Amos and Ex: Living in the End Times

Jacking in to director Jose Padilha's 2014 remake of Robocop to talk cyberpunk, trans, AI, and agency in 2025.

Both appreciating and ultimately dismissing James Mangold's latest addition to the Bob Dylan filmography, A Complete Unknown.

On the genius of Paul Thomas Anderson's translation (2014) of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice (2009) in the current moment (2025).

Thinking about consciousness and art vis-a-vis the late great David Lynch's final feature film Inland Empire  (2006).  

A&E consider Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) as the ritual incantation it was obviously meant to be.

Exploring the failures of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and especially late capitalism via Luca Guadagnino's 2018 remake of Dario Argento's 1977 film Suspiria.

A&E on the American election and its overlay with David Cronenberg's 2012 adaptation of Don DeLillo's 2003 novel Cosmopolis.

Today's moving picture, in all senses of the term, is David Robert Mitchell's 2018 stoner noir film "Under the Silver Lake," which A&E agree, is like a fine wine: better with each passing year.

A&E discuss Jane Schoenbrun's 2024 film "I Saw the TV Glow" exploring, among other topics, media's shaping of our adolescence and adulthood.

A&E chat Alex Cox's brilliant/incendiary/prescient low budget classic Repo Man (1984) in an effort to get a better handle on 2024.

A&E on the bleak freak scene that is American politics in 2024.

A&E chat the state of leftist theory nearly 25 years into the 21st century, wondering why it is that so many Marxists seem so disinterested in updating materialism for 2024.

A&E review Tom O'Neill's 2019 book "Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties." Plus: the Beach Boys.

A&E bring the psywar home to chat the decommissioned Stanley R. Mickelsen radar complex outside of Nekoma, North Dakota, and the effect of the Cold War on North Dakota's psyche more broadly.

The second half of our conversation on S. William Snider's book "The Art: The Secret History of Psywar, Conspiritainment, and the Shattering of Reality (Vol. 1).

The first of two conversations revolving around S. William Snider's book "The Art: The Secret History of Psywar, Conspiritainment, and the Shattering of Reality (Vol. 1)." With an appearance by Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.

A&E discuss director Richard Kelly's surreal and underrated film Southland Tales (2007), wondering how he got the future so right.

A conversation about the late Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Paul Schrader's 1985 biopic on the author (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters), and finding a way out.

Nineties crime cinema week wherein A&E chat underground cells, intelligence gathering, and the battle to shape reality itself via John Frankenheimer's 1998 film Ronin.

The second of two episodes on the BAP book Bronze Age Mindset (2018).

The first of two episodes on the BAP book Bronze Age Mindset (2018).

A&E use Juel Taylor's 2023 film They Cloned Tyrone as a way into talking 21st century biopolitics, necropolitics, Haiti, and revolution.

Found this lost episode from June 2023 while scrounging the couch cushions deep for change wherein A&E discuss the political scene as it had been unfolding to that point in World History. Plus: the neoliberalism of Cormac McCarthy's fiction.

Time to chat the next of several selections in this season of the mass market communist film: Chris Nolan's Oppenheimer, wherein labor organizing gets more screen time than quantum physics.

A&E chat Maria Demopoulos's and Jodi Wille's 2012 doc The Source Family, discussing how state agencies were always-already part of the American counterculture.