Trylove

With special guest Natalie Marlin (@NataliesNotInIt)! Bi Gan’s lovelorn neo-noir follows Luo (Huang Jue) as he pursues Wan (Tang Wei), the woman he fell in love with years before. Luo weaves in and out of half-recalled memories to trace Wan’s whereabouts, only brushing shoulders with reality as he dodges his own past in pursuit of the fading memory of love through decades of lost time. Famous for...

Based on Charles Willeford’s noir novel, George Armitage’s MIAMI BLUES is ‘supposed’ to be about the escapades of Hoke Moseley (Fred Ward), a jaded, toothless Miami cop. Instead, it’s about Frederick J. Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin), a sociopathic, interloping hustler. Junior’s ongoing seduction of young prostitute Susie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) provides him insulation from Hoke’s suspicions, but threa...

The truth behind the assassination at the center of Brian De Palma’s political paranoia thriller BLOW OUT isn’t really the point. It’s more about the ways in which fact comes to be distorted through many lenses, each built on relative understandings of the core event itself. When he happens to catch the sound of a politician’s murder on tape while scouting new SFX for a movie, sound designer Jack...

In Béla Tarr’s dour, slow drama WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES, an aimless people’s anger and malaise is leveraged to violent ends by figures of power. A desolate town bristles when a traveling circus comes through with a stuffed whale as its centerpiece. Uncertain of its meaning, the townspeople respond with disbelief and skepticism as they suffer through the rapid decay of society playing out in paralle...

With returning guest Blake Hester! BURST CITY is arguably more of a cultural document than a movie with a plot and a story. It consists largely of musical setpieces by the Japanese punk groups of its time, with plot threads (vengeful bikers, nuclear infrastructure, etc.) being more hinted at than shown. In this episode, Blake joins us to talk about BURST CITY's content, context, and creation. Find...

You’ve seen movies like Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1996 directorial debut, HARD EIGHT. In fact, if you called it part of the PULP FICTION (1994) neo-noir craze, you wouldn’t be wrong. Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) is an avuncular elder hustler who takes John (John C. Reilly) and Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow) under his wing, keeping new blood small-timer Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) at bay while he sets up a...

Tim Burton’s debut feature feels a little bit like a filmmaker finding his footing. At the same time, it’s a trial by fire for Paul Reubens and Phil Hartman as they brought their creation, the capricious Pee-Wee Herman, to the big screen. It paid off, of course, cementing Pee-Wee as an icon of character comedy and a mainstay of American children’s programming. Depending on your history with the ch...

We’re kicking off 2024 (THE YEAR OF THE #BIG #BALLER - "Let your nuts hang!") with William Richert’s gonzo political paranoia thriller WINTER KILLS! It’s kind of funny, but not funny enough to be a laugh-out-loud comedy. It’s kind of serious, but not serious enough to demand attention. Riding behind the unluckiest motorcade in American history, WINTER KILLS pitches Jeff Bridges as Nick Kegan, the...

Dozens of movies. Hundreds of hours of talking. Fifteen categories. No ties. The Golden Barrys return. Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/trylovepodcast and email us at trylovepodcast@gmail.com to get in touch! Buy tickets and support the Trylon at https://www.trylon.org/ . Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters. Outro music: A song I don’t want to name in case so...

Content warning: Discussions of sexual assault. Twenty years after a string of murders in rural South Korea, Bong Joon-ho made a movie about the people who tried to catch the country’s first serial killer. What resulted was a harrowing chronicle of a trail slowly going cold, people who were unequipped for the heuristic exercise of catching a home-grown monster, and a government that cared more abo...

Juzo Itami’s “ramen western” TAMPOPO is… just a delight. The lines that separate class, sex, and generations are broken through the lens of food in vignettes that surround a sweet, satisfying A plot. The mundane and universal is elevated to indulgence through the presumption of taboo, with each character’s indulgence – a meddling supermarket crone, a wealthy, browbeaten elder, a gangster’s hedonis...

With returning guest and Perisphere senior editor Finn Odum! Alejandro Jodorowsky’s best-known film, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, is a psychedelic hero’s journey from rags to riches, from shit to gold, and from iniquity to enlightenment. It follows “The Thief” as he gives up his search for material wealth to join a cast of sinful sages on their way up the titular mountain and, hopefully, beyond the boundari...

