Trylove

Brian De Palma is a legendary and divisive filmmaker. Stephen King is an even more legendary and divisive storyteller. These two careers came together in 1976 to make CARRIE, now considered a landmark of the horror genre and one of King's most successful screen adaptations. Have you ever wondered what two cishet male twenty-something podcasters who don't know De Palma from De Niro think of it? Wel...

CW: discussions of violence. HAUSU is still a singular work 42 years after its release. In its walls, you'll find twists and parodies of pastoral life, arranged marriage, social expectations of women, and dozens of references to director Nobuhiko Obayashi's childhood trauma as a survivor of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks. More than draw your eye with absurd grotesqueries, HAUSU wants t...

We’re all going to lose ourselves someday. The betrayal of the body is the surest thing since taxes. We’ll forget, or we’ll die, or both at the same time. It’s when we lose each other – the social trust of our communities – that our understanding of the world shatters like frozen blood. THE THING (1982) is another one of those horror classics that defies nature by remaining relevant, astounding, a...

Content warning: Discussions of suicide and self-harm. We can't escape our demons. We could go to the other edge of the universe, or jump to an entirely new one, but the burdens we bear will always follow – and despite the lack of gravity, they might be even heavier up there. A mishmash of bad CGI, decent acting, cheesy writing, and hellish concept hamstrung by bad editing courtesy of (you guessed...

Everyone who runs into eccentric amnesiac Mamiya develops a murderous apathy, fully aware of their crimes but unable to explain their motives. Toxically repressed detective Takabe is put on the case, set on discovering a reason – for Mamiya’s madness, for his victims’ bloodlust, and for his own fragile sanity. Who do we become when faced with the platonic ideal? How do our perceptions – of ourselv...

Welcome back Eric Leith (@biggergooseegg) for another episode! Whatever ALIEN (1979) added to cinema (including a treatise on aiming pop media at the powerful), ALIENS (1986) undid in favor of marketability and bloodshed. In the former, we found ourselves tightly wound aboard the Nostromo, trusting only in each other as Ellen Ripley faced the terrors of interplanetary capitalism. In ALIENS, we get...

CONTENT WARNING: Brief mention of rape and sexual assault. Featuring special guest Eric Leith (@biggergooseegg)! A perfect marriage of pulpy science fiction and gritty, sparse horror, Ridley Scott's 1979 masterpiece isn't just frequently cited as one of the best movies in either of these genres--it's frequently cited as one of the best movies ever made period! In this episode, the last surviving m...

Content warning: Discussion of problematic depictions of queer and marginalized communities. Brief mention of sexual assault. We start talking about the movie around four minutes in. HACKERS (1995) will always be fun to look back on. But it also feels timeless in how it uses the anti-capitalist queer origins of cyberpunk to build a world where young, tech-literate outcasts, blamed (and framed) for...

Featuring special guest Nick Ransbottom! What other noirs didn't have, THE THIN MAN series did: levity, breathing room, characters who weren't written full of life just to have it snuffed out on the next page. Nick and Nora Charles's charmed life as bourgeois socialites and functioning alcoholics could be an uneasy basis for a hard-boiled plot but for William Powell and Myrna Loy's bedrock perform...

Featuring Trylon film programmer John Moret! The Trylon Cinema (née "Microcinema") celebrates its 10th birthday this month with a day-long surprise movie marathon. Trylon film programmer John Moret calls it a rare "ritual space" – perhaps the only one in the Midwest – that celebrates the act of GOING to the movies rather than just SEEING one. For this episode, we were thrilled to welcome John in t...

Featuring special guest Nick Ransbottom! VIDEODROME repurposes our own understanding of our bodies to tell a different story about critical media viewing. But does its wide lens preclude it from making a more pointed statement? Fuck James Woods. Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

Full of Seussian grotesqueries and allegorical slavery, FANTASTIC PLANET is probably remembered for exactly what it deserves to be remembered for (creative, creepy, crawly creatures, trippy visuals, and an extremely 1970s soundtrack). What it doesn't deliver is the intangible, experimental storytelling psychedelia that its marketing seems to sell the movie on. Do its depictions of sexuality, socie...

