ACFmovie podcast

Titus & Scott Beauchamp discuss William Friedkin's The Exorcist as a Catholic horror, where the confrontation with evil is part of man's supernatural destiny. Horror both issues from the revelations of our modern scientific powers & also investigates their limits. It makes the case for faith in our humanity at the same time it opens up the possibility that being human isn't special. Body horror es...

Titus & Pete Spiliakos discuss Rocky & its many sequels. Why did it shoot to fame? Because its a Frank Capra movie! Because Rocky's a boy scout. Because it's very realistic about the suffering of the lower classes & the way it complicates patriotism. Rocky is a boxing movie with very little boxing; it's a feel good-movie where the protagonist loses. It's a marvel of middlebrow art.

Titus & Terry Teachout talk about the pluperfect noir: Double Indemnity, written by Billy Wilder & Raymond Chandler. Every element of the all-American tragedy is present here, for the first time. We talk about the conflict between love & law, the different claims of eroticism & friendship, & also where insurance stands to the all-American future.

Titus & John Presnall talk Antonioni's Blow-Up, a movie about the erotic revolution of the '60s & what it meant to art, artists, the young, & society. Blow-up offers a version of a tragic hero--a man who thinks himself king of London because he's on top of the new erotic & artistic production of beauty. He thinks he's in control. Then he encounters mortality.

Titus & Paul Cantor, America's eminent Shakespearian, talk movies, TV shows, & tragedy. From Godfather to Breaking Bad, from Aristotle to Mark Twain, we talk about how to understand pop culture & how to understand America's great love affair with tragic heroes (now called anti-heroes).

Titus & Richard Brookhiser, famed biographer of the Founders, get to their third discussion--this time introducing his newest book, out just after the election, about the great Chief Justice, John Marshall. We talk about his life & his work in making the Supreme Court an institution to rival the presidency & Congress. We also talk about the Federalists' vision of the American people.

Titus & Terry Teachout discuss In A Lonely Place, the 1950 Nicholas Ray noir, Bogart's most daring performance--a movie with a modern feel, with sophisticated adult characters, men & women, who nevertheless suffer great misery. We talk about Ray's talent for bending genre to tell stories that feel true to characters he establishes within genre. We also talk about film noir's connection to tragedy,...

Titus & John Presnall talk Al Capone & Eliot Ness--Brian De Palma & David Mamet's The Untouchables, their answer to Coppola's Godfather. We talk about law & justice, populism & rights, Puritans & Catholics, WASPs & immigrant Irish & Catholics, America & Europe, democracy & tyranny. Listen & share, friends!

Titus & John Presnall discuss Apocalypse Now, which ended the 70s, the decade of vastly ambitious Coppola movies which started with the Godfather. We talk about Coppola's vision of America & the Vietnam war, his exploration of varieties of manliness, some more insane, others less, his ideas about British imperialism--his allusions to Kipling, Conrad, & T.S.Eliot--& the amazing & awful qualities of...

Titus & Carl Eric Scott discuss Cameron Crowe's autobiographical story Almost Famous, his touch of greatness! We talk about rock music & the era when it defined the identities of vast numbers of young Americans. About the rock demigods, especially Dylan, Bowie, & Led Zeppelin. About the need for community around music & the way American youth has changed. & about Carl's Rock Songbook, the series o...

Titus & James Lileks talk about Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, the new Amazon series, & the original Jack Ryan movie, John McTiernan's The Hunt for Red October. We talk about the portrayal of heroism in relation to national security, about analysts rather than fighting heroes, about national threats & whether commerce & public respectability allow the realistic portrayal of political enmity, & how the ki...

Titus & Terry Teachout talk noir! Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, the best Robert Ryan noir--a story that moves between social criticism & Romanticism effortlessly, the tragic story of a man who believes in justice & who learns to believe in innocence, too. We talk about the many attractions of the movie--Ida Lupino, the Bernard Hermann score, George Diskant's cinematography, Ward Bond's remar...

