Back from last episode’s jaunt to rainy climate-changed Korea, Sean and Cody delve into the understandably touchy subject of global pandemics. In Terry Gilliam’s bizarre 1995 time travel thriller 12 Monkeys , chrome-domed con James Cole (Bruce Willis) is sent by his bosses back in time to 1996 to figure out whether a kooky animal rights coalition called the Army of the 12 Monkeys actually juiced the world with the deadly virus that devastated the planet. Cole’s former shrink Dr. Railly (Madeline...
Mar 18, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 30
After their 19th century vacation in the last episode, Sean and Cody swim back to roughly the present day and immediately find themselves drowning in Korea’s environmental problems as depicted in Bong Joon-ho’s sardonic tragicomedy Parasite. When Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) bluffs his way into a job as a tutor to the fetching daughter of the rich Park family, he thinks he can get his own poor family out of their squalid subterranean Seoul rat-trap. But as the Kim family completes their infiltrati...
Mar 04, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 29
This is a crossover episode with the Second Decade podcast . After partying in the future (or what was the future) in the last episode, Sean and Cody journey to the past, exchanging their grunge duds for waistcoats and cravats as they invade Russia in 1812. In War & Peace , the BBC television miniseries from 2016, Russian trust fund baby Pierre Bezhukov (Paul Dano) is so distracted with the long walks he takes to find himself that he stumbles onto the largest battlefield of the entire Napole...
Feb 18, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 28
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 racia...
Feb 04, 2021•1 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Sean and Cody set out on an epic quest through Middle Earth in this, the most nerd-tastic episode of Green Screen yet. In the 2002 fantasy epic The Two Towers , part of the Lord of the Rings saga, mild-mannered hobbit Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) and his gardener and possible boyfriend Samwise (Sean Astin) are on a long walk to pitch a magic ring off a short pier into the fiery lava chasm of Mt. Doom in an attempt to bring an end the disagreeable and environmentally unfriendly Sauron administrati...
Jan 21, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Glad to be out of Gotham’s Christmas nightmare, Sean and Cody are transported in chains to the marshlands of early 19th century England, where a Dickensian smorgasbord of social and environmental commentary is ready to envelop them like dust from Miss Haversham’s wedding gown. In the 1946 David Lean-directed Great Expectations , an adaptation of the Dickens novel, pauper tween Pip (John Mills) lets an escaped convict stuff his face with one of his sister’s meat pies, then finds himself the playt...
Jan 07, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 25
Flush with the Yuletide spirit, Sean and Cody leave the mountain forests of Rwanda for the gritty streets of Gotham City in search of the Caped Crusader—sorry, the Dark Knight—who is to be found only sparingly in this 1992 superhero blockbuster. In Batman Returns , fed up secretary Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfieffer) suffers the ultimate #MeToo moment when her megalomaniacal boss (Christopher Walken) pushes her out a window and unwittingly transforms her into the vinyl-clad Catwoman. Meanwhile, sewe...
Dec 24, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Sean and Cody exchange Thanksgiving leftovers for Rwandan mountain gorillas and join forces with History by Hollywood podcast host Martin Darlington for an in-depth look at Gorillas in the Mist , the popular biopic of legendary primatologist Dian Fossey. In this 1988 film based on her memoirs, amateur naturalist Fossey (Sigourney Weaver) begs bigwig anthropologist Louis Leakey for a slot on a junket to Africa to count endangered gorillas. When she gets in-country she begins an obsessive one-woma...
Dec 10, 2020•1 hr 40 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Glad to be back on Earth after their confusing adventures on Arrakis last episode, Sean and Cody sit down to Thanksgiving dinner and an extra helping of 1970s moral and environmental confusion as they analyze this Ang Lee-directed period drama from 1997. In The Ice Storm , set in Conn-ECT-i-CUT over Thanksgiving 1973, the loveless marriage of boring white guy Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) and his moody wife Elena (Joan Allen) is spiraling the drain while their neighbor Janey (Sigourney Weaver), her son...
