Trylove

Featuring special guest Matt Yost (@mattyost_)! It could be said that as an adaptation of an adaptation, Bob Fosse's CABARET has an audience of an audience, too: working as critique by paralleling the rise of Naziism with bourgeois escapism in Weimer-era Berlin, it implicates both its characters and world. To what end, though? Is it didactic or just descriptive? Follow Matt Yost on Twitter and Let...

Featuring special guest Charlie Mackin (@charliemander13)! After winning four Oscars for PARASITE (2019), South Korean director Bong Joon-ho finished a short press run, boarded a plane, landed in Minneapolis, and headed to the Walker Art Center for a talk with film critic Scott Foundas. To hear Bong speak so candidly about his films, philosophy, and collaborators in Minneapolis was a completely su...

Featuring special guest Seth Zarate (@snzarate)! Forget Bruno – it's the return of the man we're calling our Bruce Willis expert, Seth Zarate, for a peek at Terry Gilliam's slightly madcap time-traveling paranoia piece 12 MONKEYS (1995). Inspired directly by the 1962 experimental short film LA JETÉE, Gilliam's vision of the future is one marred by human failure – both to protect the world from a d...

Featuring special guest Logan Lafferty (@mrleviathan)! In a clever marriage of narrative and form, the pieces of TOTAL RECALL (1990) don't all add up at first. Each question about its world, plot, and sweeping class themes seems to beg a little more explanation – just enough to maintain intrigue without leaving the audience behind. It's classic Verhoeven, classic Arnie, classic Ironside, classic S...

On Saturday, February 29, 2020, John Waters performed his sold-out one-man show, "This Filthy World," at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis. He left us with some cogent, concise words of wisdom, and we're humbled to share them with you on his 74th birthday.

Though not immediately recognizable as a Spike Lee film, INSIDE MAN (2006) still engages with some of the issues the director is known for tackling, including systemic racism, racial interiority, and the faith placed in American law enforcement. A bank robbery ostensibly gone wrong reveals a dark truth at the heart of the heist that leads the audience, if not the characters, to question the legacy...

Featuring special guest Kyle Olson! To take your mind off of all the depressing news, we bring you the kind of uplifting content that only we can: an in-depth look at Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film CONTAGION. Back when it was first released, the film was known for its uncompromising, cold realism. How does the film hold up in 2020? Does the ensemble cast help take away from that feeling? Is watchin...

Featuring special guest John Moret! Things are tough for everyone during the COVID-19 crisis, so it can sometimes feel a little indulgent to even worry about things like repertory cinema. But as we talked with Trylon Film Programmer John Moret about how the Trylon and the people behind it are dealing with the pressure, it became clear that keeping in touch – even if it’s kind of all bad news – isn...

Emerging from the "Poverty Row" studios of 20th Century Hollywood comes Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 classic DETOUR, a work of film noir that stands out due to its unconventional structure and the wonderful performances of its two main stars, Ann Savage and Tom Neal. Although at first the film might seem to solely represent the usual trappings of American noir, once you get beneath the cool exterior of D...

Listening note: The Gray Duck Theater shuttered in 2023 after four years in business. The space reopened in April 2023 under new ownership as a combination microcinema and community event space called PopsArt Theater. Spoiler alert for PARASITE (2019). In this very special episode, we were thrilled to talk to Andy Smith, founder and owner of the Gray Duck Theater & Coffeehouse in Rochester, MN...

The rich hunt the poor for sport. The cops are on strike. The veterans are all out of work. Natasha Binder needs to find her estranged father. Chance Boudreaux needs $217 to pay his union dues. The realities of a one-sided class war meet the fantasies of New Orleans ultraviolence in HARD TARGET, John Woo’s first American production. The rich can afford to take human lives with impunity; the well-t...

Despite its signature bombast, THE KILLER doesn’t actually reinvent many of the tropes of action cinema. There’s plenty of gunpowder, gore, and squibs to be found in its 110-minute runtime. What makes it different – and what keeps it feeling fresh more than 30 years later – is how it uses those tropes to service a subversive story. Pitting hitman Ah Jong against Detective Li Ying and tossing an in...

Special guest Jenny Ackerson (@AckersonJenny) joins us for this extra-long discussion of PARIS, TEXAS! When director Wim Wenders and screenwriter Sam Shepard sat down to start PARIS, TEXAS, they wanted "to tell a story about America." The story they ended up telling was about Travis, an amnesiac reintegrating as if out of memory back into the deserts of the American southwest, intent on making his...

