The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Green Screen
After last episode’s icy prison break, Sean and Cody go down under for Pride Month as they load up the bus for a queer road trip into the outback. In The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Australian drag queen Tick (Hugo Weaving) gets a gig to do a show in the remote outback down of Alice Springs, so he teams up with the flamboyant Felicia (Guy Pearce) and transgender widow Bernadette (Terence Stamp) to get a bus to transport them, their costumes and a giant high-heeled shoe halfway across the continent. But there’s more on the road than dust and kangaroos, as the trio...
info_outline
Runaway Train (with guest Dan Delgado)
Green Screen
Sean and Cody, back from an unplanned hiatus, are joined by The Industry podcast host Dan Delgado for a look at the rarest of birds: an actually good film from schlocky 1980s grindhouse studio Cannon Films! In Runaway Train, prison lifer Manny (Jon Voight) is joined by a whiny shoeless sidekick Buck (Eric Roberts) for a poop-scented breakout from Alaska’s most notorious hoosegow. But their brilliant escape goes terribly wrong when the engineer of the freight train they stow away on croaks from a heart attack, and no one in the entire Alaska Railroad system seems to know how to slow down the...
info_outline
Bonus: A Statement About The Show
Green Screen
We have a statement that we'd like to make to our listeners. Green Screen will soon be ending its run of regular episodes. There will be three more after this one: Runaway Train, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and the podcast finale, Dances With Wolves. The reasons why we've made this decision are complicated and we'd like you to hear them in depth. This is why we've recorded this special bonus episode. We'll also talk about what we learned, what we got out of this experience, what we'll miss, and what we see as the contributions our show has made. This won't...
info_outline
Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World
Green Screen
Though still weary from that long train trip to the Urals last episode, Sean and Cody board a British Navy sailing ship headed around Cape Horn as they delve into this swashbuckling 2003 adventure/war film, directed by Peter Weir. In Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World, indefatigable Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) can’t think about anything except the French man-o’-war he’s chasing all over the oceans. But his best friend Maturin (Paul Bettany) is so keen on collecting bugs in the Galapagos Islands that he can barely keep his mind on his job of sawing limbs off teenage...
info_outline
Doctor Zhivago
Green Screen
Finally having returned from a double-header on Mars, Sean and Cody find themselves on the snowy steppes of Russia in the tumultuous era of the Bolshevik Revolution as they sink into this 1965 epic classic, one of the biggest blockbuster films of all time. In Doctor Zhivago, wistful sawbones and sometime poet Yuri (Omar Sharif) is living his best life with happy wifey (Geraldine Chaplin) and baby, until he suddenly gets the hots for the alluring Lara (Julie Christie) who’s married to someone else. But when the Revolution comes they’re all forced to put on red stars and salute Lenin, or at...
info_outline
The Martian
Green Screen
What, they’re still not back from Mars? Sean and Cody are on number two of a double-header (with last episode) as they take on Ridley Scott’s popular 2015 science fiction drama. In The Martian, plucky and somewhat jerky botanist astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) gets the Home Alone treatment as his shipmates accidentally leave him behind on Mars. It’ll be four years until anyone from Earth can rescue him and he’s only got 68 packets of potatoes and some freeze-dried poop. Wait, wasn’t that the plot of the last film on the show? That’s not a coincidence. Environmental issues...
info_outline
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Green Screen
After turning themselves into cartoons last episode, Sean and Cody make a side trip to a mostly fictional version of the red planet on their way back to the real world. In the 1964 space adventure Robinson Crusoe on Mars, white bread astronaut Kit Draper (Paul Mantee) and the monkey he loves crash-land on the titular planet to find the basic tourist amenities such as oxygen, water and food haven’t been restocked in several million years. With only a mid-60s tape deck, an Air Force surplus flight suit and a couple of tubes of turkey paste, can Draper find a way to survive long enough for...
info_outline
The Congress
Green Screen
Sean and Cody exchange the gross creatures of the last episode for the dubious charms of an animated, drug-induced alternate universe as they dive into this visionary 2013 dystopian science fiction drama. In The Congress, aging Hollywood star Robin Wright, playing herself, lets a movie studio zap her into a digital clone that they can use to put her into any film for the next 20 years. When her contract is up and it’s time to renegotiate, though, she finds herself hyped on hallucinogenic drugs to join the raddest party in town, which is a freaky alternate reality that turns everyone into...
info_outline
Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Green Screen
Urban development in NYC and the pre-Presidential environmental impact of one Donald J. Trump are ready to be eaten after midnight in this bizarre 1990 fantasy.
info_outline
Orlando
Green Screen
Frost fairs on the Thames in Elizabethan England and later times are delivering the chill as we examine this quirky 1992 gender-bending, time-traveling odyssey.
info_outlineAfter three straight episodes in the barrios and freeways of L.A., Sean and Cody sample some slow living in the early 19th century Pacific Northwest as they examine this quirky and unusual 2020 indie Western. In First Cow, frontier cook Otis “Cookie” Figowitz (John Magaro) gets fired and chased through the forest by his former employers, and is fortunate to hook up with Chinese immigrant King-Lu (Orion Lee) who’s similarly down on his luck. When they spot a single cow wandering through the Oregon forest they hatch a scheme to milk it and use the dairy to make tasty oily cakes to sell at the local trading post. Unfortunately their best customer, the Chief Factor (Toby Jones), is also the owner of the cow. Environmental issues discussed include the role of cows and cattle in European settlement of the West, how cattle was a harbinger of colonialism, and the environmental history of Sauvie Island, Oregon where the movie was filmed and presumably takes place.
Why would a single cow be such a valuable resource in Oregon Territory in 1820? Who owned Oregon Territory at that time anyway, and why is it so hard to tell? Why did a British Navy captain deliberately import cows into Hawaii in 1792, and why was the King of Hawaii so jazzed about the arrangement? What’s “cattle colonialism”? How come Westerns usually focus on the stories of white men with guns “taming” the West, and how does this film present a different story? Why would this movie make John Wayne really, really mad? Which racist trope which has appeared in numerous other Green Screen films is refreshingly absent from this one? How do you pronounce “clafoutis”? How about “Auberjonois”? Which That Guy in this film is the son of another That Guy who appeared in a previous film profiled on the podcast? Why does Amazon think anyone in their right mind would watch reruns of Murder, She Wrote with commercials? All these questions and more are ready for milking in this decidedly bovine episode of Green Screen.
First Cow (2020) on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9231040/
First Cow (2020) on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/first-cow/
Next Movie Up: 55 Days at Peking (1963)