ACFmovie podcast

Titus & John Presnall talk Antonioni's Blow-Up, a movie about the erotic revolution of the '60s & what it meant to art, artists, the young, & society. Blow-up offers a version of a tragic hero--a man who thinks himself king of London because he's on top of the new erotic & artistic production of beauty. He thinks he's in control. Then he encounters mortality.

Titus & Paul Cantor, America's eminent Shakespearian, talk movies, TV shows, & tragedy. From Godfather to Breaking Bad, from Aristotle to Mark Twain, we talk about how to understand pop culture & how to understand America's great love affair with tragic heroes (now called anti-heroes).

Titus & Richard Brookhiser, famed biographer of the Founders, get to their third discussion--this time introducing his newest book, out just after the election, about the great Chief Justice, John Marshall. We talk about his life & his work in making the Supreme Court an institution to rival the presidency & Congress. We also talk about the Federalists' vision of the American people.

Titus & Terry Teachout discuss In A Lonely Place, the 1950 Nicholas Ray noir, Bogart's most daring performance--a movie with a modern feel, with sophisticated adult characters, men & women, who nevertheless suffer great misery. We talk about Ray's talent for bending genre to tell stories that feel true to characters he establishes within genre. We also talk about film noir's connection to tragedy, to post-war America, & to our own times. Listen & share!

Titus & John Presnall talk Al Capone & Eliot Ness--Brian De Palma & David Mamet's The Untouchables, their answer to Coppola's Godfather. We talk about law & justice, populism & rights, Puritans & Catholics, WASPs & immigrant Irish & Catholics, America & Europe, democracy & tyranny. Listen & share, friends!

Titus & John Presnall discuss Apocalypse Now, which ended the 70s, the decade of vastly ambitious Coppola movies which started with the Godfather. We talk about Coppola's vision of America & the Vietnam war, his exploration of varieties of manliness, some more insane, others less, his ideas about British imperialism--his allusions to Kipling, Conrad, & T.S.Eliot--& the amazing & awful qualities of the movie, which lead the audience to discover, in the emerging chaos of war, possibilities that had seemed foreclosed by civilization & thus forgotten, but which come alive again as humanity regresses symbolically & thematically back beyond peace, war, & the cosmos.

Titus & Carl Eric Scott discuss Cameron Crowe's autobiographical story Almost Famous, his touch of greatness! We talk about rock music & the era when it defined the identities of vast numbers of young Americans. About the rock demigods, especially Dylan, Bowie, & Led Zeppelin. About the need for community around music & the way American youth has changed. & about Carl's Rock Songbook, the series of essays to read on rock music!

Titus & James Lileks talk about Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, the new Amazon series, & the original Jack Ryan movie, John McTiernan's The Hunt for Red October. We talk about the portrayal of heroism in relation to national security, about analysts rather than fighting heroes, about national threats & whether commerce & public respectability allow the realistic portrayal of political enmity, & how the kid from the Office turned into an action star. Listen & share, friends!

Titus & Terry Teachout talk noir! Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground, the best Robert Ryan noir--a story that moves between social criticism & Romanticism effortlessly, the tragic story of a man who believes in justice & who learns to believe in innocence, too. We talk about the many attractions of the movie--Ida Lupino, the Bernard Hermann score, George Diskant's cinematography, Ward Bond's remarkable portrayal of a father mad to avenge his daughter's murder--& we also talk about noir, genre pictures, social criticism, how America learned about tragedy in WWII, & the new depth of character in story-telling this ushered in. Listen & share!

Titus & Pete Spiliakos talk about Die Hard on its 30th anniversary. We talk about the everyman role that made Bruce Willis a star & how director John McTiernan arranged an entire story about arrogant, failing institutions--corporations, the media, the police, FBI, &c.--& the moral virtues of working class Americans like John McClane.

We also talk about the skill & care put into making the movie--the action, the design, the characterization, & the sequences in the plot. Die Hard redefined action just like it defined a sort of populist patriotism.

We then turn to how action movies failed as a genre & were replaced by superhero movies & the new situation--economic, political, social, technological--in which nobody finds it possible to imagine a working class hero. We try to show what middlebrow art does in bringing social concerns & storytelling together, as well as how it might be done again.