Bringing Out the Dead

 Year:  1999

Director:  Martin Scorsese

Screenplay:  Paul Schrader, based on the novel Bringing Out the Dead by Joe Connelly

Starring:  Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, John Goodman, Ving Rhames, Tom Sizemore

Running Time:  121 minutes

Genre:  Drama

New York City, the early 1990s:  Burned-out paramedic Frank Pierce (Cage) works the night shift.  Depressed, unable to sleep, and wracked with guilt for those he has not been able to save, Frank begins to hallucinate the patients he has lost.  After responding to a call about a man suffering cardiac arrest, Frank forms a tentative friendship with the man's daughter Mary (Arquette).

On it's release in 1999, this bleak urban drama was seen as a follow-up to Taxi Driver (1976), another collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader.  Both films tell the stories of nocturnal workers in a hellish urban environment, and have strong themes of guilt and redemption.  However, while Robert De Niro, as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, finds his salvation in violence, Frank Pierce is essentially a compassionate man, trying to do the right thing in a broken, fallen world.  The film take place over the course of a weekends Frank and his fellow paramedics make the rounds tending to the sick and wounded of night-time New York, and delivering them to the overcrowded, understaffed and under equipped hospital.  Nicolas Cage gives one of his best performances as the haunted Frank Pierce, deathly pale, with sunken red-rimmed eyes, he looks like someone who hasn't slept in weeks, his slow drawl fitting Frank's laconic narration, and even the scenes where Cage delivers some of his more trademark over the top moments, it fits with Frank's mania at that point in the film.  Patricia Arquette delivers a quietly powerful performance as compassionate drug addict Mary, who becomes Frank's angel of mercy.  Sharing Frank's season in hell are Larry (John Goodman), Frank's friend,  Marcus (Ving Rhames), an eccentric devoutly religious paramedic who enjoys flirting with the dispatcher and organises a prayer circle among clubbers while he and Frank try and save an overdose victim; and Tom (Tom Sizemore), a wild paramedic who enjoys beating people up when he's bored.  This is a violent, and dark film, which is sometimes hard to watch and often disturbing, but it is visually impressive, with the fast cutting between flashing ambulance lights, and the camera tearing down the streets of New York, it's also very funny, albeit with humour of the darkest variety, such as Frank begging his boss to fire him at the start ion every shift, and some surprisingly surreal imagery.  It is a tough watch, and failed at the box office when it was released, but it is one of Scorsese's most powerful and underrated works.

Nicolas Cage in Bringing Out the Dead
  

Strange Days

Year of Release:  1995
Director:  Kathryn Bigelow
Screenplay:  James Cameron and Jay Cocks, from a story by James Cameron
Starring:  Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Vincent D'Onofrio, Michael Wincott
Running Time:  145 minutes
Genre:  Science-fiction, thriller

Set during the last two days of 1999, in a nightmarish Los Angeles on the verge of all-out war, the film tells the story of Lenny (Fiennes), an ex-cop turned black market distributor of illegal virtual reality recordings (known as "SQUIDS") which allow the user to relive the memories and experiences of the recorder.  When Lenny stumbles upon a recording of a murder, he and his friend Mace (Bassett) find themselves the targets of a high-level conspiracy.

Watched now, this film feels like a dry-run for Bigleow's Detroit (2017), dealing with similar themes of racial tension and police corruption albeit in a science-fiction setting.  The film is visually stylish, and Bigelow is an excellent action director ensuring that the set-pieces are well-staged, and she creates a real apocalyptic feel to the whole thing.  However the film feels stretched and strangely dated, inevitably due to the setting and the technology, and it never quite escapes it's mid 1990s roots, also Fiennes is too clean-cut for the scuzzy Lenny.  Angela Bassett is impressive, though, as the ass-kicking limo driver, Mace.        

To be fair, it's not really a bad film, and cyberpunk fans should enjoy it, but it's certainly not spectacular. 

Ralph Fiennes and Angel Bassett in Strange Days

Natural Born Killers

Year: 1994
Director: Oliver Stone
Screenplay: Oliver Stone, Dave Veloz and Richard Rutowski, from a story by Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis, Robert Downey, Jr., Tom Sizemore, Tommy Lee Jones, Rodney Dangerfield
Running Time: 119 minutes, and a 123 minute Director's Cut
Genre: Crime, thriller, action, satire, dark comedy

Opinions: Mickey Knox (Harrelson) and Mallory Knox (Lewis) are a married pair of serial killers who leave a swathe of murder and devastation over the southern USA. They are chased by unbalanced celebrity cop Jack Scagnetti (Sizemore), who has a personal mission against serial killers, and sleazy Australian television personality Wayne Gale (Downey, Jr.), host and producer of popular true-crime show American Maniacs, alongside almost every law enforcement agency in the USA.
While seeking treatment for a rattlesnake bite, Mickey and Mallory are arrested, after a three week crime spree that has left fifty-two people dead. A year later they are in prison, and the warden, Dwight McClusky (Jones), enlists Scagnetti to help transport the two to a mental hospital with the understanding that they will be killed on the way. However, Mickey has plans of his own and agrees to a live TV interview with Gale as tensions in the prison approach boiling point.

Opinions: This film, based loosely on an original screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, was hugely controversial on its orignally release for its arguable glamorising of the violence. The movie utilises almost every cinematic technique in the book, the film stock changes seemingly at random, moves from colour to black-and-white, tinted images, weird camera angles, animation, on-screen captions, stock footage, distorted images, clips from TV shows and movies, a frenzied editing style and weird back-projection. Some scenes detailing Mallory's abusive family life are even shot in the style of an old TV sitcom. This is combined with a frenetic and eclectic soundtrack which blends in everything from classical to country to hard rock.
Woody Harrelson is genuinely terrifying as the charismatic but murderous Mickey, and he gets strong support from Juliette Lewis as the frenzied Mallory, both of whom manage to be genuinely touching in their romantic scenes. Tom Sizemore also works well as the sinister cop on their trail. However both Robert Downey, Jr. and Tommy Lee Jones are completely over the top as the TV journalist and prison warden respectively. Which does largely fit in with Stone's excessive style.
The movie is an attack on the way that the media ostensibly condemns criminals while at the same time glamorising them, which is not a particularly new point, and it's treatment here is not in any way subtle, but is effective.
The film is still shocking and disturbing though more for it's style than for anything really in the content. It has aged surprisingly well, and remains a striking and memorable viewing experience.



Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis pose for the camera in Natural Born Killers