ACFmovie podcast
339 episodes - English - Latest episode: 28 days ago - ★★★★★ - 76 ratingsPodcast by Titus Techera
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Episodes
PoMoCon #46 Montesquieu
March 29, 2024 14:00 - 56 minutes - 77.8 MBTitus & Prof. William Allen discuss his new translation of Montesquieu's The Spirit of The Laws.
ACF Europe #24 The Leopard
March 23, 2024 21:44 - 44 minutes - 61.2 MBTitus & Miles Smith IV discuss Visconti's adaptation of the most famous 20th c. Italian novel, Lampedusa's Gattopardo. The end of the aristocracy, the beginning of the bourgeoisie, the problem beauty poses for art.
ACF Europe #23 Young Pope
November 10, 2023 07:44 - 1 hour - 91.6 MBTitus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni talk about The Young Pope, Paolo Sorrentino's HBO comic miniseries about a reactionary American pope calling the modern world to account before the mystery of God!
Critic Series 57 Hail Caesar
October 19, 2023 21:46 - 54 minutes - 12.5 MBTitus & Joshua Steinman discuss the Coen Bros.' Hail Caesar, a vision of the American mid-century, the post-war moment when glamour & technology competed in Los Angeles, when the beautiful visions of the past held sway & science had not yet replaced them.
ACF Critic Series #57 Hail Caesar
October 19, 2023 21:46 - 54 minutes - 12.5 MBTitus & Joshua Steinman discuss the Coen Bros.' Hail Caesar, a vision of the American mid-century, the post-war moment when glamour & technology competed in Los Angeles, when the beautiful visions of the past held sway & science had not yet replaced them.
ACF Critic Series #56 Being There
October 13, 2023 21:39 - 48 minutes - 67 MBTitus & Chris Rufo discuss the last remarkable Peter Sellers film, Hal Ashby's Being There, a satire on Washington, D.C., but also an existential drama with a philosophical interest in the problem of nihilism. We touch on everything from the zombie Biden presidency to Heidegger's Dasein!
ACF Europe #22 Aguirre
October 06, 2023 20:26 - 47 minutes - 64.6 MBTitus & Lafayette Lee talk Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath Of God -- conquistadors in the Amazon, El Dorado & terror, a journey into the heart of darkness, a return to the origins of monsters & heroes. Manly nihilism, the indifference & hostility of nature, incest.
ACF Europe #21 Il Divo
September 10, 2023 02:33 - 1 hour - 111 MBTitus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni talk Italian politics & Paolo Sorrentino's artistic vision of the Italian republic in Il Divo, the secrets of the politicians & the transformation brought about by democracy...
ACF Critic Series #55 Soylent Green
August 25, 2023 21:34 - 56 minutes - 77.6 MBTitus & David Polasnky discuss dystopia & the transformation of elite opinion in the 50 years since Soylent Green came out--a movie whose horrors of poverty are now offered as policy proposals for a progressive future.
ACF Europe #20 The Consequences of Love
August 15, 2023 18:02 - 1 hour - 87.9 MBTitus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni talk about Paolo Sorrentino's second movie, his first romantic story, or at least novelistic character study, starring the greatest Italian actor of the 21st c., Toni Servillo. Sorrentino comes up with a beautiful story about the secret power of love & morality over the heart of modern man, & a striking admiration for the past.
ACF PoMoCon #45 Steve Sailer, Noticing
August 01, 2023 18:12 - 1 hour - 96.3 MBTitus & Steve Sailer discuss his upcoming anthology of articles, columns, speeches, & essays -- the first volume of a lifetime of noticing important facts about American society that respectable institutions don't want to talk about. This time around, we talk about the Sailer Law of Female Journalism.
ACF PoMoCon #44 Peachy Keenan
July 20, 2023 21:15 - 46 minutes - 64.1 MBTitus & Peachy Keenan discuss her new book Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War, a funny but spirited battlecry, to rouse the moms of America, for family & also for faith.
ACF Critic Series #54 No Country For Old Men
July 07, 2023 19:44 - 1 hour - 98.3 MBTitus Techera & Lafayette Lee discuss No Country For Old Men, the Coen Bros. movie & the Cormac McCarthy novel it's based on. We talk about manliness & war, confrontations with evil, & the transformations of America, North & South in their influence on the West, the 60s, & our world now...
ACF Critic Series #53 The Life & Death of Col. Blimp
June 02, 2023 13:42 - 1 hour - 45.4 MBTitus & David Polansky discuss the wonderful war-time movie The Life & Death of Col. Blimp, a Powell-Pressburger combination of propaganda & art, & a rare opportunity to reflect on British character through the Imperial wars & the World Wars, as well as on America & its wars in the comparison.
