ACFmovie podcast

Titus & Eric Cook continue our series on D.W. Griffith & the origins of cinema as the democratic form of art with Intolerance, an attempt to give a visual history of humanity that can inspire people to turn away from cruelty & make the democratic age unlike the previous splendid, but catastrophic ages. A fond hope, at the outset of the World Wars.

Titus & Aaron Sibarium discuss his reporting on the practice for dictatorship now thriving in elite institutions & educating a next generation of elites, while America is busy with other matters--woke censorship & epidemic demands on college campuses, by both students & administrators, in hospitals, in NGOs, &c.

Titus & Flagg Taylor talk The Courier, the true story Cold War spy thriller set during the Cuban Missile Crisis--a study in the friendship of two men, British gentleman Greville Wynne & Russian spymaster Oleg Penkovsky, who embody civilization even as they help save it. It's a fine movie, see it!

Titus & Ben Sixsmith discuss Ben's new volume of short stories, Noughties: Eleven echoes of a dismal decade. These are scenes from the decadence of British culture, contemporary recollections of the various ideas of celebrity, influence, soft power, political transformation that thrived in that deluded decade, the beginning of the 21st c.

Titus & Hannah Long talk about Terrence Malick's The New World for Thanksgiving! The origins of America, love & war, pirates & Puritans, England & the quest for the Indies. Happy Thanksgiving!

Titus & Hannah Long talk about Capra's dark Halloween comedy, his satire on WASP America & his comic hopefulness about democratic America, the horror-comedy as America's pride & how to have a Halloween without the sordid.

Titus & Eric Cook continue our discussion of Griffith's Birth of a nation, we talk about the amazing achievements of the movie & the way they're connected with its damning fault--the strange way in which Progressive pacifism & racism all the way to white supremacy could go together in art. We also talk about the difficulty of giving an account of the Civil War that takes seriously both justice & h...

Titus & Eric Cook of SPEAKING ABOUT SILENTS begin a series on the great achievements of D.W. Griffith, America's first visionary director, a self-made artist, entrepreneur, & aspiring prophet. We talk about The Birth of a Nation, a wonderful picture that's also morally repellant--from the beginning, cinema was powerful & dangerous! Artistic genius in the cause of injustice, animated by a philanthr...

Titus & Paul Seaton & Carl Eric Scott complete our overview of the work of the greatest living French thinker, Pierre Manent,.with special attention to his book, The Metamorphoses Of The City. We talk political philosophy & history, & what it means to be a post-modern conservative.

Titus & Telly Davidson talk about the effect of 9/11 on cinema & TV: The darkening of the mood of 21st c. cinema, fantasy as 9/11 reenactment, the absence of great directors in the national memory of 9/11, the difficulty of dramatizing the event & the demeaning ways it's treated out of sentimentality, & finally the madness of the post 9/11 espionage & war shows.

Titus talks about Oliver Stone's most unexpected, most patriotic movie, WTC < a true story that reveals American character at its best--citizenship, public service, nobility, faith, as well as its basis in the middle class family way of life.

Titus & Justin Lee & Dave Woods talk about David Lowery's Arthurian tale, The Green Knight, a reflection on mythical decadence & what it might mean for the young to become men. The movie gives you the confrontation of pagan heroism & Christian faith, of ancient & modern ideas, of fear of death & fear of life.

Titus & Peter Robinson & John Yoo talk about Master & Commander, the Peter Weir seafaring adventure movie, about the Aubrey-Maturin novels on which it was based, about the charm of military adventures & the series we've been reading. Also, we talk about the detective & lawyer novel series & TV shows--Bosch, Lincoln Lawyer--that fascinate us & which will be our next podcast.

Titus & Noah Millman talk about Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro's novels--The Remains Of The Day, Never Let Me Go, Klara & The Sun. All three are about transformations in society & in the soul, the outsourcing of humanity from masters to servants or from humans to robots, the jeopardizing of human longing or love, both through technology & in other ways.

Titus, Carl Eric Scott, and Paul Seaton introduce a series of podcasts on the greatest living French thinker, Pierre Manent, a Catholic Straussian, a critic of liberalism & defender of the democratic nation-state, a political theorist. We will acquaint you with the man’s thought, his questions in political philosophy, & some of his books.

Titus & Sam Goldman talk about Whit Stillman's Barcelona, a story of Americans & Europeans, of two young men looking for love, as well as for manliness, responsibility, adulthood, service, at the point where a vibrant & lawless democracy sweeps such ideals from society! A romantic comedy about how to be an American!

Titus & Mike Anton talk about Machiavelli's republicanism, his fighting spirit, his education for rash young men, & the attempt to educate the very online right away from extremism, toward political success.

Titus & Telly Davidson talk Wag The Dog, David Mamet & Barry Levinson's satire on media & politics in the 90s, the merger of Hollywood & D.C., of news & entertainment, the collapse of politics into rhetoric, & the corruption of elites.

Titus & Sam Goldman talk Ripley, the novel & 1999 movie adaptation, the 50s, the strange transformations of the WASP elite & the middle class, America & Europe, bourgeoisie & aristocracy, art & therapy, evil & the desire for acceptance.

Titus & Geoff Schulenberger talk about erotic thrillers & tragedy, about the neo-noir of the 80s-90s, & the disappearance of stories about dangerous women.

Titus & Armond White talk Zack Snyder--the artist of the year, with Justice League & Army Of The Dead giving us a beautiful & a dark vision of the American future. We talk about the power of his imagery, the way he's taken up Spielberg's mantle as America's leading cinematic humanist, & how he stands up for the part of America that's now silenced--faith, heroism, patriotism...

Titus & Sam Goldman talk about Whit Stillman, Metropolitan, & the twilight of WASPs: The romance of the Doomed Bourgeois in Love facing democracy--the reaction on the left & the right to the abolition of gentlemanship--the Tocquevillian view of middle class societies & the middlebrow art that typically reflects their experience.

Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about the remarkable HBO series Chernobyl, the only serious cinematic treatment of the peace time event that came closest to nuclear Armageddon. We talk about the Soviet regime, Russian character & Russian humor, the friendship & conflict between science & politics, & the limits of liberalism when it comes to storytelling, to say nothing of globalization.

Titus & David Goldman discuss Chins & America, the two models for political assimilation on a continental scale in modern politics. We talk about competition, the hard teaching war offers, & the requirements for leadership, national vision, & respect for knowledge in a society.

Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about the best movie of 2020, Konchalovsky's story of a suppressed revolt in Soviet Russia, where the very existence of revolt is suppressed ideologically. A story about a mother & daughter, about private life, our embodied nature, yearning for holiness, & how politics can turn all of these things into crimes.