Trylove

DRUNKEN MASTER II, known as THE LEGEND OF DRUNKEN MASTER on its belated stateside release, is an absolute high watermark of the kung fu genre. Its classically dazzling choreography would be enough to earn it a place among the all-time best, but its anti-Western/pro-worker plot and artful filming really put it in another tier. At the same time, it works at a very basic level: watching people move l...

Content warnings: Suicide. This week, we’re joined by Trylonteer and movie lover Kelly Krantz ( https://twitter.com/kransekage_ ) to discuss one of Wim Wenders’ classic films: WINGS OF DESIRE! WINGS OF DESIRE tells the story of Damiel and Cassiel, angels floating above Cold War-era Berlin, studying, analyzing, and listening to our inner thoughts – but never revealing their presence. Damiel eventua...

Content warning: Explicit discussions of sexual content, drug use, and some crude but good-natured goofing. Fuck James Franco. The opening scenes of SPRING BREAKERS showcase two intentional worlds: One is a sardonic sensory overload, full of “bikinis and big booties”’ the other is a wry examination of cultural assumption through racial aesthetics, fraught with the implications of finding your own...

Featuring returning guest Charlie Mackin ( https://twitter.com/charliemander13)! KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE is about how the journey to self-actualization, despite being an internal one, is never taken alone. Thirteen-year-old Kiki ventures off to find her own identity as a witch – whatever that may be – and learns more about herself, her talents, and how others appreciate them (or don’t) when she tr...

Featuring returning guest Matt Clark (https://twitter.com/themplsmatt)! If NIGHT MOVES isn’t quite like other neonoirs of the 1970s, it’s because of Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), a tragic antihero whose fatal flaw can’t really be called “hubris” because he actively seeks out his own problems and never accepts their resolution. When the “perfect” case lands in his lap (the 13-year-old daughter (Mela...

KEY LARGO is a story about leaving to change things, only to come back and get caught up in them all over again. It’s a tightly wound noir stuck in a flimsy boarding house off the coast of Florida where an ex-GI, a war widow, a hounded mobster, a group of Seminole Indians, and many more seek freedom – and find instead signposts that the world they hoped to build never came to be after World War II...

First she mates… then she terminates. Then we talk about it! Maybe you can’t say LADY TERMINATOR is more than the sum of its parts (problematic depictions of women, poor editing, and a sometimes shot-for-shot ripoff of THE TERMINATOR (1984)), but it absolutely doesn’t need to be. Blending Indonesian folklore with ‘80s action tropes and a healthy dose of exploitation, it’s roughly about the curse o...

Warning: This podcast was recorded at 7 a.m. Central on a Sunday morning. Minor bullshit, “on one”-ness, and legitimately enlightening discussion ensue. It was stupid of me to write that THE SACRIFICE (1986) is Tarkovsky’s most personal film. That’s definitely MIRROR. Depicting stories from Tarkovsky’s own life and cognition with a dreamlike throughline, it’s a movie that seeks to explore the rela...

Featuring special guest Seth Zarate ( https://twitter.com/snzarate)! Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film might also be his most personal. Through the tale of a family rendered catatonic by impending nuclear obliteration and one man’s fateful gambit to avoid disaster, he wrestles with the morality of human existence, the sin of the unnecessary, and the role of faith in determining the self. It was a firs...

(Listening note: Harry was late, so we start the episode by talking bullshit about Star Wars and some other stuff. Use the timestamps to skip to the good stuff.) CLAUDINE isn’t a textbook blaxploitation film, but it leans on those tropes and expectations to subvert them in a really radical way, especially in the context of its 1974 release. The story of a struggling mother on welfare finding love...

Featuring special guests Eric Leith ( https://twitter.com/unintellivision ) and Seth Zarate ( https://twitter.com/snzarate)! THE FACULTY lifts from sci-fi and horror touchstones like ALIEN (1979), THE TERMINATOR (1984), and THE THING (1982), deconstructing classic tropes and even whole scenes in a high school context. It’s not as heady as that makes it sound, but it’s still fun and subversive in a...

Our Polly Platt series comes to an end with one of the producer, production designer, and hitmaker’s best-known works: the ur-teen romcom SAY ANYTHING… We discuss the movie’s status as romcom classic, the questionable influence of the American dream over the lives of vulnerable youth, whether or not Lloyd Dobler is a simp, and whether or not they should’ve cut the “ding” from the final shot of the...

In BOTTLE ROCKET, Wes Anderson focuses on the moments before you realize it’s time to say goodbye – to your friends, your family, the person you thought you were, and the person you thought you’d become. Without his toyetic visual indulgences, Anderson’s style reveals a somewhat more heartfelt version of the real relationships between goofy characters that populate his later movies. Resources: - B...

