind of movie whose press kit lists seven producers, headed by the obnoxious Joel Silver, ahead of the three writers, who, however, prove to be equally obnoxious. And, further, the kind of movie whose plot you cannot really follow because it is a) convoluted beyond unscrambling by the ordinary brain, b) distasteful beyond endurance by a normal stomach, and c) stupid.

We are asked to concern ourselves with the rivalry between the world's No. 1 and No. 2 hitmen, sometimes almost friendly, but mostly lethal. There is Sylvester Stallone as the cool hitman, his features in a permanent mournful scowl, as if a hundred hangdog Hamlets were trying to squeeze through a hairnet. Challenging him is Antonio Banderas as the hot hitman, something like a trigger- happy laughing hyena, always over the top as well as over the sides and bottom. Both actors have a certain advantage vis-a-vis the screenplay "by Andy Wachowski & Larry Wachowski and Brian Helgeland" (where "&" in current credit parlance means collaboration, whereas "and" means earlier version or rewrite): Mr. Banderas because his thick Spanish accent makes him often unintelligible, Mr. Stallone because his lethargic delivery makes him frequently inaudible.