Trylove

With returning guest and Perisphere senior editor Finn Odum! Alejandro Jodorowsky’s best-known film, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, is a psychedelic hero’s journey from rags to riches, from shit to gold, and from iniquity to enlightenment. It follows “The Thief” as he gives up his search for material wealth to join a cast of sinful sages on their way up the titular mountain and, hopefully, beyond the boundari...

Takahide Hori’s one-man masterpiece-in-the-making is fun, sweet, and terrifying. In the distant future, after losing a war to the synthetic life forms they created, humans who’ve lost the ability to reproduce in a viral pandemic launch a last-ditch effort to correct the course of their species. Parton – a lonely prole who lives a vicarious, virtual existence – enlists in the effort to find a cure...

With special guest and former Trylon volunteer Celia Mattison! In the small town of Bomont, dancing and rock music are illegal – but on this podcast, they’re literally our favorite things. FOOTLOOSE positions dance as not just a metaphor for self-expression, but the act itself. With writer Celia Mattison, we put our Sunday shoes back ON to discuss the place of FOOTLOOSE in the dance movies landsca...

TWILIGHT (nope!) can be considered in the same conversation as other works of slow cinema, but György Fehér’s detective story has a bit more of a direct, even darkly comic, edge to it. A girl is found violently murdered in the woods, kicking off a slow-but-frenzied search for the perpetrator. In this discussion, we talk about how TWILIGHT leverages the slow cinema toolkit (slow pans, long takes, m...

Francis Ford Coppola’s war epic coasts from the formulaic to the surreal so smoothly, it’s almost hard to pinpoint the point of no return. On its face, it’s obviously anti-war; in the director’s own words, it’s “anti-lie”; and in many ways, it excoriates Hollywood portrayals of war themselves. The Final Cut, as discussed on this episode, puts a finer point on the film’s specific criticisms of the...

One of Brian De Palma and Robert De Niro’s earliest features (a big movie for famous guys with “De” in their last names) is a De Mented, De Praved, De Tached experimental film that De Tails (I’m done) voyeurism, vicarity, and white liberal apologia in the Civil Rights era. When Vietnam vet Jon Rubin (De Niro) fails to convey his desire for authenticity through both filming porn and marrying one of...

Content warning: Depictions of abuse and violence toward women and transgender people. The atrocities committed by Buffalo Bill, a serial killer known for skinning his victims, make up only some of the injustices outlined in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, director Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel. Among the others: Stunted actualization, systemic removal of agency, and a culture-wid...

With Maddy Sheehy, Emma Youndtsmith, Abbie Phelps, and Natalie Marlin! How did YOU come across THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT? Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s found footage horror film kicked off a genre before the turn of the millennium, and it still holds a freaky deaky power over audiences today. Four voices are distinctly absent from this episode of Trylove, but the four who’ve replaced them have...

Who would you be if not for destiny? What kind of person are you holding yourself back from becoming? George Sluizer’s psychological thriller is best known for its morbidity and shock ending, but on this episode of Trylove, we focus on the stuff in the middle. At its heart, THE VANISHING is two parallel tales of men driven to pursue a new version of themselves: An aggrieved ex-husband and a sociop...

Turns out there’s still a bunch to say about SCREAM, the movie that saved the horror genre by one of the guys who almost killed it. Go figure! From generational moral panic to metacommentary on slasher media to the impact of consumer technology on the way movies tell stories, this episode unpacks Wes Craven’s third wall-breaking classic that started a scary movie revolution. Get tickets to “The Ni...

Content warning: This episode includes references to sexual violence as discussed in PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. Public reaction to three missing schoolgirls and their teacher during a field trip to Hanging Rock – a prehistoric monolith – ranges from shock to guilt to pocket-watching. But how the citizens of Victoria react sometimes belies their true feelings: The girls who were spared their classmate...

Part FITZCARRALDO (1982), part APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), part Lord of the Flies, THE MOSQUITO COAST was Harrison Ford’s wily villainous turn and one of Peter Weir’s most cynical movies to that point in his career. Allie Fox’s Nicaraguan sojourn – an ill-conceived plot to bring ice to the jungle – is cut short by his hubris, his family’s increasing skepticism, and the harsh realities of jungle living...

