Trylove

A mythologized decade, a souped-up Challenger, and the man behind the wheel are running out of time in Richard C. Sarafian’s 1971 amphetamine-fueled road trip movie VANISHING POINT !  With 15 hours to make it from Denver to San Francisco in a new white Dodge Challenger, the former cop/driver/motorcyclist/boyfriend actually takes up a bunch of stops. Each detour exposes him to another unique charac...

Music industry veteran Lou Adler’s second and final directing credit, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS predated the riot grrrl movement by close to a decade. It effectively pioneered the aesthetic behind the feminist punk movement that took off in the 1990s. Three anxious teens (Diane Lane, Laura Dern, and Marin Kanter) form The Stains, taking the stage in scandalizing outfits and outrage...

Four girls in a Japanese school prepare for their performance at the school festival with one sub-in: The Korean exchange student who doesn’t know the songs. The new shape of their group, and the uncertain shape of their lives to come, casts a weird malaise over the days leading up to the show, broken only by their moments of youthful camaraderie. LINDA LINDA LINDA holds a special place in the boy...

CISCO PIKE was Bill L. Norton’s directorial debut, Kris Kristofferson’s first screen credit, and just another Coked Up Crazy Ass White Boy role for Gene Hackman. A musician turned drug dealer wants to pull a 180 and go back to the music biz after a stint in the pen. But he spent the Summer of Love behind bars, and when he gets out, he finds out the ‘70s ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. Karen Black...

We’re thrilled to have Emma Youndtsmith back to discuss a longtime favorite of hers and many millennials’: The movie that made Edgar Wright’s career, SHAUN OF THE DEAD ! We discuss the enduring love for this quirky movie, the comfort of regression, our favorite jokes, and our preferred zombie-fighting weapons (Emma’s legitimately surprised me). Then, we’re pitting seemingly random dead celebrities...

Help the Trylon afford a 4K projector! https://trylon.org/4K SURPRISE! We’ve got one more Kinuyo Tanaka movie in the tank, because Cody and Jason weren’t able to get 80s Action Extravaganza tickets this year. With Cody out anyway, we’re covering DRAGNET GIRL , our first silent film directed by Yasujirō Ozu. It has a very, VERY different energy from his better-known works with color and sound (for...

Help the Trylon afford a 4K projector! https://trylon.org/4K The Trylon’s series on Kinuyo Tanaka’s acting roles ends with a bang: Keisuke Kinoshita’s THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (no, not the 1983 version that won the Palme d’Or). It’s a dire tale: Tanaka plays an old woman on the cusp of 70, at which point she’ll be taken to the top of a mountain to die alone so her village can conserve food. And Blea...

Help the Trylon afford a 4K projector! https://trylon.org/4K A governor in 11th century Japan is exiled, and his wife (Kinuyo Tanaka) and two children are sold into slavery. And it only gets crazier from there! The young boy (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) and girl (Kyōko Kagawa) come of age in the service of the local administrator Sanshō (Eitarō Shindō). Disgraced, each member of the shattered family surviv...

Help the Trylon afford a 4K projector! https://trylon.org/4K When a single mother’s son falls ill while awaiting her husband’s return from the front, she turns to prostitution to cover the bill. After his return, Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka) comes clean to Shuichi (Shūji Sano), whose reaction jeopardizes their otherwise stable relationship. In 2022, we covered several movies directed by Kinuyo Tanaka. A...

Help the Trylon afford a 4K projector! https://trylon.org/4K Years ago, we covered Alfred Hitchcock’s first surviving feature film, THE PLEASURE GARDEN (1925). The final movie he made before his death, 1976’s FAMILY PLOT , is on the other side of one of the most storied careers in all of film. It’s also… fine. Eager to cash in on the bounty, a pair of small-time hustlers (Bruce Dern, Barbara Harri...

Help the Trylon afford a 4K projector! https://trylon.org/4K A funny thing happens the first time you see Michael Mann’s MIAMI VICE . The funny thing is that you don’t really like it very much, and it’s kind of confusing and… just kind of off. You know how I know that? Because people who absolutely LOVE it will tell you this. MIAMI VICE is more than a filmmaker looking back at his old work. It’s a...

COLLATERAL is a different flavor for Michael Mann, yet it’s still familiar territory for the tortured auteur. There are enough distinct ingredients, for sure: Some mixture of Stuart Beattie’s script, a blend of film and digital aesthetics, and Tom Cruise’s real-life sociopathy resulted in a critical and commercial darling (something of a rarity in Mann’s body of film work). In this episode, Jason,...

