Trylove

In YI YI, the sudden illness of the matriarch in a three-generation household sends the lives of its inhabitants spiraling. In the emotional chaos, NJ, his wife Min Min, his daughter Ting Ting, and his son Yang Yang find themselves reckoning with the end of a generation and at the crossroads of many versions of themselves. In our discussion of director Edward Yang’s final film, we discuss the big...

TAIPEI STORY dives again into Edward Yang’s musings on the modern Taiwanese experience, juxtaposing the past with the future against a concrete-and-glass background of 1980s economic disparities. Childhood sweethearts Chin and Lung meet again later in life, when neither of them is quite ready to make anything happen. Debts, missed opportunities, and baseball fill the space between them – and as th...

Si’r and the other rebel youths of 1959 Taipei aren’t misguided – they just aren’t guided. In A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, Taiwanese director Edward Yang investigates the broadly social and intensely personal conditions that might’ve led to a teenage murder that occurred during his youth. Si’r and his friends (and his enemies) exist in the vacuum of identity between nations and generations, between warr...

The Man Hunos Bruno, our resident Bruce Willis authority, Seth Zarate (https://twitter.com/snzarate) is back and talking to his younger self on Trylove! LOOPER put Rian Johnson on the big-budget map and earned him the director’s seat on a fuckin’ STAR WARS movie. It’s the movie that tried to convince us Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt could feasibly look like the same person with varying deg...

Jo and Steve need their $4,000 back from their cab licensing go-between. What they get instead is a tour through San Francisco’s Chinatown, with stops at some of its most charismatic and enigmatic Chinese-American residents. Each person they meet holds up a kaleidoscope to the Chinese-American experience, muddying their picture of Chan and of their very culture. - “Chan is Missing: Reflecting on a...

A kidnapping, a political murder, a prison break – it was supposed to be simple. Prison warden Vito barters with the mob to exchange his stolen wife for Milo, a low-level thug locked up in Vito’s prison. Vito’s decision to keep Milo until the handoff proves wise: Not only is the mob in no hurry to let loose ends stay loose, but Vito begins to develop a certain consideration for Milo during their t...

While lacking some of the exploitation panache in which the poliziotteschi revels, CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN is an appropriately pulpy dive into the seedy, blood-soaked streets of ‘70s Italy amid a rash of violent crime in the years following an economic boom. A storied police captain and his naive district attorney butt heads when the attorney starts to pull the threads connecting the capta...

Welcome Dan Nagan of Everything We Learned (https://twitter.com/adapperdanman/) back to the program! Is there virtue in repetition? In EDGE OF TOMORROW, there’s a certain indignity to it – Tom Cruise’s Bill Cage dies repeatedly and violently in an inter-species war in search of a secret that could tip the scales in humanity’s favor. But in reliving a single failed decisive battle every day (thanks...

Dan Halsted is one of the premier film programmers in the United States. In addition to his role as head programmer for the historic Hollywood Theatre in Portland, OR, Dan has amassed a collection of some of the most vital kung fu and exploitation films in existence. He’s salvaged the only known prints of several classics, he holds one of a small handful of many more, and he’s attracted the compan...

Featuring Natalie Marlin ( https://twitter.com/NataliesNotInIt)! For some, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD was an amusement. For others, it shattered growing cynicism. It’s an epic in the classic sense, thrilling and regaling with focused sights and sounds and craft so impactful it seems like wizardry. At the same time, it’s a bountiful narrative that works with the barest materials – neologisms, post-consumer...

Featuring Abbie Phelps (https://twitter.com/goodhunterabbie)! Steven Spielberg’s update of H.G. Wells’s genre classic crumbles Tom Cruise, America’s perfect leading man, into a pool of tears and paranoia. It’s a choice consistent with the narrative of the overall movie, a metaphor for the naked, scared soul of imperialism – an unmasking of the patriotism-cum-xenophobia that shepherded thousands of...

Featuring Blake Hester (https://twitter.com/metallicaisrad)! PULSE is probably a pretty good movie! The boys think I would’ve given it a single thumbs up and made puns about the title instead of having genuine thoughts and insightful feelings about it. They’re probably right. I’m on vacation. Find Blake… At https://www.gameinformer.com/user/blake-hester At https://twitter.com/metallicaisrad At htt...

The philosophical wanderings of GHOST IN THE SHELL are exactly what give its plot – occasionally convoluted and hard to follow – a safe cushion on which to land. The conclusions it draws about the creation and maintenance of identity are mirrored in Motoko, a cybernetic humanoid perfected by the Japanese government, and the Puppet Master, the sentient amalgam of networked information she’s tasked...

