Catherine Bigelow is not the kind of female director who needs her ex-husband, although her ex-husband is James Cameron, who is respected as the "God of Card".
Back then, Cameron went to the set hoping to find an actress, only to find the female director Catherine Bigelow who was "like" himself. Both are workaholics, tyrants on the set. Cameron was very surprised to see a female version of himself on the set, coupled with the talent of the other side, so the two married soon. But two years later, the peaceful divorce was announced. We fall in love with ourselves, but often the person we hate most is also ourselves. Combine a pirated version of yourself as the other half, and you can imagine the result.
The combination failed, but the two established a strong friendship. In 2008, Cameron took out the "Avatar" that he had honed for ten years . The world is crazy, the box office is at a new high, and the Oscar is almost one-sided. Just when everyone was about to watch the "coronation" of the God of Cards, the judges "unkindly" awarded the best film and best director to his ex-wife Catherine Bigelow and her film "The Hurt Locker" .
Kashen watched his ex-wife on stage to accept the award twice, and the two still embraced each other deeply, but the super close-ups given by the camera still captured the loss and embarrassment that Kashen had inadvertently revealed.
Since then, no one has called Catherine Bigelow the ex-wife of James Cameron. Of course, this is something.
Catherine Bigelow once said: I can do better with men!
James Cameron is estimated to be the first person to recognize this sentence, so a few years after the two divorced, a film project called "Strange Days" was handed over to Catherine Bigelow. This is a movie about the millennium. Cameron was not able to do so at the time. Seeing that the year 2000 was approaching, he simply handed over the project to the reliable Catherine Bigelow, and became a producer and screenwriter. So " Strange Days" was born!
It is no exaggeration to say that even if the film is released to the present, it is still not out of date. The film uses the last few days of 1999 as the story node, telling a bizarre story that happened at the end of the world.
The leading actor, Lenni, a desolate former policeman, after resigning from the police station, started to steal and sell "other people's memories ."
At that time, the FBI developed a set of machines that can record the memories of others, hoping to fight crime by this. As a result, the crime rate is still rising, but the machines are traded on the black market, and people can experience the experiences and feelings of others through the machines. Lenni is a good pirate, an excellent Santa Claus, a priest who has no intention of inserting a willow, but also a crappy psychiatrist. He understands the needs of others, and sells his memory to his opponent, but he is also obsessed with the past. Like others, he is just a slave of desire. One day, a prostitute who provided him with memories and experiences found him nervously and said that he had very important memories to sell to him. Before Lenni had time to experience the valuation, the disc was accidentally taken away, and he was worried about the car being dragged. He didn't pay attention to the other party's panic at all, until the prostitute was brutally killed and found out that he was being followed, he didn't notice much of it.
The memory of the dead prostitute will cause great social unrest. In Leni's words, "If it is announced, it will really be the end of the world"! "Last Century Riot" is extremely avant-garde, trying to explore the difference between reality and illusion . This illusion is different from the "mime virtual world" of other science fiction films. This illusion is the real memory of others, but for the experiencer, it has The element of illusion is the perfect representation of the desire of the other.
Lenni is a veteran of peddling desires . His slogan is: "I am your priest, your psychiatrist, and I will take you to those hallucinations that make you dream of." When he met with his friend who lost his legs and was unable to walk, he provided his friend with the memory of a person running on the beach. In the memory, there are also the greetings of a beautiful bodybuilder and him. The legs are the most eye-catching existence in it, which is self desire. The perfect fusion of the desires of the other.
It's just that when the friend wakes up from the machine, a great sadness takes him. The happiness of regaining his legs was short-lived, and a stronger sadness swallowed him, reminding him of the gap between illusion and reality.
Lenni is a good trafficker, but definitely a bad psychiatrist. Because even he himself was indulged in the illusion of desire brought by the machine.
He is always excited to experience the sweet past between him and his ex-girlfriend Fez again and again, and he has become accustomed to having a love affair with hallucinations. But when the memory visit was over, the loneliness of returning to reality made him miserable again. Those sweet as addictive poisons, with strong side effects, make people reluctant to give up.
The memory capture and experience machine in the film unravels the unsolvable way of the desire to imitate: taking others as an example, and at the same time outlawing the obstacle of others. That is to be able to occupy the position of others without struggle, competition or encountering resistance. But this way of satisfying desires is only a fleeting compensation, which always brings bitterness back to reality. The more satisfying it is, the more it deepens people's loss. This method is both fascinating and cruel. The problem Cheney encountered was not as simple as imprisoning himself in loneliness, but in the absence of the other party and the other's desires , he still wanted to return that past time.
In reality, being rejected by the matured Fez again and again, and being beaten by Fez's current boyfriend, a prestigious musician, shows the toxicity of hallucinations and desires. In "Being and Desire", Sartre mentioned: The eyes cannot be seen. Once I look at the eyes, it will disappear immediately, and all I see are the eyes.
The first second of the film is a close-up of human eyes . Moreover, the film also uses a large number of "first-person" perspectives, giving people a VR-like visual experience. The strong style of handheld photography gives the film a different viewing experience.
In the film, when a character uses a memory device, seeing and being watched , experiencing and anti-experiencing, form a complex polygonal prism relationship. Someone even forced to open the other's eyes and exchange equipment after killing others, so that the deceased could experience himself from the perspective of others after being killed.
This perverted behavior hopes to double the toxicity and efficacy of hallucinations, and amplify the pleasure of pain and deformity. But the desires of others can only be understood and interpreted by others . Mutual love cannot be maintained forever. If you want to imprison others in the past, the punishment will be toward an empty and dead future. At the end of the film, the film brings the protagonist back to reality on both social and personal levels. The controversial video was handed over to the righteous police chief by the hero and heroine;
And Cheney finally got rid of his inextricable desire for Fez, and found true love within reach. Man is such a strange species, obsessed with unavailable illusions, yet blind to the love that can be touched by reality. Hope that others will always be consistent with the past time, this is a pathological change of desire. Cheney hopes that desire will never change. However, the essence of desire is freedom and nothingness . Desire does not promise anything, it never knows what it promises. Because once desire gives a promise, it is no longer desire. Cheney and the heroine kissed each other in the first minute of the new century. He finally no longer desires the other's desires, he becomes the desire itself.
"The Last Century Riot", a science fiction film wrapped in desire, encountered box office Waterloo that year, invested 40 million yuan, and only won more than 7 million box office. It contains an avant-garde core of science fiction, as well as fierce accusations and representations of racial discrimination beyond many pseudo-black films.
It can only be said that the birth is not at the right time, it is too advanced!
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