Trylove

On Saturday, February 29, 2020, John Waters performed his sold-out one-man show, "This Filthy World," at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis. He left us with some cogent, concise words of wisdom, and we're humbled to share them with you on his 74th birthday.

In honor of Nobuhiko Obayashi's passing on April 10, we're discussing HIS MOTORBIKE, HER ISLAND (1986), the director's summery teen romance that does what all good teen movies do: it makes you want to trek the Japanese countryside on a Kawasaki motorcycle.

Less outrageous but no less pointed than Obayashi's seminal HAUSU (1977), HIS MOTORBIKE, HER ISLAND is still a showcase for the director's playful awareness of audience and how to surmount the limitations of cinema. Only Obayashi could make a movie about falling for someone so deeply that the differences between seasons, between selves, between fantasy and reality, cease to matter – and then carry that thesis through every element of the film's production.

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Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

Though not immediately recognizable as a Spike Lee film, INSIDE MAN (2006) still engages with some of the issues the director is known for tackling, including systemic racism, racial interiority, and the faith placed in American law enforcement.

A bank robbery ostensibly gone wrong reveals a dark truth at the heart of the heist that leads the audience, if not the characters, to question the legacy of capital when we deploy military force to protect it.

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Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

Featuring special guest Kyle Olson!

To take your mind off of all the depressing news, we bring you the kind of uplifting content that only we can: an in-depth look at Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film CONTAGION. Back when it was first released, the film was known for its uncompromising, cold realism.

How does the film hold up in 2020? Does the ensemble cast help take away from that feeling? Is watching this movie, right now, really a smart thing to do in any way?

Recommended media:

- SHIN GODZILLA (2016)

- 28 DAYS LATER (2002)

- TRAIN TO BUSAN (2016)

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Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

Featuring special guest John Moret!

Things are tough for everyone during the COVID-19 crisis, so it can sometimes feel a little indulgent to even worry about things like repertory cinema. But as we talked with Trylon Film Programmer John Moret about how the Trylon and the people behind it are dealing with the pressure, it became clear that keeping in touch – even if it’s kind of all bad news – isn't a bad way to deal with the day-to-day.

While confusion runs high, John and the team remain optimistic about the rest of 2020. In this special remote episode, we talk about film procurement amid a nationwide pandemic, how being an independent cinema gives the Trylon some mobility in times like these, and what everyone’s watching in the meantime.

Find a Minneapolis food bank near you: http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/sustainability/homegrown/WCMSP-185913

Support the Trylon with a fee-free PayPal donation: https://www.paypal.com/fundraiser/charity/1657619

Support America’s arthouse cinemas with Criterion and Janus Films: https://www.gofundme.com/f/Art-House-America

Support The Food Group of MN: https://thefoodgroupmn.thankyou4caring.org/Donate

Donate to the Electric Fetus COVID-19 Staff Relief Fund: https://www.gofundme.com/f/minneapolis-covid19-staff-relief-fund

Watch a movie from Rochester’s Gray Duck Theater online: https://mailchi.mp/grayducktheater/gray-duck-theater-is-open-for-businessnowonline

Support Second Harvest Heartland: https://www.2harvest.org/

Donate to Hunger Solutions Minnesota: https://salsa4.salsalabs.com/o/51574/p/salsa/donation/common/public/?donate_page_KEY=12658

Donate to Twin Cities Music Community Trust: https://www.twincitiesmusiccommunitytrust.org/donate

Recommended media:

- THE TRIP (2010 TV series)

- ROLLERBALL (1975)

- A GOOFY MOVIE (1995)

Follow us at @trylovepodcast on Twitter and email us at [email protected] to get in touch!

Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

Emerging from the "Poverty Row" studios of 20th Century Hollywood comes Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 classic DETOUR, a work of film noir that stands out due to its unconventional structure and the wonderful performances of its two main stars, Ann Savage and Tom Neal.

Although at first the film might seem to solely represent the usual trappings of American noir, once you get beneath the cool exterior of DETOUR you'll find a suffocating atmosphere of guilt and dread.

