Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is United States of America but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.
Country: United States of America
Movie: Strange Days
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Year: 1995
The Elevator Pitch: Lenny Nero sells dreams, or at least the virtual recordings of peoples emotions and experiences. When he receives one of these experiences from a strange source it turns out to be of a murder that unravels his entire world.
How Was the Movie?:
Ohh nooo. This movie was probably recommended to me at least a half dozen times over the past two years and I have to tell you, I think I really hated this movie a lot.
There is a lot to like about it from the atmosphere and costumes up to the absolutely fantastic filming and especially the action scenes which often take on some really ambitious and interesting angles but in the end, I think I might have missed the window for when you could enjoy this movie. The film imagines New Years Eve 1999, the edge of the dawn of the millennium in such overly militaristic, nihilistic nonsense that looking at America in present day seems goofy. This movie was so clearly written in the wake of the Rodney King riots and it seems to really mean well but then does none of the leg work to actually get to the point it imagines that I kept waiting for something actually meaningful to happen.
The acting in this movie is a lot of choices I don’t like at all from actors who I think are amazing. The story rides the line between neo-noir and almost veers into sci fi but I think most of the problems for me come somewhere between the utter nativity of the script, the unbelievable characters, and the worst sin of all, absolutely wasting your core concept. Why did they make the tech emotional experiences when they’re presented, for the viewer and often for the people in the film, as VHS/playback tape. The tech is even less salient than it was when Batman Forever imagined it (in the same year somehow!).
It feels embarrassing comparing Hackers to Strange Days but I want to see someone else break that down. Moreover, there’s a Max Headroom episode, Dream Thieves from 1987 that literally does this movie better than this movie (to me) despite being way cheesier and way worse filming! The weirdest problem is that I don’t like the script at all because it has two, possibly three competing themes and none of them make sense next to each other and the ending just veers off into the sunset which made some of the parts I did like about the movie feel really cheap after I was done watching it.
In the end the problem is that if I watched this movie in 2015 I could have set aside some of its odd problems and enjoyed it as a thought experience but I can’t do that today.
What was for Dinner?:
If you can believe it I have never made or eaten succotash in my life! I’m a dirty Northerner I suppose so I decided this was a great time to remedy that. Who doesn’t love a bunch of vegetables with a little char on them?
One of the only things I miss that is distinctly American is boxed mac and cheese. I actually rarely ate when I lived in the US but it’s one of those things that just has a distinct flavor memory attached to it. I decided to make stovetop mac and cheese to honor that feeling. I usually put a whole bunch of things in it but I forced myself to just make the standard cheese version and it was pretty good as per usual. Hard to go wrong with cheese sauce and pasta.
For dessert I really regret my life choices. Originally I was just going to make brownies. Brownies are a shockingly recent [1890s] American developed classic but apparently I’m “too good” to just make brownie and I fell down a horrible rabbit hole trying to make these Hostess alike cakes. I can make a delicious cake but I’ve never been good at candies or making things even / nice looking. They don’t sell marshmallow fluff here so I spent 3 hours making my own from scratch and basically gluing everything to my kitchen counters. I cried over 4 times making this cake and in the end I piped some beautiful marshmallow fluff into the middle of this cake and it DISSOLVED into the cake, spilled out the sides, and glued the cake to the side of the glass pan I was working in. I had to go to the store to buy powdered sugar at 10pm on Friday night to make the icing swirls on top and my piping bag exploded and covered my entire tablecloth and my cake in so much icing I gave up and re-applied the ganache on the top to fix the mistake. They were delicious.
Also because of a variety of reasons they don’t sell all the shitty American beers here so I bought little glass bottle of Coke which was fun.
That’s it for the USA and the entire project, I hope you enjoyed reading about all the food and movies we’ve been enjoying and that it inspires you to pick something novel up in your life!