In this episode, the first non-Boggie in our Polly Platt series, we discuss TERMS OF ENDEARMENT, Albert Brooks’s ‘real’ character drama. We discuss how its core conflicts do (and don’t) round out its characters, how nice it is to see the uncomfortable parts of family relationships portrayed unwincingly (if unconvincingly), and Jack Nicholson’s undeniable, scene-chewing sluttiness. Follow us on Twi...

In Peter Bogdanovich’s THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, two generations in a 1950s Texas town come to grips with the promise of postwar American glory when it turns out to be a myth. In this episode, we discuss how the movie finds its moral center amid a pedestrian malaise, the clear contributions of Polly Platt, and present-day parallels to the real-life cinema facing closure in Uptown Minneapolis. Resourc...

Featuring special guest Jenny Ackerson ( https://twitter.com/ackersonjenny)! The directorial debut of Roger Corman protégé Peter Bogdanovich is a startling, screeching indictment of the past and future of American violence, and what it looks like when they meet in the present. Following the parallel stories of aging classic horror star Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) and quietly disgruntled, emasculat...

As Jacques Tati’s best-remembered film, PLAYTIME is a technical achievement on many levels. The crew built an entire city block, complete with skyscraper façades and cardboard extras, to manufacture a grey, corporatized Paris against which to feature its many layered gags. It’s fitting, then, that the film’s third-act script-flip, which corrals us into a wonderfully chaotic nightclub, feels so fre...

What TRAFIC lacks in punchlines, it makes up in pathos. A sidestep from the meticulous comedic craftwork that defined Tati’s masterpieces, it doesn’t feature many of the clever gags seen in MON ONCLE (1958) or LES VACANCES DE MONSIEUR HULOT (1953). It feels a little empty, actually – until you get used to its currents of anti-comedy and high-minded statements about the folly of man and the ways we...

Maybe because it’s the debut of M. Hulot, LES VACANCES DE MONSIEUR HULOT (MR. HULOT’S HOLIDAY) isn’t quite as consistent, coherent, or radical in its messaging as MON ONCLE (1958). What it IS, however, is a string of great bits and vibes from the French coast. In this episode, we run down our favorite gags from the film, discuss how it distills the bizarre experience of vacationing, ponder its use...

M. Hulot isn’t so much a fly in the ointment of the bourgeoisie as a flashlight on the silliest aspects of their way of life. He’s a picture of Franco goofiness rooted in the rural; the chaotic; the human. MON ONCLE is Jacques Tati’s blocking masterclass that maps the geometry of homes, cities, streets, and factories onto the characters that move within them to illustrate the contrast between high...

The Trylon’s playing movies we already recorded on earlier in the pandemic, so we’ve changed the rules for a short Non-’Lon Series on movies we HAVEN’T seen and may never see at the Trylon! They say it’s not tragic to die doing what you love, which is why the Non-’Lon BoysPick series is dying with POINT BREAK (1991), the most Dudes Rock movie ever. It’s a thoughtful exploration of a cop’s ability...

The Trylon’s playing movies we already recorded on earlier in the pandemic, so we’ve changed the rules for a short Non-’Lon Series on movies we HAVEN’T seen and may never see at the Trylon! Aaron’s pick takes us to the dystopian UK of 1982’s PINK FLOYD – THE WALL, a musical journey through not just one man’s steady decline into fascist individualism, but that of all of Western society. In this dis...

The Trylon’s playing movies we already recorded on earlier in the pandemic, so we’ve changed the rules for a short Non-’Lon Series on movies we HAVEN’T seen and may never see at the Trylon! Sports correspondent Cody chose MONEYBALL (2011), a baseball-centric movie that fits so well in his wheelhouse, it’s a wonder we haven’t talked about it until now. Over the course of our conversation, we discus...

When we announced our "Non-'Lon" Series last week, how long did you wager it'd take before one of the boys chose an anime? If you guessed "immediately," we have good news! This week, Harry selected the late great Satoshi Kon's debut feature film, PERFECT BLUE (1997), an eerily prescient psychological horror film about a J-pop idol's reality unraveling that proved so visionary and influential that...

The Trylon’s playing movies we already recorded on earlier in the pandemic, so we’ve changed the rules for a short Non-’Lon Series on movies we HAVEN’T seen and may never see at the Trylon! Jason kicks us off with RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981), a seminal action-adventure ah hell, you know what RAIDERS is. It’s 40 years old in 2021, so we’re putting on our goggles and giving it a close contemporar...