Trylove

Paul Schrader’s directorial debut isn’t a tale of a fearless crew punching up at their company overlords and the corrupt union that’s supposed to protect them. Instead, it’s a tale of compromise. The kind you make, and the kind that gets made for you. The kind you desperately hope means something in the end, anyway. In this episode, we discuss the excellent casting; how it’s great that Richard Pry...

XANADU is a musical fantasy film released in 1980 directed by Robert Greenwald. It stars Olivia Newton-John as Kira, Michael Beck as Sonny Malone, and Gene Kelly as Danny McGuire. Sonny is an artist toiling away painting album covers for a living. Danny is a has-been song and dance man resigned to retirement after a career in construction. Kira is an immortal muse sent from a mythological plane to...

With Abbie Phelps! Baz Luhrmann’s musical mashup is a ravishing, jarring, occasionally annoying wakeup call to the modern movie musical. How did we get from the freneticism of MOULIN ROUGE! — one shot per second, Ewan McGregor as a twee poet musician with a flair for the burlesque, Nicole Kidman as a diseased courtesan overperforming horniness, John Leguizamo as a little person with a lisp — to so...

EYES WIDE SHUT is a 1999 psychosexual thriller film starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise and directed by Stanley Kubrick in his final feature film. After New York City doctor Bill Hartford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) attend a Christmas party hosted by one of Bill’s patients, Alice reveals to Bill in a stoned haze that she’s fantasized about having sex with other men. The revel...

Alejandro Amenábar’s surprise hit THE OTHERS turns the tables on the ghost story. And a couple decades after its release, it’s still a really fun, watchable movie! But is it more than its inspirations? Furthermore, is it more than a twist on its inspirations? In this episode, we consider the ways THE OTHERS inverts gothic horror tropes, how it makes the grandeur of a Jersey mansion seem so lifeles...

Content warning: This episode includes references to and discussion of sexual assault. Happy first episode of 2025! Here’s a discussion of a movie where a series of horrendous things happen. In Lars von Trier’s DOGVILLE, Nicole Kidman plays a stranger seeking escape from gangsters in the Rocky Mountains. Luckily for her — or not — the humble town of Dogville provides ample refuge, and Tom (Paul Be...

𝐼𝑡’𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡 𝑤𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑓𝑢𝑙 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟… Time for us to rank, rate, and re-evaluate the films we saw at the Trylon in 2024, as well as the episodes we made about them! The Barrys can be a pretty grueling tradition — hours spent re-litigating discussions we’ve already had about movies we’ve already talked about — but who are we kidding, we love going back to the well. Sit back, relax, cue up “Stac...

With returning guest Kris Montello , Programming Director for the Asian-American International Film Festival and programmer for the Slamdance Film Festival! Yasujirō Ozu didn’t intend for AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON (1962) to be his final film, but it feels like it. Chishū Ryū is Shuhei Hirayama , an aging salaryman, widower, and father who’s slowly coming to grips with the realities of growing older — pr...

Can you make things better? Can you make yourself better? What’s the difference between that and wanting to make things better for someone else? Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is a troubled cop. Misanthrope, former football star, loose cannon cop — he struggles to reconcile the stated altruism of his job with the ineffectual brutality that makes him so good at it. After he disables one witness and fails...

Arguably Yasujirō Ozu’s masterpiece, GOOD MORNING (1959) has more going on than its simple plot would have you believe. World War II is fully in the rearview in a quiet, out-of-the-way town. Instead of wartime anxieties, nosy neighbors gossip about their friends’ lifestyles; punkish kids covet the new TV set next door; men teach boys how to fart on command. They’re bound together more by niceties...

Bret Easton Ellis’s original novel featured vivid descriptions of depraved acts, but Mary Harron’s film adaptation of AMERICAN PSYCHO has a slithering unctuousness all its own. Christian Bale is Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street VP by day and a murderer at large by night. Problem is, those two things don't stay separate for long. Despite the heft of its subject matter and the “unfilmability” of its s...

Shortly after announcing a sweeping shakedown, Chinatown gangster Frank Baturin (Akim Tamiroff) is targeted by his right-hand man in a vicious power play. When the hit fails, Baturin’s life is left in the hands of Mary (Anna May Wong), a one-in-a-million surgeon — and daughter of a Chinatown medicine shop owner — who nurses Baturin back to health. While her friendship with the King deepens, Mary’s...

After her father is killed for refusing to be extorted by the leaders of a human trafficking operation, Yan Ling (Anna May Wong) and Kim Lee (Phillip Ahn) jet across the islands of Puerto Rico on their way to the ringleader. When Anna May Wong starred in Robert Florey’s DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI, it was hailed as a milestone in Hollywood’s progress toward a more inclusive, diverse industry: An Asian-Am...

