|Matt Levine| There are few parts of my country in which I can take pride as an American. Not its healthcare system nor gun control laws, both so nonexistent that they blur the lines between barbarism and civilization. Certainly not its oligarchy parading as democracy, by which the whims and… Continue reading
Enjoy local artist Dan Murphy’s artwork inspired by Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), with its timely title, a quote from the film. After Hours was scheduled to screen at our favorite repertory theater May 1-3, 2020, and it is now scheduled to screen from July 24-26, 2020. I look forward… Continue reading
|Ben Savard| At the time of this essay’s start, life is unstable and uncertain. Half One Over four million people have been diagnosed with a novel and serious virus; that number is still growing. The response has been a series of contradictions. The world has been brought to a standstill… Continue reading
What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. —Walker… Continue reading
|Brad Stiffler| There is undoubtedly a lot of graffiti in Downtown 81. Featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat just before he began his meteoric ascent in the world of galleries and museums, the film captures the height of his public graffiti-writing period with numerous scenes of him spray painting walls and defacing cars… Continue reading
|Matt Levine| 12-year-old self, after seeing Face/Off for the first time upon its release in June 1997: Dude. 35-year-old self, after rewatching Face/Off for about the fifteenth time in 2020: What? 12-year-old self: Bro. 35-year-old self: Ugh. 12-year-old self: That was the fucking coolest thing ever. 35-year-old self: Um… 12-year-old… Continue reading
|Ted Harwood| You’re sitting in a comfortable chair, watching the opening scenes of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, and it looks damned hot. Everyone on the screen is somehow sweaty looking and dusty, and even the shots at dawn look too hot to breathe. For just a second, you envision brush… Continue reading
|Caty Rent| When I was first approached with the opportunity to choose a film to show at the Trylon, Theater of Blood rose quickly to the top of my list. I immensely enjoy the horror genre, but mostly when a movie can be funny while taking itself seriously. Vincent Price… Continue reading
|Olga Tchepikova-Treon| Gummo has been around for more than twenty years, so there are not many new insights I feel I can offer about its position in and contribution to cinema history, or its significance in Harmony Korine’s filmmaking trajectory. Korine earned his directorial debut—this very Gummo—with the tremendous success… Continue reading
|Jesse Lawson| For those of us caught slumbering in the cinema, Abbas Kiarostami once offered a vindication. Interviewed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, he expressed his distaste for those films that “hold viewers hostage” or attempt to “disturb” them. “I prefer the films that put the audience to… Continue reading
|Jesse Lawson| I ended up with the wrong Gremlins poster on a trip to Spencer Gifts one Saturday in the mid-1980s, when I was eight or nine years old. It may have been mislabeled; I may have misread the label. I had wanted a reproduction of the film’s meta promotional poster,… Continue reading
|Greg Hunter| Paris, Texas begins with Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) in a kind of walking catatonia. He has spent years away from his family––most of them on foot, for all viewers know––and only reconnects with his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) after collapsing in a small West Texas town. Despite… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| John Carpenter’s Halloween is a cornerstone of the slasher genre. It’s one of the most influential and well known horror franchises, inspiring countless sequels and knock-offs. It’s everywhere in horror culture: The hockey-mask wearing Jason of Friday the 13th is based on Michael Meyers. Halloween appears in Wes… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| See Finn Odum’s post on Silent Night, Deadly Night here. Continue reading
|Finn Odum| Santa Claus is an American Christmas staple. As soon as Halloween passes, department stores pull out red and green decorations and radio stations start playing Christmas carols. TV networks air every Christmas movie imaginable, including a wide variety of Santa Claus origin stories and adventures. To the dismay… Continue reading
|Ann Romine| Five minutes into Buffalo ‘66, Billy Brown needs to find a bathroom. To remedy this situation, he decides to return to the prison from which he was just released, a move that immediately characterizes the film’s protagonist as a lost soul. On a winter day in Buffalo, New… Continue reading
|Todd Melby| Working freelance doesn’t pay much, but it does afford one time. A couple of years ago, I used my ample time to create a film podcast. I titled it The Drunk Projectionist. The name sounds cool, but when it comes to movies, I’m quite sober. My movie pod hustle… Continue reading
|Betsy Midnight| Flash yourself back to 1999: the shiny Clinton years had fully dissolved into scandal, boy bands couldn’t be stopped, The Matrix came out, and everyone started wearing pleather trench coats with their platform flip-flops. Into this kooky transitional period in American culture, Ravenous––a surprisingly artsy, horror Western––poofed into… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| Movies are nothing without their environments. A location can dictate a film’s context, its characters’ values, and the movie’s tone. As a geographer, I’m trained to see the world in terms of place. I ask questions such as, how do people come together and interact in this space?… Continue reading