Nov 26, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 22
Sean and Cody, joined by film professor and David Lynch expert Mike Miley, fold space into the most bizarre Green Screen episode yet, involving an infamous 1984 science fiction epic that has polarized audiences for three decades. In this virtually incomprehensible film, spice-addicted trust fund baby Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan) puts on a skin-tight rubber spacesuit and tries to avenge his father’s death by riding latex worms designed by Carlo Rambaldi and gaining control of the universe’s mo...
Nov 12, 2020•1 hr 37 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Sean and Cody wish you a happy and delightfully spooky Halloween as we continue to social distance, and the headlines are far scarier than anything we can find in a highly influential early ‘70s horror film. In The Wicker Man from 1973, stodgy cop Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) flies his groovy seaplane to a small Scottish island only to find a bunch of standoffish people who say they’ve never heard of the missing girl he’s looking for. It turns out Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), the polye...
Oct 29, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 20
Sean and Cody are joined by literature student and documentary expert Ethan Weinstein for a bizarre journey into the heart of Southern womanhood with a side order of nuclear holocaust anxiety. In the classic 1986 documentary Sherman’s March , filmmaker Ross McElwee sets out to make a movie about the lingering effects of the Civil War scorched-earth military campaign that made the name William T. Sherman into fightin’ words south of the Mason-Dixon line. But he quickly gets sidetracked as a gaggl...
Oct 15, 2020•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 19
Eager to chill out after the last episode’s grim antics in the swamps of the South, Sean, Cody and film expert Kris Hill settle down to tea in a pleasant suburban New England and become embroiled in a steamy melodrama with heavy environmental undertones. In Douglas Sirk’s 1955 masterpiece All That Heaven Allows , rich matronly widow Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is powerless to resist the flannel-clad, Brylcreem-pompadoured sizzle emitted by free-spirited arborist Rob Kirby (Rock Hudson) who is some i...
Oct 01, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 18
After riding the waves in SoCal in the last episode, Sean and Cody set out to navigate the swamps of the South and deconstruct the putrefying secrets that molder in North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. In this 1991 thriller by Martin Scorsese, a remake of a 1962 film noir, convicted rapist Max Cady (Robert DeNiro) has a burr up his bum about the crap job that his former lawyer Sam (Nick Nolte) did of defending him decades before. After stalking Sam and his family, poisoning their pooch and babbling...
Sep 17, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Surf’s up! Sean and Cody have exchanged the deserts of West Texas for the beaches of Southern California, and they’re joined by environmental historian and beach expert Elsa Devienne to take apart one of the most beloved action movies of the nineties. In 1991’s Point Break, FBI hotshot agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reaves) and his bonkers partner Pappas (Gary Busey) hit the beaches in pursuit of a bunch of bank robbers in rubber masks, who are actually a gang of surfers led by Buddhist-babbling blond...
Sep 03, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 16
The hosts of Green Screen take a sentimental journey, in Cody’s case to the dusty plains of West Texas where he was raised, and in Sean’s to a transatlantic flight where he saw this film for the first time while hung over after a heavy metal festival. In Holes , a Disney adventure film made for kids in 2003, Texas teen Stanley Yelnats (Shia LaBeouf) is wrongly accused of swiping some superstar keds from a charity auction and is punished by being forced to dig a bunch of pointless holes at a pris...
Aug 20, 2020•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Coming off the dreary climate change denial in the last episode, Sean and Cody go ape over one of the most iconic monster films in cinema history. In the original 1933 King Kong , greedy producer Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) sails a crew of down-and-out ne’er-do-wells to the distant Skull Island to make a quickie exploitation pic. The whiteys quickly get more than they bargained for when they encounter the island’s landlord, a sexually frustrated giant gorilla who seems to have a thing for scr...
Aug 06, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 14
What starts out as a light-hearted palate cleanse quickly becomes more than Sean and Cody bargained for as they seek to lighten the mood with a classic Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker slapstick comedy. In The Naked Gun 2½ , dimwitted Police Squad detective Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) bumbles into a plot where evil White House Chief of Staff John Sununu (Peter Van Norden) is trying to rig George Bush’s environmental policy so fossil fuel fat cats like the dapperly mustachioed Quentin Hapsburg (Robert Go...
