L.A.-based podcaster and writer Colin Marshall hosts Notebook on Cities and Culture [iTunes]. (Worth subscribing to here. In 2013, I did a most enjoyable interview with him on Vancouver here.)
He also produces Los Angeles: The City in Cinema, a series of video essays examining the variety of Los Angeleses revealed in the films set there, both those new and old, mainstream and obscure, respectable and schlocky, appealing and unappealing — just like the city itself. Here’s his latest – a version of Los Angeles that can be lived in without a car because the subway goes everywhere.
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Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” crossed Los Angeles with a grittier, less orderly Tokyo. Just over thirty years later, Spike Jonze’s “Her” crosses Los Angeles with a sanitized Shanghai, creating a utopian urban setting for surely the mildest cyberpunk story ever told. Instead of menacing android replicants and detective Rick Deckard who hunts them, we have a sentient operating system and the mustachioed, ukulele playing milquetoast Theodore Twombly who, as he lives his lonely life in this future Los Angeles’ skyscrapers and on its high-speed trains (but never in a car), falls in love with it.