The Golden Barrys return and they’re as contentious as ever! And a little freakier. What does that even mean? We’re glad you asked. Kind of! Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/trylovepodcast and email us at trylovepodcast@gmail.com to get in touch! Buy tickets and support the Trylon at https://www.trylon.org/. Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters. Outro music: A...

Dedicated to the “mountebanks” and “clowns” who produced lighthearted escapist fare during World War II, SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS was director Preston Sturges’s attempt to make the fun of that genre the message of his own entry. Elitist film director John Sullivan seeks authenticity in his own high-minded cinema, insisting on ‘earning’ the right to make ‘true’ stories of the downtrodden by living in the...

Returning guest Seth Zarate grabs his trumpet to blow down the Walls of Jericho! It’s the movie that came up with the thing where a lady hitchhikes by showing a bit of her bare leg instead of pointing out her thumb! IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT is also a funny early romantic comedy that, in lieu of a balance between “rom” and “com,” often leans into its uncomfortable scenarios without giving the audience...

Socialite divorcee Tracy Lord is engaged again to the nouveau riche George Kittredge, which puts her back in the spotlight of Spy Magazine’s writer and photographer, who’ve been put on the scent by Tracy’s ex-husband in a transparent bid to win her back. THE PHILADELPHIA STORY helped reverse Katharine Hepburn’s slumping career, but it’s also a fun rom-com that leverages class politics (old money,...

With a BANG, POW, THWAP, and ZAKOW – it’s the original live-action Batman! In this episode, we discuss the film’s greatest gags, its surprising self-awareness, the compelling choice to make Batman’s first live-action outing a straight-up parody of Batman, and what this version of Batman has on the ones that have come since. As of this recording, BATMAN is available to stream on HBO Now. If you don...

Listening note: Zencastr fucked up Harry’s track at the start of Cody’s Noteys. It was a fun round, so I elected to keep the episode going and truncate Harry’s track where I could. Sorry for the poor listening experience. Produced by Motown founder Berry Gordy, THE LAST DRAGON is a genre mashup of kung fu, blaxploitation, and comedy that clings to its Hero’s Journey trappings only long enough to g...

Here we are, old friends. 200 published episodes of our podcast. Thank you so much for listening to even one episode! We get so much out of doing this podcast, discussing movies, learning about our friends, and meeting new people while we’re at it. To celebrate, we each came up with a different Trylove-themed game with which to challenge the others. That’s right: It’s an all-killer, no-filler epis...

𝙼𝙰𝙳 𝙶𝙾𝙳 𝚍𝚊𝚍 𝚋𝚘𝚍 𝚋𝚊𝚍 𝚙𝚘𝚍. In production for decades, Phil Tippett’s MAD GOD is a stunningly crafted piece of mixed media that impresses on levels of both scale and detail. Its broad narrative follows an agent of the end of the world on a mission to restart the universe violently. Telling its story without dialogue, its visuals and soundscape chart several cycles of death, calcification, and rebirth...

Content warning: Discussions of sexual violence. ROADGAMES is about an American man hauling meat through the Australian outback who REAR WINDOW (1954)s himself into believing he’s seen evidence of a murder. It’s also about the feeling of coming back to a community after identifying yourself against it for so long. It’s a bit goofy, a bit spooky, sometimes pretty trippy, and often a lot of fun. Fol...

It’s a horror comedy, so we simply had to know what Natalie Marlin (https://twitter.com/NataliesNotInIt) thought of it! THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD is a strange, pioneering movie. That’s about as much as Jason can type about this movie because he wasn’t on this episode and didn’t see the movie. Enjoy! Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/trylovepodcast and email us at trylovepodcast@gmail...

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is maybe the freakiest movie from maybe the freakiest director. It’s a bit of a Brian De Palma kaleidoscope, blowing his obsession with showing you the unseen mechanics of a scene into a grand, grotesque, obscene scale. Follow Kelly on Twitter at https://twitter.com/kransekage_ and on Letterboxd at https://letterboxd.com/luckyhoss/ “The Hell of It: My Top 5 Favorite Songs f...

Content warning: Discussions of sexual violence. Purificazione isn’t really a witch. The spell she casts on Antonio, a man promised to another woman, doesn’t really have any magic to it. But that doesn’t stop him from creating a narrative that leads to Purif being blamed for the whims of the cosmos (the death of a child, the richness of the soil, etc.). But as the village becomes more and more con...