Jul 23, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 13
Parched from their trip to Arabia in the last episode, Sean and Cody exchange sand for surf in a rare double-header episode examining two different films on the same subject. In 1947, six buff Nordic adventurers set out on the Pacific on a tiny raft to prove a questionable theory about where the original settlers of Polynesia might have come from. The tale of their voyage was chronicled in the classic 1950 documentary and a 2012 Norwegian-made dramatic film, both titled Kon-Tiki . Environmental ...
Jul 09, 2020•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Back from the chilly forests of medieval Japan, Sean and Cody put on their COVID-19 approved shemaghs and saddle up the camels for a dusty trip into the desert and the heart of one of the most beloved and acclaimed films of all time. In David Lean’s 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia, pasty British white guy Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) gets sent by khaki-wearing, cocktail-sipping sahibs to scope out the hottest new guerrilla commander in Arabia, Faisal (Alec Guinness in brownface), and see if he’d be up ...
Jun 25, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 11
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...
Jun 11, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 10
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...
May 28, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 9
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 ...
May 14, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Life on Earth is too depressing right now, so Sean and Cody blast over to the ice planet of Hoth (which looks suspiciously like Finse, Norway) to figure out how the Star Wars gang handles a cryonic environment. In The Empire Strikes Back , resistance heartthrob Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) gets his face effed up by the Bumble creature from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer while testy Han Solo (Harrison Ford) sells Wookie kisses and the rebellion prepares for an epic space battle with military tact...
Apr 30, 2020•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Finding the apocalyptic visions of the last episode too sobering, Sean and Cody liquor up with some California chardonnay to tackle the first comedy on the Green Screen list. In Bottle Shock , wine academy president Stephen Spurrier (Alan Rickman) tries to shake up the Paris wine scene by pitting the snobby old guard French vintners against the rebellious upstarts of California’s Napa Valley in a famous 1976 tasting competition. Can the mostly golden but sometimes poop-brown fluid wrought by the...
Apr 16, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 6
It’s the end of the world as we know it! Sean and Cody, sequestered together as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, try to get to the bottom of exactly what happened to Earth in the unseen back-story of the Mad Max post-apocalyptic universe. In the film, one-armed truck driver Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) sets out to drive four princesses and one Zoë Kravitz across a bandit-infested desert, with a punked-out army of crazies huffing silver spray paint and driving exhibits from Harrah’s auto...
Apr 02, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Our intrepid duo of hosts face off against an undeniable classic, the John Ford-directed family drama How Green Was My Valley , which beat Citizen Kane for Best Picture at the 1941 Academy Awards. It’s a charming nostalgic story of a family of coal miners in Wales at the end of the 19th century seen through the eyes of a young boy (pre-pubescent Roddy McDowall) who watches his beloved green valley turn black and icky because coal mining generally sucks for the environment. Of course we don’t act...
Mar 19, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Sean and Cody’s tickets back from San Francisco somehow don’t get punched and they’re forced to settle down for another tour of the city by the bay as they discuss and review the 1978 science fiction horror thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers , the first (and probably best) remake of the classic 1956 film. Directed by Philip Kaufman, the film features Donald Sutherland as a dauntless health inspector, Brooke Adams as his beautiful but badly-matched moll, Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright...
Mar 05, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Sean and Cody beam up to a smelly Klingon bird of prey to boldly go where the cast and crew of the Star Trek franchise have gone many, many times before. Starring the usual rogues’ gallery of Star Trek personnel (William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols etc.) and directed by cast member Leonard Nimoy, the fourth feature-length movie in the franchise sees the enterprising Starfleet gang flashing back from the future to collect a pair of humpback whales that they hope will...
Feb 20, 2020•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 2
In this, the inaugural episode of Green Screen, Sean and Cody discuss and review the 1979 thriller The China Syndrome , directed by James Bridges, starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Michael Douglas and pre-Quaker Oats and “diabeetus” Wilford Brimley. The film deals with the issues of nuclear power, and famously was released and in theaters only days before the real-life near meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in March 1979, which effectively killed the nuclear p...
Feb 06, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 1
