ACFmovie podcast

Titus & Eric Cook discuss the lovely, hilarious Christmas movie Elf! The humor turns out to conceal a sophisticated, realistic look at the collapse of the American civil religion seen from the point of view of the family Christmas & it deals well with how to deal with this situation.

Titus & James Lileks discuss the experience of seeing Star Wars, again & again, in the summer of '77 & how a generation took that childhood love & ran with it well into the Social Security years. The future of Star Wars in an age where it's a movie a year plus tv on the internet plus, inevitably, VR, is also in discussion. The imagination is not what it used to be.

Titus & James Lileks discuss the cultural mark left by movies & how they affect generations. From Casablanca to Star Trek to Aliens to Radio Days to Last action hero, we talk about the personal & social impact of movies & how we try to share these passions, as movie lovers & as family members.

Titus & James Lileks are back with ruminations on middlebrow, this time going through post-war Christmas movies/animations/TV specials. Varieties of A Christmas Carol--old comedies like Christmas in Connecticut--fantasies like The bishop's wife--the 60s animations--A Christmas story--&, a recent one, Arthur Christmas.

Titus & James Lileks talk about middlebrow & mid-century America. We've got lots to offer:

1. Cultural archaeology & commercial archaeology--our fascination with what life was like in America before.

2. Hitchcock & the movies as inadvertent documentaries.

3. The great fracturing in the 50s: Freudianism--youthful alienation--smarmy rebels you want to slap the cool out of--The heiress (1949)--Monty Clift--Henry James.

4. The collapse of the culture, as work of the most successful classes, who most should have defended their taste & habits.

5. Middlebrow is inescapable, but inherently unstable. Technology pulls us in the direction of progress, but a sense of taste makes us want to bring back some formalities, mores, & pleasures that depend on us all doing the same thing... We cannot tolerate too much imposition on our freedom, but so soon as we make small concessions to comfort or whim, a deluge follows.

Titus & Pete Spiliakos complete their discussion of Blade Runner with the new Blade Runner 2049. The question of soul shifts here to the question of birth. Self-knowledge shifts to our self-understanding as relational beings (we start from family relations & end with citizenship). Similarly, tyranny completely shifts from the state to corporations & we discuss the possibility that getting what we want, imposing our wills as consumers, might lead us to a libertarian nightmare.

Titus & Pete Spiliakos discuss Blade Runner from the point of view of political philosophy. Pete's big insights are political: The story recalls the slavery question in the Americas & adumbrates a new threat to humanity, inasmuch as being the persons we are seems harder & harder. I bring up the possibility that the fantasies & philosophies of the Old World are taking over the New World, with inequalities more horrifying than any previously known to man.

Titus & Pete Spiliakos (First Things online columnist) discuss the GOP as a budding oligarchy. We talk about the failed presidential ambitions of Senators & Governors; the principled constitutionalist conservatives who cannot seem to grapple with the big political questions of the day; the party's oligarchic turn and the threat of collapse following on the greatest electoral successes its had in more than 160 years.

Titus & Carl Eric Scott & Flagg Taylor talk about the great movie The lives of others, dramatizing communism in East Germany through the relationship between a playwright & the Stasi agent (secret police) monitoring him.

Carl & Flagg have co-edited the best book on the movie, Totalitarianism on screen, & talk about that as well.

Titus & Carl Eric Scott wrap up their discussion of Whit Stillman. After their Damsels in Distress podcast, they discuss Last days of disco, a lovely comedy of manners that tried to discuss the sentimental education of young Americans in terms of cocktails, dancing, & conversation.