ACF Middlebrow #46 Battleground
May 26, 2023 08:28 - 58 minutes - 43.7 MBTitus & Jack Fowler talk about Battleground, the first major cinematic depiction of the Battle of the Bulge, the end of WW2, & the conflict that revealed American character. Happy Memorial Day!
ACF Critic Series #52 Blue Velvet
May 19, 2023 15:42 - 1 hour - 48.6 MBTitus & Ryan Shinkel discuss David Lynch's Blue velvet, a movie about suburbia & the city, a boy growing up to be a man by facing evil, & the predicament of American freedom, which might mean ignoring evil or embracing it...
ACF Critic Series #51 Fight Club
May 05, 2023 18:52 - 1 hour - 51.1 MBTitus & L0m3z discuss David Fincher's Fight Club & its relation to right-wing Twitter anons -- the age of agonizing men looking for causes, who attack capitalism & matriarchy but find it difficult to associate or be productive.
ACF Critic Series #50 Brazil
April 19, 2023 19:31 - 57 minutes - 43.2 MBTitus & David Polansky discuss Terry Gilliam's Brazil, a dark comedy, a tale of future tyranny, also a Romantic fantasy--we talk about the ways in which it describes our troubles, & more adequately than the more famous entries in dystopian science fiction.
ACF PoMoCon #43 Steve Sailer
April 12, 2023 07:35 - 1 hour - 53.2 MBTitus & Steve Sailer discuss the unpleasant facts of political life in America & the study of those facts through the use of statistics. Steve talks about how he studies patterns of behavior and what conclusions this leads him to about the two major political coalitions & the ways of life they make possible, as opposed to the rhetoric & the ideology peddled by pundits in the mass-media.
ACF Critic #49 Mulholland Dr
March 31, 2023 08:39 - 41 minutes - 33.7 MBTitus & Sohrab Ahmari discuss Mulholland Dr., David Lynch's story of Hollywood, love of the beautiful leading to murder--the glamour that sustains FantasyLand & the misery that leads to corruption--dreams & morality!
ACF Middlebrow #45 Nobody's Fool
March 03, 2023 20:44 - 55 minutes - 42.6 MBTitus & Flagg Taylor discuss Paul Newman's Thanksgiving movie, Nobody's fool, a story about a man returning to family & learning what he might have that he should give thanks for. We talk about upstate New York, a rural setting, post-industrial, becoming impoverished, & how people have to deal with aging & mortality. I compare this setting, full of quarrels & tinged by despair, with social media!
ACF Middlebrow #44 Lethal Weapon 2
January 02, 2023 19:51 - 54 minutes - 32.3 MBTitus & Pete Spiliakos talk about the working class buddy cop action comedy, the relationship between friendship & justice for men, & the succsess of the Lethal Weapon franchise.
ACF Middlebrow #43 Lethal Weapon
December 22, 2022 15:05 - 56 minutes - 33.9 MBTitus & Pete Spiliakos talk about the most famous buddy cop action comedy--justice for Christmas, Los Angeles summoning heroic men to do daring deeds, the superiority of noble sacrifice to therapy when it comes to men grieving.
ACF PoMoCon #42 On Giorgia Meloni
November 12, 2022 09:05 - 1 hour - 35.4 MBTitus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni discuss the elections in Italy & the new gov't of Giorgia Meloni, a right-wing politician dedicated to the Italian nation & who quotes the conservative sages of our times--Roger Scruton. We talk about the economic, immigration, & foreign affairs problems facing Italy.
ACF PoMoCon #41 Aaron Kheriaty, The New Abnormal
November 04, 2022 16:11 - 54 minutes - 30.8 MBTitus & Aaron Kheriaty discuss Aaron's new book, The New Abnormal, a report on the biomedical security state & a warning about the threats to civil liberties rising in response to the pandemic.
ACF #28 Dressed To Kill
August 30, 2022 18:07 - 1 hour - 55.4 MBTitus & John Presnall talk about Brian De Palma's transsexual thriller, a poetic attack on psychiatry & a look at the transformation of society after the sexual revolution, as marriage, love, & even individual identity become fragile & threaten to collapse.
ACF #27 Carrie
July 27, 2022 19:48 - 1 hour - 76.6 MBTitus & John Presnall talk about Brian De Palma's most famous horror movie, Carrie, 1976, adapting Stephen King's debut novel. We're in important ways rehearsing the '70s as a society, so it's worth thinking about the stories that were intended as warnings at the time about the great changes in society, especially in the '60s. Carrie, especially in its conclusion, is a remarkably clever view of American society & the future, the children.
ACF Middlebrow #42 Celebrating Dirty Harry
July 21, 2022 19:18 - 29 minutes - 26.7 MBTitus & Scot Bertram talk about Dirty Harry, whose 50th an. in 2021 went largely unnoticed--the virtues of the character & of the story are now embarrassing to elites & perhaps to many other people--the criticism of society offered by the artists, however, is more timely than we could possibly wish & deserves attention!