Takahide Hori’s one-man masterpiece-in-the-making is fun, sweet, and terrifying. In the distant future, after losing a war to the synthetic life forms they created, humans who’ve lost the ability to reproduce in a viral pandemic launch a last-ditch effort to correct the course of their species. Parton – a lonely prole who lives a vicarious, virtual existence – enlists in the effort to find a cure...

With special guest and former Trylon volunteer Celia Mattison! In the small town of Bomont, dancing and rock music are illegal – but on this podcast, they’re literally our favorite things. FOOTLOOSE positions dance as not just a metaphor for self-expression, but the act itself. With writer Celia Mattison, we put our Sunday shoes back ON to discuss the place of FOOTLOOSE in the dance movies landsca...

TWILIGHT (nope!) can be considered in the same conversation as other works of slow cinema, but György Fehér’s detective story has a bit more of a direct, even darkly comic, edge to it. A girl is found violently murdered in the woods, kicking off a slow-but-frenzied search for the perpetrator. In this discussion, we talk about how TWILIGHT leverages the slow cinema toolkit (slow pans, long takes, m...

Francis Ford Coppola’s war epic coasts from the formulaic to the surreal so smoothly, it’s almost hard to pinpoint the point of no return. On its face, it’s obviously anti-war; in the director’s own words, it’s “anti-lie”; and in many ways, it excoriates Hollywood portrayals of war themselves. The Final Cut, as discussed on this episode, puts a finer point on the film’s specific criticisms of the...

One of Brian De Palma and Robert De Niro’s earliest features (a big movie for famous guys with “De” in their last names) is a De Mented, De Praved, De Tached experimental film that De Tails (I’m done) voyeurism, vicarity, and white liberal apologia in the Civil Rights era. When Vietnam vet Jon Rubin (De Niro) fails to convey his desire for authenticity through both filming porn and marrying one of...

Content warning: Depictions of abuse and violence toward women and transgender people. The atrocities committed by Buffalo Bill, a serial killer known for skinning his victims, make up only some of the injustices outlined in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, director Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel. Among the others: Stunted actualization, systemic removal of agency, and a culture-wid...

With Maddy Sheehy, Emma Youndtsmith, Abbie Phelps, and Natalie Marlin! How did YOU come across THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT? Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s found footage horror film kicked off a genre before the turn of the millennium, and it still holds a freaky deaky power over audiences today. Four voices are distinctly absent from this episode of Trylove, but the four who’ve replaced them have...

Who would you be if not for destiny? What kind of person are you holding yourself back from becoming? George Sluizer’s psychological thriller is best known for its morbidity and shock ending, but on this episode of Trylove, we focus on the stuff in the middle. At its heart, THE VANISHING is two parallel tales of men driven to pursue a new version of themselves: An aggrieved ex-husband and a sociop...

Turns out there’s still a bunch to say about SCREAM, the movie that saved the horror genre by one of the guys who almost killed it. Go figure! From generational moral panic to metacommentary on slasher media to the impact of consumer technology on the way movies tell stories, this episode unpacks Wes Craven’s third wall-breaking classic that started a scary movie revolution. Get tickets to “The Ni...

Content warning: This episode includes references to sexual violence as discussed in PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. Public reaction to three missing schoolgirls and their teacher during a field trip to Hanging Rock – a prehistoric monolith – ranges from shock to guilt to pocket-watching. But how the citizens of Victoria react sometimes belies their true feelings: The girls who were spared their classmate...

Part FITZCARRALDO (1982), part APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), part Lord of the Flies, THE MOSQUITO COAST was Harrison Ford’s wily villainous turn and one of Peter Weir’s most cynical movies to that point in his career. Allie Fox’s Nicaraguan sojourn – an ill-conceived plot to bring ice to the jungle – is cut short by his hubris, his family’s increasing skepticism, and the harsh realities of jungle living...

With returning guest Seth Zarate! Listening note: This episode sounds different from our usual productions. Cody, Seth, and Jason were all in a room together, while Aaron joined remotely. Jason had precious little editing time. Our apologies for any disruptions. One of Peter Weir’s earliest feature length films, THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS bears some of his hallmarks (genre-mixing, dualities, subcultu...

Content warning: This episode contains references to sexual violence as discussed in THE PLUMBER. Peter Weir’s 1979 made-for-TV 16mm creeper is a short parable about two people from the same part of the world but two different parts of society (a lower-middle-class plumber and a member of the liberal intellectual elite) becoming the worst versions of themselves to survive the other. Max is the iti...