#295: Missing Movies + Strange Days (1995)

The Next Picture Show

Telegraph Road Productions

Tv & Film, Film Reviews, Film History

4.6 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2021

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our recent pairing of Michel Gondry’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MINDS with Lisa Joy’s REMINISCENCE was actually a second-choice selection forced by the ongoing unavailability of the film we initially thought of as a slam-dunk companion to Joy’s new film: Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 thriller STRANGE DAYS, another noir-inflected science-fiction story concerned with the intersection of technology and memory. But that film is nearly impossible to find these days (at least through official channels), which prompted this off-format discussion in which we spend some time digging into why STRANGE DAYS feels like a “missing piece” in our modern-day discussion of both Bigelow’s career and cinema overall, particularly its daring racial and sexual politics and visceral violence. Then we widen the lens a bit to consider the overall phenomenon of impossible-to-find movies in the streaming era, and what it says about our past and present attitudes toward film preservation. Please share your comments, thoughts, and questions about disappearing movies, STRANGE DAYS, or anything else in the world of film, by sending an email to [email protected], or leaving a short voicemail at (773) 234-9730. Show Notes Works cited: • “The convenience trap: What the changes at Netflix reveal about an insidious trend,” by Sam Adams (avclub.com) • “Film preservation 2.0,” by Matthew Dessem (thedissolve.com) • “Song of the South: the difficult legacy of Disney’s most shocking movie,” by Scott Tobias (theguardian.com) Outro music: “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, Next Picture Show listeners.
0:01.6	Here's a friendly reminder that if you enjoy the Next Picture Show,
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0:08.1	You can get our weekly newsletter for $3 a month and unlock bonus episodes for $5 a month.
0:13.3	You also get access to add free versions of the podcast.
0:16.2	We recently released a bonus episode on Ted Lasso and recorded another on the new series Why the Last Man. To subscribe to our Patreon, please visit patreon.com slash next picture show.
0:28.6	It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.
0:32.3	You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being.
0:39.1	We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.
0:46.7	Welcome to the Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film
0:50.7	and how it shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Keith Phipps here with
0:54.3	Scott Tobias and Tasha Robinson. We're breaking format a bit this week to deal with a couple of
0:59.1	related issues raised by our recent pairing of Eternal Sunshine in the Spotless Mind and Reminiscence.
1:04.0	We like the way those episodes turned out, and we hope you do too, but Eternal Sunshine
1:08.0	wasn't our first choice for the pairing. Loveved as we do, we originally wanted to compare a reminiscence to Catherine Bigelow's
1:13.6	1995 film Strange Days, another noir-influenced crime throwers set in a then-near-near-future
1:19.1	concerning the intersection between memory and technology.
1:22.8	The only problem?
1:24.1	That film has all but disappeared.
1:27.1	Which kind of is thinking, we live in a moment when
1:28.9	seemingly every movie is just a click away, and yet it only takes trying to find one movie
1:33.2	that's not available to realize that just isn't the case. In the past 40 years, home video
	...

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