Trylove

In a special, spoilery, distinctly non-Trylony episode, we're proud to host Nick Ransbottom (@TheEzioKenway) to talk about Rob Letterman's loose adaptation of the 2016 video game of the same name. We – four video game-literate men in the same general demographic – all liked it a lot. Go figure! And then go see it! It probably would've been enough to make POKÉMON: DETECTIVE PIKACHU a facsimile of t...

Content warning: This film contains depictions of attempted sexual assault and plenty of "period-specific" racism. Heavy on the air quotes. For all his cowboy pageantry and vague machismo, John McCabe is just a sad, insecure man (and not the kind who's rewarded for it, either). In Robert Altman's "anti-Western" MCCABE & MRS. MILLER, he's a wingless frog who keeps bumping his ass, flailing to e...

Inside CLUELESS (1995)'s comedic portrayal of stereotypically vapid California Beverly Hills high schoolers' lives, there might be a genuine message of self-actualization through social performance. Does it earn that appraisal? Does it matter? As guest Charlie Mackin says, "If you're becoming a better person just because you want to become a better person, that's an okay motivation to do things."...

Featuring Nick Grossman! Throughout our little series on Akira Kurosawa's most popular works, we keep setting up each movie as the progenitor of modern genre pieces (STRAY DOG for police procedurals, YOJIMBO for highfalutin' Westerns, etc.). Even so, SEVEN SAMURAI is the genesis of most character-led ensemble movies – period – and has itself been remade countless times. It uses several samurai (bo...

A straight-laced detective quickly frays when his gun is stolen on the bus home, leading him on a slow chase across Tokyo during a heatwave – and leading modern cinema to the genesis of police procedurals. Akira Kurosawa's STRAY DOG is noir with a heart, pulp with a conscience, and drama scarred with the impact of World War II on three generations of Japanese society. In this episode, we argue tha...

Comparisons to STAR WARS aren't necessarily a bad way to look at THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (1958), but they won't add much to your viewing experience. Yes, Akira Kurosawa's feudal epic (featuring Toshiro Mifune as General Rokurota Makabe and Misa Uehara as Princess Yuki) lives in a cleverly-built world of deposed princesses and disgraced swordsmen, but it's also a picaresque grounded in people of the lo...

The closeness of Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa's relationship – a closeness that would be their undoing – is well-exemplified in RED BEARD. Their final collaboration for a number of reasons (personal and financial clashes are both rumored), the movie isn't typical Kurosawa, either. The director said as much at the time, admitting that the movie represented a turning point toward the conservati...

(You can skip to about 10 minutes in if you want to hear about the movie. It’s all sexy ASMR and shop talk until then.) SANJURO (1962), sequel to the groundbreaking YOJIMBO (1961), is not so groundbreaking. It’s where you start to get a sense for the commercial viability of Toshiro Mifune’s inimitable character (he’d go on to appear in ZATOICHI MEETS YOJIMBO in 1970, pairing him up with the blind...

Longtime Akira Kurosawa muse Toshiro Mifune’s grumpy ronin with a heart of gold in YOJIMBO (1961) codified the “man with no name” archetype on which Western movies survived for decades (including Sergio Leone's unlicensed 1964 remake A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS). The movie's synopsis – a town stuck in a bloody spat between two profiteering families is forced to reconcile when a mercenary swordsman blows...

Featuring Emily Csuy, Aaron Grossman, and Cody Narveson! Martha Coolidge's second directorial credit, VALLEY GIRL, can be a frustrating movie to love. Steeped in (plausibly self-aware) '80s aesthetics and some adorably goofy lingo (see "trippendicular"), it also has something to say about the cultural challenges of just relating to another person – and how we sometimes create those challenges for...

THE RAID is one of the grandest entries in the conversation between action cinema and video games. But is it good or just loud? At least we can agree that JOHN WICK is better, even if it wouldn't exist without THE RAID. Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

Is David Lynch's 1980 historical drama about Joseph Merrick one of his least Lynch-like films? Is it a straight-forward, sentimental, and even manipulative dramatization about a real-life tragedy? ...Or is it a quintessentially Lynch-like indictment of the culture of globalized, industrialized capitalism we still find ourselves living under, and how that culture has warped us to the point that deh...

On the border between earnest tragedy and pseudo-hippie preachiness, there's KOYAANISQATSI, a plotless documentary-slash-visual tone poem about humanity's lopsided relationship with Planet Earth and how there are some things we just can't rebuild. This episode was recorded in 2018 after a free screening of KOYAANISQATSI at the Trylon, which was put on by the Moving Image & Media Studies Gradua...

The only feature-length film by writer/director Barbara Loden before her death in 1980, WANDA follows Wanda Goronski, a divorcee in Pennsylvania coal country whose options for a better life shrink with every man she meets. Content warning: discussions of depression, abuse of women, and attempted sexual assault. Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

What started as a commercial director's fever dream became a genre-blending staple of cult cinema. In this episode, Aaron Grossman (@aarbypls) joins the boys to talk about HAUSU, Nobuhiko Obayashi's feature-length debut, and its surprisingly resonant message about the virtues of peacetime and the echoes of wartime tragedy. Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

THE 400 BLOWS (1959) is François Truffaut's first film, based in part on his own life as a ruffian on the streets of Paris. It's also widely regarded as a monument of French New Wave cinema. In our first episode that doesn't sound terrible, Jason, Harry, and John try to figure out what that meant at the time and how we look at it today. Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Wate...