Titus & Pete Spiliakos talk about Die Hard on its 30th anniversary. We talk about the everyman role that made Bruce Willis a star & how director John McTiernan arranged an entire story about arrogant, failing institutions--corporations, the media, the police, FBI, &c.--& the moral virtues of working class Americans like John McClane. We also talk about the skill & care put into making the movie--t...

Titus is joined by Richard Rushfield, newshound extraordinaire, author of the Ankler newslater, the favorite Hollywood commentary at the American Cinema Foundation. We talk Netflix, Amazon, Disney--the changes in our entertainment & technology--as well as how the conflict between them is shaping up in America's fight for a monopoly in the glamour business.

Titus & Pete Spiliakos return to PoMoCon, the post-modern conservative podcast, & discuss the various political & intellectual forms of corruption afflicting elites. We find things to notice, & criticize, among both parties & all ideological points on the compass. Sure to make us popular.

Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about Agniezska Holland's story in honor of Jan Palach, Burning Bush. This is the 50th anniversary of the violent end of the Prague Spring, so we talk about the promise of freedom in in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet invasion that ended it, & the noble self-immolation of the young student Palach in protest against tyranny. We talk about the moral realism & the technical compe...

Titus & Terry Teachout discuss Charles Laughton's directorial debut, The Night Of The Hunter, a remarkable movie about false prophets--the possibility that the devil would come among us in the clothes of a preacher. We talk at length about the various aspects of the making of the movie--actors, script, production, score, & even some editing & cinematography. & we also talk about the moral seriousn...

Titus & John Marini discuss the most impressive of Sam Peckinpah's Westerns, The Wild Bunch. We talk about Peckinpah's ambivalent view of Progress, his Rousseauan attempt to ground human happiness in an innocent state of nature that recalls Eden, & his thoughts on nobility--what does it mean to have integrity, to be a man of one's word, & to stick together with other men. Peckinpah made the Wester...

Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about Comedy & Communism--under the banner of Middlebrow, we talk about the recent movie The Death of Stalin, but also about Milan Kundera's Joke & the plays of Vaclav Havel, about Solzhenitsyn & Leo Strauss, about the tragic movie The lives of others & about the black Soviet comedies of Ilf & Petrov... We talk about comedy as truth-telling & retrieval of nature under the...

Titus & Terry Teachout discuss Laura, the most beautiful noir movie--a beautiful noir about the beautiful. We talk about the great achievements of the actors--the cinematography--the score--the direction--the source novel--in every way we try to bring out what a surprising collaboration of talents this movie is, rather than the handiwork of one single author. More, we discuss the achievement of mi...

Titus & Richard Brookhiser, famed biographer of the Founders, discuss the Gentleman Revolutionary, Gouverneur Morris, The Rake Who Wrote The Constitution, as the Brookhiser bio is titled. Morris was the most aristocratic of the Founders & he is the one with the best seats for both world-changing events. We talk about his many accomplishments, from writing the New York Constitution & the US Constit...

Titus & Flagg Taylor discuss the last Western--& the movie that won Clint Eastwood his first Oscars. Unforgiven is a movie about the origins of law in sacred law--not in mere order. It shows what fearful deeds are required to establish the equal natural rights of all human beings, whereas an orderly system might simply treat women as prostitutes & property.

Titus & Richard Brookhiser, famed biographer of the Founders, discuss Alexander Hamilton, the most romantically or adventurously heroic of the Founders, recently the object of a very successful Broadway musical. We discuss the greatness of Hamilton & the view it gives of the American Founding--for this is the highest subject of storytelling & the greatness has to be understood first in order to be...

Titus & John Marini talk about My Darling Clementine, Ford's first post-war Western--his most Romantic & least ugly picture, an attempt to revisit the foundation of the rule of law after the political & economic catastrophes of the first half of the 20th c.

Titus & John Marini discuss Stagecoach, the movie that made John Wayne a star & the Western an art-form, John Ford's way to establish America's national form of poetry.