Although Tom Neal plays the perfect everyman caught in circumstances beyond his control, the real star of the show here is Ann Savage's performance of a down-and-out, fast-talking woman taking matters into her own hands. Or trying to, anyway.

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Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

Spoiler alert for PARASITE (2019).

In this very special episode, we were thrilled to talk to Andy Smith, founder and owner of the Gray Duck Theater & Coffeehouse in Rochester, MN. As of this writing, Gray Duck is the only theater in Minnesota to screen the rare black and white edition of PARASITE (2019), which gave us a perfect excuse to take this show on the road and ask him all our burning questions.

Where do you even start when building a cinema in a suburb of a Midwestern metropolis? How does he pick which movies to screen? What’s the relationship between the Trylon and Gray Duck like? Why are documentaries so successful in Rochester? How the hell did he get ahold of a movie only screened in New York and Los Angeles?

Find Andy on Twitter at @andy_smth, on Letterboxd at andygrayduck, and follow the Gray Duck everywhere at grayducktheater.

Follow us at @trylovepodcast on Twitter and email us at [email protected] to get in touch!

Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

The rich hunt the poor for sport. The cops are on strike. The veterans are all out of work. Natasha Binder needs to find her estranged father. Chance Boudreaux needs $217 to pay his union dues.

The realities of a one-sided class war meet the fantasies of New Orleans ultraviolence in HARD TARGET, John Woo’s first American production. The rich can afford to take human lives with impunity; the well-to-do can afford to pay the poor to stop them; and the poor can only afford to die. As the cycle is upended (thanks to some Cajun kickass-meets-Hong Kong balletic bliss), so too are the roles of predator and prey reversed, exposing the imbalance of wealth politics and sympathetic tools used to suppress the disenfranchised in America and around the world.

Recommended media:

- The White Stripes – “Conquest”

- MAFIA III (2016)

- BURNING (2018)

- COBRA (1986)

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Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

Despite its signature bombast, THE KILLER doesn’t actually reinvent many of the tropes of action cinema. There’s plenty of gunpowder, gore, and squibs to be found in its 110-minute runtime. What makes it different – and what keeps it feeling fresh more than 30 years later – is how it uses those tropes to service a subversive story.

Pitting hitman Ah Jong against Detective Li Ying and tossing an innocent blind woman into the mix, THE KILLER builds tension not through highlighting the differences between the cop and the criminal, but by reveling in their compatibility. Once both characters realize the senselessness of their cat-and-mouse relationship (foist on them by the bureaucracies that would betray them), each finds himself in the other’s stories and motivations.

If it sounds a little gay, that’s because it’s pretty gay.

Recommended media:

- BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969)

- POINT BREAK (1991)

- WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967)

- HANNIBAL (2013 - 2015)

- TOKYO DRIFTER (1966)

- YAKUZA 0 (2015)

- LE SAMOURAI (1967)

- LE CIRQUE ROUGE (1970)

- ONLY BUILT 4 CUBAN LINX… (1995)

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Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.

Special guest Jenny Ackerson (@AckersonJenny) joins us for this extra-long discussion of PARIS, TEXAS!

When director Wim Wenders and screenwriter Sam Shepard sat down to start PARIS, TEXAS, they wanted "to tell a story about America." The story they ended up telling was about Travis, an amnesiac reintegrating as if out of memory back into the deserts of the American southwest, intent on making his way back to a home he begins to remember breaking.

By leveraging and breaking apart the western genre, blues music, the "love long lost" story, and the physical and mental landscapes of the American frontier, PARIS, TEXAS radically reshapes our notions of the scope, history, legacy, and future of the American dream. Just as Travis and Jane's story of remembered, shared, and repeated generational traumas slowly unravels, Wenders's masterpiece slowly shifts to unveil a subversive, essential new framework through which to view America, masculinity, love, loss, memory, and what it means to impose an idea on a place, a time, and a person.

You can see why this episode is two hours long.

Follow us at @trylovepodcast on Twitter and email us at [email protected] to get in touch!

Theme: "Raindrops" by Huma-Huma/"No Smoking" PSA by John Waters.