ACFmovie podcast

Titus & Terry Teachout talk about North by Northwest, Hitchcock's perfect comedy. We move by way of thriller from the noir to what it would take for a noir hero, betrayed by a beautiful woman, nevertheless to find his way to romance in the element of comedy. Cary Grant pulls off a performance by turns comic & tragic, trying to make sense of life in modern America, & end up getting married.

Titus & Paul Cantor continue discussing his new book, Pop Culture & The Dark Side Of The American Dream: Today we talk about The Walking Dead as a post-modern Western. What's American character like in absence of institutions & technology? Can there be any meaningful freedom in the state of nature?

Titus & Paul Cantor talk about Breaking Bad--the Macbeth of Meth. We talk about the dark side of the American Dream, the new situation created by institutional failure, agonized manliness, & the desire to escape the middle class in the direction of excellence &, indeed, tyranny.

Titus & John Marini wrap up a trilogy on Sam Peckinpah's Westerns with his most comic, least violent picture: The Ballad Of Cable Hogue. The only movie he made about a Founding also turns out to be his story about dealing with movability, mutability, & mortality in America. Progress is a killer, but human beings can remember their love of the natural, tranquil life. It's also Peckinpah's Lockean Western, where labor mixed with nature creates property & leads to a common good for a community!

Titus & John Marini discuss Sam Peckinpah's first Western, Ride The High Country, a story about the collapse of nobility. Joel McCrea & Randolph Scott are veteran marshals of the Old West who sign up for one last job hoping to make something for themselves & of themselves. We also talk about his great, if short-lived series The Westerner. before that.

Titus & Carl Eric Scott & Flagg Taylor discuss Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's new movie, Never Look Away, a beautiful meditation on art & tyranny, on the changes of regime in Germany from the Nazis to Communist East Germany to the democratic West Germany, & the task of the artist in modern society.

Titus & Theodore Gioia discuss how classical music, originally a source of ennobling characterization in Hollywood, turned into the specific soundtrack of evil, of mastermind villains like Hannibal Lecter--the way TV & pop music overwhelmed America's middlebrow settlement & replaced it with a demotic source of authenticity, connection to the audience, & historical relevance--& how things might change again!

Titus & Paul Cantor celebrate our 100th episode at the ACF with a conversation about Tim Burton's first decade: Pee Wee's Big Adventure--Beetlejuice--Batman--Edward Scissorhands--Batman Returns--Ed Wood. The cinema of freaks, what it means not to be part of the majority opinion in America, & where art stands to all this!

Titus & James Poulos, author of The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us From Ourselves & Executive Editor of American Mind, discuss the collapse of elite liberalism & the challenge we face as we transition to digital technology through the destruction of all forms of celebrity. We talk about political transformations in America & around the globe, the world after history restarts, & the possible revival of nations & peoples...

Titus & Terry Teachout discuss Pitfall, the fine 1948 noir starring Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, & Raymond Burr as the heavy! It's a story about post-war America, men dissatisfied with suburban happiness, & the dangers middle-class life is facing. You get the insurance business & people whose lives are tied up with fraud. You get two attitudes to danger, risk, & getting what you want.

Titus & Flagg Taylor talk Pawlikowski again--Cold War, a beautiful tragedy by the preeminent Polish director of our times. After Ida, which won the Best Foreign Film Oscar, Cold War, which won the Palme D'or & the director prize in Cannes (& was nominated for three Oscars). After a story of devotion & divine love, a story about merely human love & shared suffering. Set in Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia, & Paris, this is the story of a couple who go West & East across the Iron Curtain, trying to live well together.

Titus & Flagg Taylor continue our series on Polish movies--& more broadly, movies about totalitarianism in Europe--turning to Pawel Pawlikowski, now at the top of his fame--nominated for the Oscars, a winner in Cannes, & finally making movies about his native Poland. We start with Ida, a movie about a young woman in the Poland of 1962, about to take her vows as a nun, who first has to learn about her family & their fate.

Titus & Paul Cantor discuss H.G. Wells's War of The Worlds, his remarkable imagination & his penchant for scientific tyranny both--then the famous Orson Welles radio show--then alien invasion movies. War of The Worlds, both the Cold War George Pal version and & the post-9/11 Spielberg, then Tim Burton's Mars Attacks & the flying saucer movies by which it was inspired.

Titus & Flagg Taylor discuss Katyn, the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda's fourth & last Oscar-nominated film--his story about honor & prudence, about faith & suffering--about the Nazi-Soviet dismemberment of Poland, the Soviet massacres at Katyn, & the subsequent totalitarian propaganda & the Polish struggle to remember & retain their national identity. It is also his own family story, since his father was murdered at Katyn.

Titus & Flagg Taylor switch chairs: ACF President Flagg today interviews ACF Exec. Director Titus Techera--about the American Cinema Foundation, its past, its plans, & its projects, about his learning about movies in post-Communist Eastern Europe & coming to America, to writing, & cultural criticism, & about the future--digital cinema, education, & heroism.