ACFmovie podcast

Titus & John Marini discuss Sam Peckinpah's first Western, Ride The High Country, a story about the collapse of nobility. Joel McCrea & Randolph Scott are veteran marshals of the Old West who sign up for one last job hoping to make something for themselves & of themselves. We also talk about his great, if short-lived series The Westerner. before that.

Titus & Carl Eric Scott & Flagg Taylor discuss Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's new movie, Never Look Away, a beautiful meditation on art & tyranny, on the changes of regime in Germany from the Nazis to Communist East Germany to the democratic West Germany, & the task of the artist in modern society.

Titus & Theodore Gioia discuss how classical music, originally a source of ennobling characterization in Hollywood, turned into the specific soundtrack of evil, of mastermind villains like Hannibal Lecter--the way TV & pop music overwhelmed America's middlebrow settlement & replaced it with a demotic source of authenticity, connection to the audience, & historical relevance--& how things might cha...

Titus & Paul Cantor celebrate our 100th episode at the ACF with a conversation about Tim Burton's first decade: Pee Wee's Big Adventure--Beetlejuice--Batman--Edward Scissorhands--Batman Returns--Ed Wood. The cinema of freaks, what it means not to be part of the majority opinion in America, & where art stands to all this!

Titus & James Poulos, author of The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us From Ourselves & Executive Editor of American Mind, discuss the collapse of elite liberalism & the challenge we face as we transition to digital technology through the destruction of all forms of celebrity. We talk about political transformations in America & around the globe, the world after history resta...

Titus & Terry Teachout discuss Pitfall, the fine 1948 noir starring Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, & Raymond Burr as the heavy! It's a story about post-war America, men dissatisfied with suburban happiness, & the dangers middle-class life is facing. You get the insurance business & people whose lives are tied up with fraud. You get two attitudes to danger, risk, & getting what you want.

Titus & Flagg Taylor talk Pawlikowski again--Cold War, a beautiful tragedy by the preeminent Polish director of our times. After Ida, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Cold War, which won the Palme D'or & the director prize in Cannes (& was nominated for three Oscars). After a story of devotion & divine love, a story about merely human love & shared suffering. Set in Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavi...

Titus & Flagg Taylor continue our series on Polish movies--& more broadly, movies about totalitarianism in Europe--turning to Pawel Pawlikowski, now at the top of his fame--nominated for the Oscars, a winner in Cannes, & finally making movies about his native Poland. We start with Ida, a movie about a young woman in the Poland of 1962, about to take her vows as a nun, who first has to learn about...

Titus & Paul Cantor discuss H.G. Wells's War of The Worlds, his remarkable imagination & his penchant for scientific tyranny both--then the famous Orson Welles radio show--then alien invasion movies. War of The Worlds, both the Cold War George Pal version and & the post-9/11 Spielberg, then Tim Burton's Mars Attacks & the flying saucer movies by which it was inspired.

Titus & Flagg Taylor discuss Katyn, the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda's fourth & last Oscar-nominated film--his story about honor & prudence, about faith & suffering--about the Nazi-Soviet dismemberment of Poland, the Soviet massacres at Katyn, & the subsequent totalitarian propaganda & the Polish struggle to remember & retain their national identity. It is also his own family story, since h...

Titus & Flagg Taylor switch chairs: ACF President Flagg today interviews ACF Exec. Director Titus Techera--about the American Cinema Foundation, its past, its plans, & its projects, about his learning about movies in post-Communist Eastern Europe & coming to America, to writing, & cultural criticism, & about the future--digital cinema, education, & heroism.

Titus & Armond White discuss the great movies of 1968, especially the Godard pictures then first brought to America, Les Carabiniers ('63), Weekend, & La Chinoise ('67), which form a sort of trilogy of the past, present, & future of Europe--from war to revolution. (We also talk about his latest, The Image Book.) We focus on Godard's ironic documentary style & prophecies about modern society, his c...

Titus & Caitlin Peartree get to our fourth Wallace Stevens podcast--this time, we talk about the uncertainty that can get in the way of recognizing a human being & the existential implications of such an event. This is also the poem in which Stevens says he will illustrate his principle of poetry: The poem should resist the intellect almost successfully. Education & wisdom are involved in seeing t...

Titus & Jody Bottum talk about Michael Crichton & his most unusual novel, Eaters Of The Dead, as well as the movie that was based on it, The 13th Warrior--directed by the great John McTiernan.

Titus & Sonny Bunch discuss Watchmen, the super-hero movie most dedicated to super-heroes, their tragic & all-American character. We also talk about Zack Snyder as auteur--a man who has managed to bring a cinematic style to blockbuster production.

Titus & Caitlin Peartree continue their series of interpretations of poems by Wallace Stevens with Of Mere Being, one of the latest of his works, a brief statement on the separation between the beautiful & happiness, or the limits of human experience.

Titus & Terry Teachout turn to Out Of The Past, Bob Mitchum's best noir, his defining role as a chump, & a great variation on the femme fatale & the corrupted noble man. This is a rare story for juxtaposing the morality of the small town & the corruption of the city, the erotic lawlessness South of the border with the disheartening unhappiness of American life, & then showing how erotic tragedy gr...

Titus & Henry Olsen (Senior Fellow at EPPC, editor Unherd.com) continue the PostModern Conservative criticism of elite corruption & incompetence with a look at the coalitional, demographic, & electoral changes of recent decades--especially our elections since 2014. We show how far the electorate has moved from the elite & what a crisis is stirred by institutions & elites that no longer represent t...

Titus & John Presnall complete their trilogy on liberalism in the age of total surveillance with De Palma's Blow Out, which puts together image & sound, Antonioni's Blow-Up & Coppola's The Conversation, turning these theoretical studies of art & technology into a practical matter--where does art stand to corrupt politics in our world.

Titus & John Presnall continue their trilogy on liberalism in the age of total surveillance with Coppola's The Conversation. We go through the plot, what it means to want to hear the ugly truth, what it might mean to fear anyone learning your secrets, & how the invasion of secrecy was shamelessly advertised in American corporate capitalism. Listen to our conversation & be ready fora shock!

Titus & Pete Spiliakos discuss Harold Ramis's attack on institutional authority in his 80s comedies: Caddyshack, Back To School, & Ghostbusters. Pete calls Ramis a prophet of Trump: A comic writer whose reprehensible protagonists nevertheless triumph over hypocritical & complacent elites.

Titus & Paul Cantor discuss Frankenstein on its 200th an.--the novel, its history on the stage in the 19th c., & various movie adaptations in the 20th c. We talk about the genius of Mary Shelley & the rarity of a new myth being created by a single person under the historical spotlight! We talk about Enlightenment, Romantic poetry, & how new technologies of communication provoke nostalgic storytell...

Titus & Joseph Bottum do the Christmas podcast--caroling, Dickens's A Christmas carol, reflections on the neediness & joy of being human, the modern American Christmas, & the childhood that prepares us for Christmas. We start & end with two of Jody's carols!

Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about Brooklyn, a beautiful work of selective nostalgia on the America of the 50s, from the point of view of an Irish immigrant played by the lovely, talented Saoirse Ronan. The story dramatizes the promises & perils of American freedom & the institutions needed to guide people to a decent happiness in America.

Titus & Scott Beauchamp turn from the Catholic horror The Exorcist to the scientific/atheist horror The Thing. We talk about the powers of science & the daring of facing the cold, inhospitable cosmos; about facing the horror of life as mere, but deadly self-reproduction; & the collapse of a community faced with this threat into paranoia. Listen & share!