ACFmovie podcast

Titus & Sam Goldman talk Ripley, the novel & 1999 movie adaptation, the 50s, the strange transformations of the WASP elite & the middle class, America & Europe, bourgeoisie & aristocracy, art & therapy, evil & the desire for acceptance.

Titus & Geoff Schulenberger talk about erotic thrillers & tragedy, about the neo-noir of the 80s-90s, & the disappearance of stories about dangerous women.

Titus & Armond White talk Zack Snyder--the artist of the year, with Justice League & Army Of The Dead giving us a beautiful & a dark vision of the American future. We talk about the power of his imagery, the way he's taken up Spielberg's mantle as America's leading cinematic humanist, & how he stands up for the part of America that's now silenced--faith, heroism, patriotism...

Titus & Sam Goldman talk about Whit Stillman, Metropolitan, & the twilight of WASPs: The romance of the Doomed Bourgeois in Love facing democracy--the reaction on the left & the right to the abolition of gentlemanship--the Tocquevillian view of middle class societies & the middlebrow art that typically reflects their experience.

Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about the remarkable HBO series Chernobyl, the only serious cinematic treatment of the peace time event that came closest to nuclear Armageddon. We talk about the Soviet regime, Russian character & Russian humor, the friendship & conflict between science & politics, & the limits of liberalism when it comes to storytelling, to say nothing of globalization.

Titus & David Goldman discuss Chins & America, the two models for political assimilation on a continental scale in modern politics. We talk about competition, the hard teaching war offers, & the requirements for leadership, national vision, & respect for knowledge in a society.

Titus & Flagg Taylor talk about the best movie of 2020, Konchalovsky's story of a suppressed revolt in Soviet Russia, where the very existence of revolt is suppressed ideologically. A story about a mother & daughter, about private life, our embodied nature, yearning for holiness, & how politics can turn all of these things into crimes.

Titus & Angelo Codevilla talk about cancel culture as a tool of oligarchy & the way democratic politics could overcome it: Cancellation is a two-way street, the more it's wielded, the more oligarchs & their minions isolate themselves from the people.

Titus & Matt Shapiro (Polimath) talk about his data project on COVID--cases, deaths, state by state, across the US. We also talk about the great big good news story the media isn't dealing with well: America's vaccination success, which seems to augur a return to normal life--or a chance to put life back together again--by summer. (We also talk about Looney Tunes!)

Titus & Flagg discuss Andrzej Wajda's last movie, a portrait of Poland's most famous painter, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, his struggle against Communism, how tyranny destroyed him, & his activity as a teacher.