ACFmovie podcast

Titus & Steven Fairchild discuss Kieslowski's Colors Trilogy--starting with Blue, the movie about liberty presented as loneliness. Juliette Binoche plays a woman who, faced with a catastrophe, tries to abandon everything so that she may be herself, only to find herself drawn to her duties to dead & living together.

Titus & Tyler Malone talk Kubrick--the erotic thriller, the possibility that love leads to horror, the strange education eros offers in its attack on morality & the stranger politics of elite corruption.

Titus & Jody Bottum talk about Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, a wonderful combination of history & comedy that reveals uniquely Kurosawa's vision of justice for Japan, a remarkable story about a young girl's transformation into a princess, & the movie where Toshiro Mifune assumes his full grandeur.

Titus & Peter Paik & George done complete our discussion of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy--after Oldboy, Lady Vengeance. A femme fatale who is also an angel of death becomes the necessary agent of justice for a number of bereaved families; Korea is modernizing, but the future turns out to be childless; the needs of punishment face the challenge of Christian forgiveness. A number of themes come together in a double plot, about hateful vengeance & a mother's love for her daughter, at the conclusion of which citizens deal with justice & look for grace.

Titus & John Presnall talk about The Black Dahlia, Brian De Palma's story about the corrupt origins of Hollywood, the aristocratic habit of concealing cruelty behind splendor, & the necessary violence involved in glamour.

Titus & Terry Teachout discuss Chinatown, a story about the origins of Los Angeles & the doomed attempt to learn the ugly truth about these origins. John Huston plays the grand, corrupt aristocrat, Jack Nicholson the petty, corrupt democrat & they come to fight over the future of America.

Titus & John Presnall conclude their discussion of Scarface, the tragedy of freedom, desire, and chasing after dreams. We talk about the description of politics in tragedy and also reveal the logic of the plot in relation to the cycle of regimes in Plato's Republic.

Titus & John Presnall talk Scarface--Brian De Palma's most infamous movie & the most influential, the tragedy of American freedom. Desire leads to violence--as Rene Girard says, desire is imitative, creates competition, & leads to catastrophe. Hence, both liberal tolerance, not to say optimism, & conservative insistence on property rights, not to say pessimism, reach a crisis when commerce & immigration create a catastrophe by fulfilling dreams with cocaine.

Titus & George Dunn & Peter Paik discuss Park Chan-wook's Oldboy, the centerpiece of his vengeance trilogy, which won him the Palme d'Or in Cannes. Korea's transformation into a prosperous democracy & one man's transformation into a superman go together to first conceal & then reveal the dark secret at the foundation of civil society: The sacred law on which politics is based is the family, which must obey public laws.

Titus & Molly McGrath discuss Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa's finest movie about the problem of justice. We talk through the different contradictory testimonies which deepen the crisis of justice--the conventional lies lead gradually to the full collapse of honor--but also about the relationship between humility, telling the truth, & saving a baby. Human nature emerges not only in its ugliness, but also in its beauty. Rashomon is both a story about Japan's collapse in WWII & a counsel of hope that times of decay need not lead to chaos.