Trylove

Peter Yates’s Robert Mitchum vehicle THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE is an unglamorous picture of a rough way of life and the rough people who live it (on both sides of the law). With friend of the show and noted crime (movie) enthusiast Matt Clark, we pull back the grimy edges of this unromantic “anti-thriller” to expose the fragile, human narrative at its core — brought to life in part by the cantank...

Too funny to be drama and too dark to be comedy, Elaine May’s THE HEARTBREAK KID is instead a vehicle for comedic disgust — something all too rare in the New Hollywood era 1970s into which it was born. Charles Grodin is Lenny, running out on his somewhat annoying wife Lila (Jeanette Berlin) for the exciting unknown of Kelly (Cybill Shepherd). The premise is straightforward, but the way it plays ou...

Kon Ichikawa’s postwar drama looks wistfully at the Japan that WAS before World War II, suspiciously at the Japan that would be rebuilt, and begs consideration of the legitimacy of either. Retreating through Burma during World War II, Private Mizushima (Shoji Yasui) discovers his gift for the harp (saung) just before Japan surrenders. Captain Inouye (Rentarō Mikuni) tasks the young soldier with de...

With Dan Nagan (@aDapperDanMan)! Mellow greetings! DEMOLITION MAN, Marco Brambilla’s only major motion picture credit is a bit of a chimera, both a fun action movie and a sort of sardonic parody of the genre. Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes are literal relics in a world gone soft: Snipes is there to terrorize it with old-fashioned chaos, and Stallone is there to rein him in with… old-fashione...

Wesley Snipes got his big action break in Kevin Hooks’ PASSENGER 57, an airplane heist movie about a security specialist and recent widower pulled back into the job to thwart an international terrorist’s airborne escape plan. Snipes seems really comfortable as not-Bruce Willis, punching and kicking his way through bad guys in the clouds and on the ground alike. In this episode, we chat about Snipe...

TO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING! JULIE NEWMAR is remembered as the first depiction of drag queens as non-gag main characters in a major Hollywood production. Vida Boheme (Patrick Swayze), Noxeema Jackson (Wesley Snipes), and Chi Chi Rodriguez (John Leguizamo) are California-bound New York drag queens who find themselves sidetracked in a rural Midwestern(?) town. They find some of the locals int...

Claire Denis’s moving, poetic portrait of repression in the armed forces might be one of the best movies of all time. In the French Foreign Legion, there are beautiful, elegant young men; there’s their goblinish commander; and there’s nowhere else to go for any of them. The group’s leader, Galoup (Denis Lavant), is hopelessly in thrall to his own superior, Forestier (Michel Subor) — so when young...

With Natalie Marlin! Just like the earth he exploits, there’s something roiling under the surface of the wheel-and-dealing Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis): A devilish, almost cartoonishly villainous veneer conceals a deep self-hatred. And like all good capitalists, he uses it to fuel the next great pain he can inflict on the people and world around him, from the local preacher of a podunk town...

Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps) are caught in a cycle: Reynolds’s obsession with his dressmaking craft and his deceased mother send him dithering between immense sweetness and crass irritability, with Alma often on the receiving end of both his affection and his aloofness. But while Alma’s not the first to suffer Reynolds’s mercurial temperament, she’s the first...

After making a movie that actually got a Best Picture nomination, Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed another that famously didn’t: THE MASTER, a psychological examination of postwar trauma and peacetime opportunism. In this episode, we try to go past the easy read of THE MASTER as simple corollary for cult dynamics, heap an appropriate amount of praise on Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams,...

Three podcasters watched a movie and recorded their conversation about it afterward… and I would like to think this was only a matter of chance. Our Paul Thomas Anderson series keeps a-rollin’ with MAGNOLIA , his “blank check” movie after the success of BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997) . The intention was to make something he’d never get the chance to make again — something big and strange and audacious. Is t...

With Blake Hester! Paul Thomas Anderson’s retrospective dramatization of the ‘70s porn industry isn’t exactly rosy, but it’s certainly not dour, either. It’s kind of situated between those poles, balancing hangout vibes and deeply depressing shit to keep it right where you want a movie to be — tragic, fun, and eminently watchable. Find Blake… At https://blakehester.rocks/ On Bluesky at @metallicai...

THE LOST WEEKEND is a weird movie to talk about 80 years after it came out. It’s a drama directed by Billy Wilder about an alcoholic writer who keeps trying and failing to kick the habit, so you can see why you might have to give it a touch of grace for its various… depictions. In 1945, it was a beacon of empathy for the addict’s struggle, the first time an alcoholic was portrayed as more than an...

