Tremors

Explicit content warning

05/28/20 • 68 min

Eager to escape the drug-addled inner city of the last episode, Sean and Cody tool on out to dusty rural Nevada in search of subterranean beasties that seem to have a taste for almost-leading-man that-guy actors, the dad from Family Ties and an especially fetching Fred Ward. In Tremors, bromatic handymen Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Ward) start finding dead people all over the place, apparently chomped by hungry creatures who have inexplicably decided that humans are their new favorite food. Can Val and Earl rescue the beleaguered denizens of Perfection, Nevada from the hordes of grabby ghoulies, or will they end up as fertilizer? Environmental issues discussed include nuclear weapons testing, cultural fears of the unintended consequences of technology, and the centrality of water infrastructure to the modern West.

How did our hosts (one of whom has a Ph.D.) initially get fooled into thinking Paradise, Nevada was a real place? Are the “graboids” recent arrivals on the scene, or have they always been there, and if they have, how come no one noticed them before? Is the infamous “nuke the fridge” scene from Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull based on a true story? Did Howard Hughes give John Wayne cancer? What happens when you set off a nuke underground? Why should you never underestimate the power of slime? What’s a “Weisiger moment”? How many degrees of separation is our podcast’s biggest fan away from the real Kevin Bacon? Was the premise of the sitcom Family Ties funny to anyone who wasn’t a Baby Boomer? All these questions will be messily devoured in this monstrous episode of Green Screen.

Tremors at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100814/ Tremors at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/tremors/

Next movie: Princess Mononoke (1997)

Website For This Episode

Tremors at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100814/ Tremors at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/tremors/

Next movie: Princess Mononoke (1997)

Website For This Episode

Previous Episode

The French Connection

Sean and Cody descend into the crime-ridden hellscape of early 1970s New York to examine urban environments and how they played on the silver screen at the dawn of “New Hollywood.” In The French Connection, a thoroughly unpleasant unhinged racist cop (Gene Hackman) and his surprisingly rational partner (Roy Scheider) spy on a Mafia-connected high roller (Tony LoBianco) and figure that he’s up to no good. In fact he’s about to bring a huge score of magic white powder over from France, hidden in the innumerable crevasses of one of the ugliest cars ever manufactured. Will the cops shut down the French junk chute in time? Environmental issues discussed include de-industrialization and the decay of American inner cities, white flight and “redlining,” the geographic dimensions of the transatlantic trade in heroin, and more.

How did parts of New York, Detroit and other cities wind up resembling the ruins of Dresden after World War II? What did postwar federal mortgage programs have to do with drugs? Why did so much heroin come out of Marseilles in the ‘60s and where did it end up? How do you disassemble a Lincoln Continental down to the sub-atomic level and then put it back together so that no one notices? Why is Gene Hackman so angry in this movie? How do you film the world’s greatest car chase without permits? How did Tricky Dick Nixon rig the drug laws to make life miserable for people he didn’t like? What’s with that totally insane jazz music on the soundtrack? All of these questions will be thoroughly roughed-up, interrogated and booked on this episode of Green Screen.

Sean's Video on "The Places of the French Connection": https://youtu.be/9MG5KxQxIcA

The French Connection at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067116/

The French Connection at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/the-french-connection/

Next Movie: Tremors (1990)

Website for This Episode

Next Episode

Princess Mononoke (with guest Alex Arreola)

After last episode’s sobering experience with the graboids, Sean and Cody join forces with academic expert Alex Arreola to go back in time to pre-modern Japan to ride with magic wolves and ward off evil curses in the forest, or something. In the 1997 Japanese-made animated fantasy adventure Princess Mononoke, Prince Ashitaka is minding his own business when a wormy monster tries to make mincemeat of his village and gives him a Dr. Strangelove-style killer arm with a mind of its own. In seeking a cure for the monster’s curse, Ashitaka sets out into the forest, meeting a host of creatures and human beings whose complex relationships with the land and each other defy easy explanations. The environmental issues discussed include forestry and silviculture in pre-modern Japan, the relationship of warfare and firearms to the environment, the inequality and vulnerability of different societies to climate change, and how story and narrative can raise environmental consciousness.

Can you guess which of our hosts has never seen a full-length anime movie before? Why did 16th century Japan go gun-nuttier than an NRA convention? What does Godzilla have to do with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima? Remember when the world came to a halt when the Shogun miniseries came on TV 40 years ago? How come so many environmental narratives in movies seem to be made for children, and why is this film different? What did Neil Gaiman and Quentin Tarantino have to do with this movie? Did you grow up on “G Force” and Battle of the Planets? All these questions get sliced and diced with a samurai sword and blasted with a primitive 16th-century musket in this unusual episode of Green Screen.

Princess Mononoke at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119698/ Princess Mononoke at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/princess-mononoke/

Next Movie Up: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Website For This Episode