With returning guest Seth Zarate! Listening note: This episode sounds different from our usual productions. Cody, Seth, and Jason were all in a room together, while Aaron joined remotely. Jason had precious little editing time. Our apologies for any disruptions. One of Peter Weir’s earliest feature length films, THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS bears some of his hallmarks (genre-mixing, dualities, subcultu...

Content warning: This episode contains references to sexual violence as discussed in THE PLUMBER. Peter Weir’s 1979 made-for-TV 16mm creeper is a short parable about two people from the same part of the world but two different parts of society (a lower-middle-class plumber and a member of the liberal intellectual elite) becoming the worst versions of themselves to survive the other. Max is the iti...

Inside its genre ‘guardrails,’ WITNESS tells the story of worlds brought together by tragedy – but whose intersection point (a haggard Harrison Ford and a repressed Kelly McGillis) exemplifies the deep, dignified richness of human love and connection. Also, Angus MacInnes dies horribly via grain entrapment and Danny Glover’s guts get spilled in cow shit. Watch WITNESS on the Internet Archive: http...

It’s not quite like the Jackie Chan movies you might be expecting. It’s more bizarre and slightly less martial arts-focused – but once you get on its wavelength, it’s truly a joy of a screwball action comedy. Watch TWIN DRAGONS (English subs) on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/jackie-chans-twin-dragons-full-movie-english-sub Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/trylovepodc...

The opposition leader is dead, clubbed in the city square for all to see – and the ruling dictatorship does everything it can, which is literally everything, to deny responsibility. Z is a fictional account of the real, state-conducted assassination of a Greek leftist politician, but its satire achieves a degree of incisiveness rarely seen in the modern political thriller. By showing the audience...

Featuring Natalie Marlin (https://twitter.com/NataliesNotInIt)! Even though MILLENNIUM MAMBO shows us a vivid portrait of Vicky, a woman struggling with personal change at the dawn of the millennium, it’s arguably not REALLY about that. It’s almost more about her relationship to herself – rather, to the version of herself who makes those choices – as narrated by Vicky 10 years in the future. Vicky...

What if Toshirô Mifune was a little bit more of a churlish bastard – but what if that didn’t make you like him any less? You might get something like Hideo Gosha’s jidaigeki action film SAMURAI WOLF! It’s a fun, contemporary take on some of Kurosawa’s best movies and the tropes they codified, with a wandering ronin taking on the cause of the underdog and finding more of his own humanity in the peo...

A self-sentenced prisoner in Plato’s cave, Marcello Clerici thinks he chooses the shadows. Marcello doesn’t want to be a fascist. He doesn’t want to be an anti-fascist, either. He doesn’t want to be an academic, an assassin, a husband, son, straight, or gay. He wants to be normal. He wants to be nothing. THE CONFORMIST is a dizzying psycho-political thriller that digs into the motivations that lea...

We’re back with some relatively rapid-fire thoughts on a few of the biggest movies of the summer! ASTEROID CITY is sentimental bliss, DIAL OF DESTINY uses and abuses nostalgia, DEAD RECKONING’s villain is megastupid, BARBIE is a good-natured romp, and OPPENHEIMER is by turns awe-inspiring and embarrassing. Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/trylovepodcast and email us at trylovepodcast@gm...

In the first half, he’s a hero – in the second, he’s losing his mind. T.E. Lawrence is the conflicted figure who inserts himself into the Arab Revolt during World War I, only to find his reputation, sanity, and very identity hanging in the balance. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is one of the best regarded movies of all time. Normally, that raises an eyebrow, but in this case, we find it’s absolutely still tr...

The reasons why some critics decried SUPER FLY on its release aren’t ours to criticize (but we make that mistake on this episode a couple times anyway), but they’re important to understanding its long-term impact. The bone it picks with the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement – that many of its victories were pyrrhic, and that America still has far to go before it can claim racial equity – make...

With returning guest and Perisphere senior editor Finn Odum! THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD might be the precursor to John Carpenter’s THE THING (1982), but the creature feature uses its tale of a plant-based alien invader to a vastly different end. Instead of honing in on the slow creep of bellicose masculinity, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD instead takes the opportunity to pound its chest at the Co...

SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE doesn’t ask for much of its titular compassion – instead, it uses director Park Chan-wook’s sense of style and space to tell complementary stories of grief. By separating intent and action through a series of salacious plot twists, Park unites the players in grief across classes: deaf-mute laborer Ryu and his corporate superior Dong-jin and the left-wing terrorist Yeoung...