Don Hertzfeldt’s creative, experimental animation style is almost universally acclaimed. His early short works helped him bridge the gap (albeit accidentally) from festival darling into a filmmaker synonymous with pre-YouTube online video culture. His first feature film, IT’S SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY, tells the story of Bill, a man defined by his neurotic observations about the world around him. In pa...

We’re no strangers to the work of Nobuhiko Obayashi. A visionary and an auteur, almost all of his work centers the human experience, especially through the media of film. Shared emotion, his filmography says, is the most important thing a human can feel. Can choose to feel. Based on a true story, BEIJING WATERMELON is no exception: Shunzo (Bengal), a humble grocer befriends the Chinese students li...

Something’s waiting in the woods! THE EVIL DEAD is a masterwork of budget filmmaking, and it kick-started a genre all its own. In this discussion, we look back at the movie as the origin of comedy-horror cinema, as a rebuke of classic Hollywood horror style, and as a damn fun crowd-pleaser. References: “Interview: A Grandmother on The Evil Dead” by Benjamin Jarman for Perisphere, the Trylon blog “...

With returning guest Dan Nagan! A double-booked Airbnb in a rundown Detroit neighborhood is much, much more than it seems. It’s better as a surprise, so we won’t spoil anything with this description, but you should know BARBARIAN is ultimately a story about control: Over narratives, land, culture, and personhood itself. **References: ** “ Trailers from Heaven: How Barbarian’s Advance Publicity Mad...

KILLER BEAN FOREVER is an independently created animated feature about Killer Bean, a vigilante anthropomorphized coffee bean with a chip on his shoulder and a bitter rivalry with the troublesome gangs of Beantown. Claiming inspiration from classic action cinema, particularly the work of gun fu genre pioneer John Woo, the idiosyncratic KILLER BEAN FOREVER became a cult hit some 10 years after its...

It defined an entire era of filmmaking. It recontextualized the tropes and narratives that came before. It festoons college dorm rooms across the world. It played at the Trylon on a newly struck 35mm print in 2024. Quentin Tarantino’s sophomore feature PULP FICTION is still “that movie”, whatever that means. An all-star cast stretched across three interlocking stories shows people in a period of a...

With special guest Abbie Phelps (@GoodHunterAbbie)! THE TRAIN is a fantastic Burt Lancaster vehicle, a showcase for supporting performers Paul Scofield and Jeanne Moreau, and, in a career dotted with bangers, one of director John Frankenheimer’s finest. With the Nazi occupation of France coming to an end, railway supervisor Paul Labiche (Lancaster) is tasked by Colonel Von Waldheim (Scofield) with...

Kokubu (Raizô Ichikawa), captain of his university's kendo team, is a mystery to those who know him: An ascetic dedicated to a point of obsession with the simplicity and beauty of the sword arts. Kagawa (Yūsuke Kawazu), a promising but arrogant kendo student, is attracted to Kokubu's devout leadership but kept at a distance by his standoffish nature. With the national championships fast approachin...

With returning guest Natalie Marlin! SECONDS is a 1966 film directed by John Frankenheimer from the original novel by David Ely. Past-his-prime New York banker Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) elects to undergo a procedure to give himself a new face and a new life. The Company, the shady organization that offers this service, completely reconstructs Arthur, altering every detail of his identity (hi...

KIRU (also known as DESTINY’S SON) is a 1962 samurai film directed by Kenji Misumi and written by Kaneto Shindo, based on a novel by Renzaburo Shibata. The film stars Raizo Ichikawa as Shingo, the secret son of an assassin executed for the crime of killing her lord’s concubine. Shingo learns of his true nature after a rival family massacres his adoptive father and sister for denying the secret of...

With Danny “Bagadonuts” Nagan, a real-life good fella and cohost of the Everything We Learned podcast! I mean, it’s GOODFELLAS. If you haven’t seen it, you kinda already have. But you should absolutely still see it (take it from Jason). Despite his status as an Irish-Italian-American, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) is a fish IN water among the most powerful mafia family of Brooklyn. From middle school, H...

With Trylonteer and Perkins superfan Kelly Krantz ( @kransekage_ )! PLAY IT AS IT LAYS is a 1972 drama film directed by Frank Perry from a novel and screenplay by Joan Didion. The movie stars Tuesday Weld as Maria Wyeth, a depressed actress stuck in an unhappy separated marriage with director Carter Lang (played by Adam Roarke), and Anthony Perkins as BZ, a gay movie producer and friend of Maria’s...