A touchstone of visual storytelling, an example of the power of short-form film, and an inspiration to surrealist storytellers like David Lynch, Maya Deren’s MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON pulls big philosophical questions out of simple materials. Through visual substitution, object manipulation, arrhythmic editing, and all sorts of narrative trickery, a surreal dream outlines one woman’s fruitless pursu...

Paul Schrader’s directorial debut isn’t a tale of a fearless crew punching up at their company overlords and the corrupt union that’s supposed to protect them. Instead, it’s a tale of compromise. The kind you make, and the kind that gets made for you. The kind you desperately hope means something in the end, anyway. In this episode, we discuss the excellent casting; how it’s great that Richard Pry...

XANADU is a musical fantasy film released in 1980 directed by Robert Greenwald. It stars Olivia Newton-John as Kira, Michael Beck as Sonny Malone, and Gene Kelly as Danny McGuire. Sonny is an artist toiling away painting album covers for a living. Danny is a has-been song and dance man resigned to retirement after a career in construction. Kira is an immortal muse sent from a mythological plane to...

With Abbie Phelps! Baz Luhrmann’s musical mashup is a ravishing, jarring, occasionally annoying wakeup call to the modern movie musical. How did we get from the freneticism of MOULIN ROUGE! — one shot per second, Ewan McGregor as a twee poet musician with a flair for the burlesque, Nicole Kidman as a diseased courtesan overperforming horniness, John Leguizamo as a little person with a lisp — to so...

EYES WIDE SHUT is a 1999 psychosexual thriller film starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise and directed by Stanley Kubrick in his final feature film. After New York City doctor Bill Hartford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) attend a Christmas party hosted by one of Bill’s patients, Alice reveals to Bill in a stoned haze that she’s fantasized about having sex with other men. The revel...

Alejandro Amenábar’s surprise hit THE OTHERS turns the tables on the ghost story. And a couple decades after its release, it’s still a really fun, watchable movie! But is it more than its inspirations? Furthermore, is it more than a twist on its inspirations? In this episode, we consider the ways THE OTHERS inverts gothic horror tropes, how it makes the grandeur of a Jersey mansion seem so lifeles...

Content warning: This episode includes references to and discussion of sexual assault. Happy first episode of 2025! Here’s a discussion of a movie where a series of horrendous things happen. In Lars von Trier’s DOGVILLE, Nicole Kidman plays a stranger seeking escape from gangsters in the Rocky Mountains. Luckily for her — or not — the humble town of Dogville provides ample refuge, and Tom (Paul Be...

𝐼𝑡’𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑤𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑓𝑢𝑙 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟… Time for us to rank, rate, and re-evaluate the films we saw at the Trylon in 2024, as well as the episodes we made about them! The Barrys can be a pretty grueling tradition — hours spent re-litigating discussions we’ve already had about movies we’ve already talked about — but who are we kidding, we love going back to the well. Sit back, relax, cue up “Stac...

With returning guest Kris Montello , Programming Director for the Asian-American International Film Festival and programmer for the Slamdance Film Festival! Yasujirō Ozu didn’t intend for AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (1962) to be his final film, but it feels like it. Chishū Ryū is Shuhei Hirayama , an aging salaryman, widower, and father who’s slowly coming to grips with the realities of growing older — pr...

Can you make things better? Can you make yourself better? What’s the difference between that and wanting to make things better for someone else? Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is a troubled cop. Misanthrope, former football star, loose cannon cop — he struggles to reconcile the stated altruism of his job with the ineffectual brutality that makes him so good at it. After he disables one witness and fails...

Arguably Yasujirō Ozu’s masterpiece, GOOD MORNING (1959) has more going on than its simple plot would have you believe. World War II is fully in the rearview in a quiet, out-of-the-way town. Instead of wartime anxieties, nosy neighbors gossip about their friends’ lifestyles; punkish kids covet the new TV set next door; men teach boys how to fart on command. They’re bound together more by niceties...

Bret Easton Ellis’s original novel featured vivid descriptions of depraved acts, but Mary Harron’s film adaptation of AMERICAN PSYCHO has a slithering unctuousness all its own. Christian Bale is Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street VP by day and a murderer at large by night. Problem is, those two things don't stay separate for long. Despite the heft of its subject matter and the “unfilmability” of its s...