Featuring special guest Nick Ransbottom! (@TheEzioKenway). Filmed on location in the New York City of 1947 and narrated by its own legendary newspaper man-turned-producer Mark Hellinger, THE NAKED CITY is both a product of and commentary on its time and place. By shooting in a faux-Cinéma vérité style and constantly breaking its own fourth wall, THE NAKED CITY playfully reframes how we think about...

CW: THE WARRIORS contains violence against women, including threats of sexual violence. Our conversation will briefly touch on these elements. When Harry saw the Wonder Wheel come OUT TO PLA-Eee-AAAY on screen at the Trylon's "Up All Night" movie marathon back in November, he hooted and hollered from the back row. The quintessential midnight movie, THE WARRIORS (1979) is a love letter to a vision...

“𝘏𝘦 𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘮𝘦, 𝘵𝘰𝘰. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘰𝘵. 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘐 𝘥𝘰? 𝘐 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥, ‘𝘠𝘦𝘴, 𝘔𝘳. 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘬. 𝘐'𝘮 𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘰𝘵.’ 𝘐'𝘮 𝘯𝘰 𝘧𝘰𝘰𝘭!” Social constructs exist only to divide, removing humanity layer by layer until we don’t recognize the people and things we love right in front of our eyes. That might be what THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (1940), Ernst Lubitsch’s early rom-com, is saying with its depic...

Happy New Year's Eve! We’ve had a hell of a time making this podcast for almost a whole year(!!!), so we wanted to cap 2019 with a special episode to recognize the best and brightest moments of the year: the inaugural Trylove Golden Barry Awards! What’s the best film the Trylon played this year? What was the most memorable guest moment on our show? What's our favorite piece of Trylon trivia we lea...

Featuring special guest Matt Yost (@mattyost_)! CW: BLACK CHRISTMAS includes violent language including threats of rape and assault toward women. We discuss this as an element of the movie. BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974) established many of the tropes and techniques that would lay the groundwork for HALLOWEEN (1978), A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984) – most modern horror cinema, actually. What's more, it's...

Featuring special guest Griffin Fillipitch! In 1937, story writer Melchior Lengyel pitched NINOTCHKA (1939) to MGM with a cutesy triptych: “Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals goes to fearful, capitalistic, monopolistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad, after all.” Thank goodness it’s not ACTUALLY that. Greta Garbo’s comedy turn gives her mo...

CW: discussions of portrayed suicide. For all the artifice displayed by the Warsaw acting troupe in Ernst Lubitsch's TO BE OR NOT TO BE, one thing is very real: their disdain for Nazi occupation and displacement of their people. Slowly infiltrating the ranks of Warsaw's occupying forces – sometimes by accident – they use the tools of their trade to subvert Hitler's ground offensive while having so...

Featuring special guest Dan Nagan! Like a samurai wandering without a master, John Frankenheimer's RONIN kind of meanders unjustifiably in the no-man’s land between Parisian noir and fantastic bombast. Too overwritten to be cool and underserved by questionable directorial choices, its characters feel out of place in a world made specially for them. Like the third of Sam’s absurd aphorisms, maybe i...

Featuring special guest Nick Ransbottom! BRUTE FORCE is a leftist melodrama that is at its best when it leans into its pulpy sensibilities. It displays an unprecedented amount of sympathy for a group of prison inmates who use their strength and camaraderie as they search for a way out of a flawed yet impenetrable system. As our heroes spiral towards their fate, we all find ourselves asking the sam...

Featuring Trylon volunteer Ben Savard! 𝘐 𝘸𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘺 𝘐 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘐 𝘥𝘰 𝘐𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘐 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘰? 𝘐 𝘸𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘺 𝘐 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘐 𝘥𝘰, 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘐 𝘥𝘰 Small-town senior Arnie Cunningham feels like he’s denied true happiness – by girls, the expectations of his parents, and by bullies at school. That all changes when the car of his dreams revs to life in the form of Christine, a cursed coupe t...

In the final complete movie released before Bruce Lee's death, ENTER THE DRAGON, characters stand in for themes and empires stand in for philosophies. It’s a little rough around the edges as a movie, but what can't be denied is its impact writ large on every form of media to this day. In this episode, we try to pick apart ENTER THE DRAGON’s various competing philosophical accusations and discover...

Media & Cultural Studies major who says he doesn’t know what that means ✔️ David Lynch hater ✔️ Likes tweeting ✔️ One of our favorite things is talking to people who know the Trylon from the inside out. On today’s episode, we’re elated to share a conversation we had with Ben Savard, a Trylon volunteer and professional film editor who says that his time with the theater has helped him figure ou...