Content warning: Consistent stylized violence and one instance of attempted sexual assault. Katsuhiro Otomo’s film adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga, AKIRA, pits brother against brother as stand-in for the larger confrontation bubbling beneath the cracked asphalt of Neo-Tokyo’s bloody streets: a reckoning between the military, youth culture, masculinity, and nuclear anxieties with the shared t...

THE HIDDEN is an '80s movie like many '80s movies in that it's super tropey, kinda gross, full of zany practical effects, and sloppily aimed at the conservativism of the age. Its twists on the burgeoning action/horror genre include some progressive(???) gender politics, a direct indictment of the American political schema (in which a white male need only say "I want to be president" to become pres...

Thicc men, thin characters. We sure as hell didn't see THIS one at the Trylon! Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

Featuring special guests Ben Hanson and John Carson! Directed by Danny Boyle (TRAINSPOTTING, 28 DAYS LATER) and written by Alex Garland (EX MACHINA, ANNIHILATION), SUNSHINE is a fun little space thing with dreams of being the next big postmodern space opera. What it ends up being is more of a bizarre tonal roller coaster (hitting all the notes from courtroom drama to odyssey thriller to gross-out...

Strap in for a second STORY about POLICE! The follow-up to Jackie Chan's blockbuster POLICE STORY (1985) doubles down on the stunts, explosions, and smarm of the original and adds more plot than is strictly necessary (about 25 minutes' worth). Despite that, and some reprehensible treatment of a deaf/mute villain, it's still a fun moment-to-moment movie that juggles violence and comedy with an appr...

CW: some discussions of violence towards women (as played for comedy). Whatever else Jackie Chan is (poet, philosopher, philanderer, tax evader, bigot, tool of the state), he's a man who understands that the best part of martial arts is its humor. Like the best of Chan's work, POLICE STORY is a creative, reactionary, and funny celebration of the beauty of expressive motion. It also has a minute-lo...

Featuring special guest and THE FIFTH ELEMENT stan Seth Zarate! What does THE FIFTH ELEMENT add to the sci-fi canon? It's certainly not the first action/comedy/sci-fi hybrid. It's also a slurry of politically unfocused mishmash that seems altogether uninterested in exploring the endpoints of those elements. If it's special, it's because of the world built around it – one that features gender-fluid...

Forget what you heard about FARGO (1996): BARTON FINK is actually the Coens' most autobiographical movie. Telling the bizarre odyssey of self-righteous playwright-turned-Hollywood screenwriter Barton Fink, the film was scripted during a bout of writer's block while making MILLER'S CROSSING (1990) – and counting the rings of this script, that adds up. It indicts Barton himself (no small feat in a m...

The Coen Brothers' 2009 existential dramedy A SERIOUS MAN trades on their Jewish upbringing to paint a larger picture about the voices that take over amid the inescapable silence of organized religion. As Harry says, it's a movie about "paying more attention to the people in your life." With eternal suffering the only constant in human existence, inaction is a recurring motif – the line, "I didn't...

Featuring special guest Eric Leith! In Tom Reagan's gritty gangster world, caring is a quick way to get yourself shot. It's too bad, then, that he cares very much about Leo O'Bannon, his Irish mob boss, and Verna Bernbaum, the woman they both think they love. When Verna's brother runs afoul of the rival Italian mafia, Tom is forced to reconcile the charge of his position, his loyalty to Leo, and t...

CW: Discussions of suicide as plot. Listening advisement: Harry's track ended up sounding bad. Sorry. While watching THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE, it's easy to see why it's one of the Coen Brothers' relatively overlooked films: nested between box office smashes O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (2000) and INTOLERABLE CRUELTY (2003), it failed to break even on its modest budget and has become a cult classic i...

Featuring special guest and honorary Minnesotan Emily Csuy! FARGO is probably a non-Minnesotan's first impression of Minnesotans, but how essentially Minnesotan is it? Why is it set here, and what does that choice reveal about the Coen Brothers' attitude toward their home state? How often does a Minnesotan actually say "you betcha"? Is FARGO secretly a case study for the Second Noble Truth of Budd...

Featuring Nabil Azzouzi! Just to put it out front: THE PLEASURE GARDEN isn't a mystery, thriller, or horror film. It has its moments (it's even funny sometimes, which is awe-inspiring for a 90-year-old movie to pull off), but being Alfred Hitchcock's first feature, it's most interesting to watch in the context of his filmography. It's got the corrupting influence of power; it's got love and lust;...