Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, 1990)

Jamie Lee Curtis in Blue Steel

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Ron Silver, Clancy Brown, Elizabeth Peña, Louise Fletcher, Philip Bosco, Kevin Dunn, Richard Jenkins. Screenplay: Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Red. Cinematography: Amir Mokri. Production design: Toby Corbett. Film editing: Lee Percy. Music: Brad Fiedel. 

Whatever points Kathryn Bigelow may earn for style in her direction of Blue Steel have to be offset by the fact that she co-wrote (with Eric Red) its nonsensical screenplay. Jamie Lee Curtis plays a rookie cop who becomes the obsession of a psychotic commodities trader and serial killer played by Ron Silver. The setup isn't a bad one, but the film is padded out with an unnecessary subplot in which Curtis's character is trying to persuade her mother (Louise Fletcher) to leave her abusive father (Philip Bosco) and a gratuitous sex scene before the expected final shootout. Bigelow demonstrated her gift for narrative economy in The Hurt Locker (2008) and for over-the-top action sequences in Point Break (1991). Blue Steel could use both.  

The Loveless (Kathryn Bigelow, Monty Montgomery, 1981)

Willem Dafoe in The Loveless

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Robert Gordon, Marin Kanter, J. Don Ferguson, Tina L'Hotsky, Lawrence Matarese, Danny Rosen, Phillip Kimbrough, Ken Call, Jane Berman. Screenplay: Kathryn Bigelow, Monty Montgomery. Cinematography: Doyle Smith. Production design: Lilly Kilvert. Film editing: Nancy Kanter. Music: Robert Gordon. 

If, as it's said to be, The Loveless is an homage to The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953), it's not a bad example of the truism that there's a thin line between homage and parody. It's hard not to laugh at the poses of its leather-clad 1950s-style bikers, saying things like "daddio" and "cool your jets." One of them is an up-and-coming Willem Dafoe, making his debut as a movie lead. It was also Kathryn Bigelow's debut as a feature-film director, and was made as her master's thesis in the film program at Columbia -- the university, not the studio. Both Dafoe and Bigelow, as they say, show promise. Though it's slow and somewhat overcooked, it demonstrates, among other things, Bigelow's eye for male posturing, which would serve her well in a later film like Point Break (1991). It was her co-director Monty Montgomery's one outing as a feature director; he's better known as a producer, working with among other, David Lynch. The Loveless is one of those movies that are less interesting in themselves than for the conditions and circumstances under which they were made and as the harbinger of better things for some of its personnel.

Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)

Angela Bassett and Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Michael Wincott, Vincent D'Onofrio, Glenn Plummer, Brigitte Bako, Richard Edson, William Fichtner, Josef Sommer. Screenplay: James Cameron, Jay Cocks. Cinematography: Matthew F. Leonetti. Production design: Lilly Kilvert. Film editing: Howard E. Smith, James Cameron. Music: Graeme Revell. 

Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days contains one of the most painful and disturbing scenes I've ever witnessed. In it a woman, through a perversion of technology, is forced to experience her rape through the eyes and sensations of her rapist. The film was a box office failure, usually ascribed to poor marketing, but I suspect that word-of-mouth about that scene has a lot to do with keeping audiences away. It makes the protagonist, played well by Ralph Fiennes, vomit when he experiences it through a virtual reality recording device that plays back not only the visual but also the physical sensations that the recorder experienced while wearing it. Bigelow was the right director for the film, conceived by her then-partner James Cameron. Making such a scene virtually demands that a woman be responsible for it, but Bigelow is also a master of the hyperactive thriller, which Strange Days wants to be when it's not being so outrageously transgressive. It's well-acted, particularly by Fiennes and Angela Bassett, and it builds to a smashing, noisy climax on New Year's Eve at the dawn of the millennium, but it's overlong, and to my mind its over-the-top violence dissipates the points it wants to make about police brutality, racial injustice, and the dangers of invasive technology. 

Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991)

Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty, Gary Busey, John C. McGinley, James Le Gros, John Philbin, Bojesse Christopher, Julian Reyes, Daniel Beer, Chris Pedersen, Vincent Klyn, Anthony Kiedis, Dave Olson, Lee Tergesen. Screenplay: Rich King, W. Peter Iliff. Cinematography: Donald Peterman. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Howard E. Smith. Music: Mark Isham. 

Point Break is so kinetic a movie, so crammed with stunts and fights and chases, that it almost seems like a parody of an action flick. Just when you wonder how the movie can top its surfing sequences, it throws in a skydiving episode. When you're expecting another car chase, you get an exhilarating, not to say exhausting, foot chase. I have to wonder if what makes Kathryn Bigelow such a successful action director is that, as a woman, she has a special point of view on what testosterone-driven action looks like. The dialogue is loaded with machismo: "Young, dumb, and full of cum." "It's basic dog psychology: If you scare them and get them peeing down their leg, they submit." Skydiving is "Sex with gods. You can't beat that!... One hundred percent pure adrenaline." "Why be a servant to the law when you can be its master?" "You gonna jump or jerk off?" After a fight: "This is stimulating, but we're out of here." It's the one female character of any consequence in the movie, Lori Petty's Tyler, who sardonically quits a scene by commenting, "Okay, too much testosterone around here for me." Bigelow's objectification of male display is what gives the movie its subversive quality.   

 

Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)

Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)

Cast: Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Jenette Goldstein, Tim Thomerson, Joshua John Miller, Marcie Leeds. Screenplay: Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Red. Cinematography: Adam Greenberg. Production design: Stephen Altman. Film editing: Howard E. Smith. Music: Tangerine Dream.

I didn't think I ever wanted to see another vampire movie. And after No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 2007) and Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie, 2016), I was feeling a little burned out on the neo-Western genre. So a film like Near Dark that combines both was a little out of my range of immediate interests. But Kathryn Bigelow's name drew me in, and it was also a chance to see a performance I had missed by one of my favorite actors, the late and very lamented Bill Paxton. I wasn't disappointed. Bigelow has a way of making even the most generic subjects interesting. She's a little like Hitchcock in her ability to keep you on edge and to create characters that make you root against your own interests. Her vampires are objectively a vicious, grungy lot, and yet you almost root for them when they're under siege, in danger of being forced into the lethal sunlight, just as you somehow sympathetically root for Hitchcock's villains like Norman Bates to get away with it. It's also a well-cast movie, with a young and very pretty Adrian Pasdar as the imperiled mortal, and Paxton doing his showboating best as the most flamboyant vampire. This was in a period when Bigelow was involved with James Cameron, so Paxton, Lance Henriksen, and Jenette Goldstein came over from the cast of his Aliens, released a year earlier and given a plug on a theater marquee in the background of one shot.