|Celia Mattison| A .pdf of the puzzle is available here for easy printing. If you’re looking for answers, you can find them here. Edited by Shivaun Watchorn Check out our October lineup of “Halloweenish” films on the Trylon’s website. Continue reading
|Betsy Midnight| In a memorable Brain Damage scene, a junkyard security guard, quietly and unseen, observes a nice young man in ecstasy, so transported by the mind-blowing, euphoria-inducing spectacle of a dirty pile of smashed-up cars that he can’t help but proclaim his rapture to the stars. The look on… Continue reading
|Justin Midnight| After a director like Neil Marshall releases a critically beleaguered and problematic film like 2019’s Hellboy, he becomes a kind of pop culture punchline for a time. Of course, this is often a consequence in the game of putting yourself out there, but the wealth of negative attention… Continue reading
|John Moret| From the moment I first walked into the Trylon nearly 10 years ago, I was enamored with it. It screamed a love of movies more than anything else. At the time I was working for a corporate movie theater chain, and the Trylon was refreshing in every way…. Continue reading
|Matt Levine| Bogey and Bacall. Tracy and Hepburn. Loren and Mastroianni. Giannini and Melato? As far as fabled onscreen couples go, the two leads who costarred in a number of Lina Wertmüller’s films in the 1970s – including three playing at the Trylon, The Seduction of Mimi (1972), Love and… Continue reading
|Geoffrey Stueven| The Naked City was directed by Jules Dassin, as stated, but its lead creative force is journalist-turned-movie producer Mark Hellinger. His affinity for Weegee’s extraordinary 1945 photo book Naked City animates what could have been a fairly tepid noir. The book Naked City was a freewheeling and feverish… Continue reading
|Benjamin Savard| An unexpected thought weaved its way through my experience of seeing Alien at the Trylon: Haven’t I seen this before? At first, this seemed silly: of course I had seen the movie before. I remembered it well. I knew the characters by name and could still brace myself… Continue reading
|Jesse Lawson| Around 1994, at age fifteen, I discovered a CD called Monster Rock ’n’ Roll Show, which compiled horror- and sci-fi-themed novelty songs––“Monster Mash” and the like. Mostly from the fifties and early sixties, the songs were joined by brief radio trailers for films of the same era (The… Continue reading
|Zach Jansen| During his thirty-five-year career, screenwriter (and sometimes director) Dan O’Bannon (1943-2009) had fewer than a dozen screenplays produced. But a quick check of his IMDb page shows more than thirty writing credits to his name, mostly due to one script: Alien (1979). Director Ridley Scott and creature designer… Continue reading
|Zach Jansen| Let the following description unspool in your mind’s eye: A spacecraft from Earth is boarded by an unknown alien. Before you know it, the alien begins attacking and killing off the crew members one by one. The surviving crew does its best to fight the creature but discovers… Continue reading
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| I. Diabolus Ex Machina Year 2047: A haunted recording travels through space. The sound of women and men screaming. A demonic voice familiar to the Satanic-Panic parents who feared their teenagers’ vinyl LPs played in reverse. The distress signal belongs to the Event Horizon. Seven-years-lost and long thought… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| Horror History: Why It! The Terror From Beyond Space isn’t just an inspiration for Alien The horror genre is a lens with which we refract our realities. It’s an escape from our terrifying real world, just as much as it’s a chance to investigate what scares us and… Continue reading
|Michael Lockhart| Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is a unique and rather abstract film that offers a variety of interpretations. In an interview from 1968, Kubrick suggested that he wanted to keep the meaning of the film open to the audience. You’re free to speculate as you wish about… Continue reading
|Michael Popham| Back in the late 1970s I was a junior high school kid living in rural Minnesota. My dad had been lured out to the wilds of Isanti County by the promise of cheap land, but he got swindled into buying 30 acres that were mostly swamp. He moved… Continue reading
|Sabrina Crews| During my recent volunteer shift at the Trylon, I watched a dazed, nineish-year-old boy walk out of Police Story. The kid, a little breathless, looked up at his guardian and, referencing a trailer he’d seen earlier, said, “Dad, whoa. What was up with that, that Barbarella?” Dad shot… Continue reading
|Matt Levine| I. Green seaweed floating in a rippling current. A green so lush only film could create it. The first shot of Solaris sets up its main tension: nature as mystical, unknowable, beyond the grasp of human control. A leaf floats across the water, fiery orange. Blades of grass… Continue reading
|Benjamin Savard| [ S P O I L E R S ] The power of Moon is in its subtlety. Science fiction is best known for grandiose visions of the future: unfathomable leaps in technology, powerful alien beings, and conflicts beyond the confines of earth. But Duncan Jones’ 2009 film… Continue reading
| Collier White | Those two years make all the difference. Turning 49 this year, The Boys in the Band is a work that has straddled Stonewall for its entire life. You might be surprised at how fresh she sounds. You’ll want to rush out and see it before it’s… Continue reading
| John Moret, film programmer | The way I see it, the intersection of space travel and cinema is one of the defining elements of the 20th Century. These technologies changed our view of ourselves and expanded our imagination beyond our planet. They came to being alongside the fallout of… Continue reading