That’s right: We’ve finally got Womenn on Mann on Trylove! The heist of a lifetime. Everything on the line. And at the center of it: Two guys in their 50s having romantic tensions that make classic Hollywood look like a convent. HEAT is a thoroughly sung masterpiece of Michael Mann’s career: inspired by real events, a remake of his own earlier work, and embellished with the director’s signature lo...

Michael Mann’s debut THIEF is pretty fully formed, a tightly wound caper with the grit of a ‘70s movie and the pizazz of an ‘80s thriller. Frank (James Caan) is an ex-convict and current master thief with a one-track mind: Make the money, marry the girl, make the family, live in peace at last. This being a movie, none of those things happen as he expects them to. In this episode with guest Kelly K...

Olivier Assayas’s post-millennium brain-bender DEMONLOVER is only a corporate thriller up to a point. A business deal over distribution rights to commercialize fetish content stirs discord among French enterprise, Japanese production houses, American entrepreneurs, and the hidden forces repeatedly shifting the levers of power. DEMONLOVER the movie becomes as compromised as its playactors: Unantici...

Based on the real 1920 labor uprising by West Virginia coal miners, John Sayles’s MATEWAN spends much more time on the place than the battle it’s remembered for. Ten people died, including three private detectives hired to violently repress the ascendant labor unions. Returning guest Louis Gagnon spent part of grad school learning about this period of labor history, so on this episode, we discuss...

How much Ham could a Hamlet let if a Hamlet could let Ham? Anyway, if you know Hamlet well, you may not enjoy THE BAD SLEEP WELL as much as someone who doesn’t. Toshiro Mifune (the GOAT) is an aggrieved secretary taking on a corrupt corporation, setting in motion a complicated plot to force confessions from sleazy profiteers who pressured a colleague into committing suicide amid an embezzlement sc...

Even in the famous glut of great movies that came out in 1999, Michael Mann’s THE INSIDER stands out because it works as a great legal thriller/biopic and as something much sadder and more compelling. Jeff Wigand (Russell Crowe) is a poindexter sitting on a story that could take down the third-largest tobacco company in the U.S., and Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) is the 60 Minutes producer who wants...

With Dan Nagan! Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is a ‘fixer’ for a big, successful law firm representing big, evil corporations. He doesn’t so much DO things as he does make it easier for the people who DO things to DO them. It’s not really an honest living, but it’s not direct enough for him to really get his hands dirty. But when his lawyer friend snaps, vowing to expose the wrongdoings of the...

Jean-François Laguionie’s GWEN AND THE BOOK OF SAND is maybe a little too strange to fully understand, but its juxtapositions and style leave help it get so much more from its 67 minutes than a lot of full-length features can manage. A young girl named Gwen joins a tribe of desert nomads in a world littered with gigantic, recognizably earth-bound objects. Gwen falls in love with Nokmoon, a boy who...

With Matt Clark (Kino Ventura)! MIDNIGHT EXPRESS is mired in a good bit of targeted xenophobia. Oliver Stone apologized for adapting Billy Hayes’s memoir the way he did, but to the people of Türkiye, the damage was done. Alan Parker’s drama film, based on the true story of an American’s confinement in an Istanbul prison, dialed up the brutality to great cinematic effect, complemented by a brooding...

René Laloux’s planet-hopping animated sci-fi adventure — no, not THAT one! — is in two places at once. THE TIME MASTERS wanders very Frenchly through its plot: An orphan needs saving on a weird planet, but our protagonists spend way more time witnessing the world (and freeing some mind-slaves on a completely separate planet) than worrying about the boy. But it comes across as such a genuine, heart...

This episode was originally published in August 2020. It was republished February 7, 2026, to coincide with its run at the Trylon as part of the "The Art of Insurgence: '80s Animated Sci-Fantasy" series. Since this episode aired, Sarah spun off the Cult Film Collective's video rental arm as its own entity titled Ant Hill Video. Featuring special guest Sarah Seember Huisken – Minneapolis...

With Seth Zarate! It’s hard to overstate the importance of NAUSICAÄ OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND to the Japanese animation medium, not least of which because it led to the launch of Studio Ghibli, one of its most influential producers. But it’s maybe more interesting to consider as an ur text for its creator and his proclivities: In a time of conflict between human civilization and the natural world,...

The Trylon’s series on the black-and-white films of Federico Fellini closes with one of his most popular films: the scandalous LA DOLCE VITA ! Celebrity journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) can’t quite decide between a life of out-and-out hedonism and his more intellectual aspirations, vacillating between caring for his fiancée Jane (Yvonne Furneaux) and courting every pretty woman he meets;...