Strange Days
Green Screen
English - February 04, 2021 09:00 - 1 hour - 83.8 MBTV & Film History cinema history climatechange environment environmentalhistory film filmhistory filmreviews moviereviews movies Homepage Download Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Sean and Cody prepare to party like it’s 1999 and relive the whole Y2K thing as they head back to Los Angeles to dip into this somewhat obscure but very complicated 1995 science fiction thriller. In Strange Days, pusher of high tech virtual reality porn Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) gets caught up in a noir-ish L.A. caper involving the girl he used to date (Juliette Lewis), the girl who wants to date him (Angela Bassett) and a snuff clip that could turn the City of Angels into a raging inferno of racial violence. It all happens on the last night of the century, supposedly. But will it be the racist cops or our intrepid heroes who will be guzzling champagne at midnight? The environmental issues posed by this film all arise out of its setting in time and place: the Rodney King incident of 1991 and the riots that followed, O.J. Simpson and the specter of apocalyptic disaster, the “six L.A.s” we see in film and how their environments differ, and why geography is the key to understanding Los Angeles’s tangled environmental history.
What was Hurricane Opal and what does it have to do with the O.J. Simpson trial? What’s the story behind the Los Angeles riots of 1992 and why they overshadowed the entire modern history of the city? Why are the Asian-owned businesses shown in movies like this almost always restaurants? Why was December 31, 1999 not really the last day of the 20th century? Was there anything of substance behind the “Y2K” computer thing or was it just media hype? Is this film actually an uncredited sequel to an even more obscure 1983 film that no one remembers except for tabloid reporters who are unnaturally obsessed with Natalie Wood’s death? How come people don’t push each other into swimming pools as party gags anymore? What happened to those 1990s cyberpunk movies and why don’t they make them like they used to? How does this film get Los Angeles geography wrong? Can a knotted necktie support the weight of a 250-pound man hanging off the tower of a luxury hotel? All of these questions and more are wired up and ready to record in this surprisingly complex episode of Green Screen.
WARNING: This episode contains discussions of sexual assault and racial violence.
Strange Days (1995) at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/
Strange Days (1995) at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/strange-days/
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