ACF Europe #19 Divided We Fall
July 15, 2022 14:14 - 1 hour - 64.9 MBTitus & Flagg Taylor talk about the Oscar-nominated Czech movie Divided we fall, a somewhat comic drama about survival & salvation in Bohemia in WWII, or the character of a people caught between Nazis & Soviets.
ACF #26 The Fury
June 29, 2022 18:57 - 53 minutes - 49.4 MBTitus & John Presnall talk about Brian De Palma's The Fury, a horror about the deep state, about the idealism of education (brain powers) & globalization (the UN) turning into espionage, experiments on people, & terrifying violence. At the point America runs the world, the family is most endangered.
ACF Europe #18 La Grande Bellezza
June 16, 2022 16:53 - 1 hour - 91.1 MBTitus & Sebastian discuss Paolo Sorrentino's most famous movie, Oscar-winner La Grande Bellezza, a worthy heir to Fellini as an examination of European decadence & the problem of nihilism in the midst of the most celebrated civilization, in Rome.
ACF Middlebrow #41 Bruce Willis
April 08, 2022 15:18 - 23 minutes - 18.6 MBTitus is interviewed by Scot Bertram of Hillsdale--the subject is Bruce Willis's career, the blue collar action movie, the citizen-hero, & all the ways in which these movies were prescient about political problems, the vulnerability of American society, & the corruption of moral virtue by glamour or celebrity worship or entertainment.
ACF Europe #17 The Teacher
March 24, 2022 14:26 - 1 hour - 59.5 MBTitus & Flagg Taylor discuss The Teacher, a Czech movie set in Slovakia in the last years of communism, the true story of the moral corruption of a small community where ideology & privilege blight the possibility of a decent life & of the parents' hope of restoring morality through the school, for the sake of the children.
ACF Europe #16 Hand of God
March 20, 2022 01:32 - 55 minutes - 36.8 MBTitus & Sebastian Edoardo di Giovanni praise Sorrentino's The Hand Of God (E Stata La Mano Di Dio), the only Oscar-nominated movie that can plausibly be compared to great cinema, as Sorrentino is the only director who can be compared to a master, & who continues the tradition of Italian cinema. We talk about Naples & Italy, the ages of Rome & the future of art, the nation, & faith. We also talk about Sorrentino's autobiography & the attempt to make suffering into art.
ACF Masters #16 Intolerance
February 26, 2022 09:13 - 1 hour - 44.3 MBTitus & Eric Cook continue our series on D.W. Griffith & the origins of cinema as the democratic form of art with Intolerance, an attempt to give a visual history of humanity that can inspire people to turn away from cruelty & make the democratic age unlike the previous splendid, but catastrophic ages. A fond hope, at the outset of the World Wars.
ACF PoMoCon #40 Woke elites
February 09, 2022 18:10 - 1 hour - 43.2 MBTitus & Aaron Sibarium discuss his reporting on the practice for dictatorship now thriving in elite institutions & educating a next generation of elites, while America is busy with other matters--woke censorship & epidemic demands on college campuses, by both students & administrators, in hospitals, in NGOs, &c.
ACF Middlebrow #40 The Courier
January 21, 2022 19:41 - 1 hour - 42.5 MBTitus & Flagg Taylor talk The Courier, the true story Cold War spy thriller set during the Cuban Missile Crisis--a study in the friendship of two men, British gentleman Greville Wynne & Russian spymaster Oleg Penkovsky, who embody civilization even as they help save it. It's a fine movie, see it!
ACF PoMoCon #39 Noughties
December 20, 2021 15:47 - 1 hour - 40.2 MBTitus & Ben Sixsmith discuss Ben's new volume of short stories, Noughties: Eleven echoes of a dismal decade. These are scenes from the decadence of British culture, contemporary recollections of the various ideas of celebrity, influence, soft power, political transformation that thrived in that deluded decade, the beginning of the 21st c.
ACF Critic #48 The New World
November 26, 2021 07:16 - 1 hour - 45.9 MBTitus & Hannah Long talk about Terrence Malick's The New World for Thanksgiving! The origins of America, love & war, pirates & Puritans, England & the quest for the Indies. Happy Thanksgiving!
ACF Critic #47 The New World
November 26, 2021 07:16 - 1 hour - 45.9 MBTitus & Hannah Long talk about Terrence Malick's The New World for Thanksgiving! The origins of America, love & war, pirates & Puritans, England & the quest for the Indies. Happy Thanksgiving!
ACF Masters #15 Arsenic & Old Lace
October 29, 2021 18:47 - 1 hour - 45 MBTitus & Hannah Long talk about Capra's dark Halloween comedy, his satire on WASP America & his comic hopefulness about democratic America, the horror-comedy as America's pride & how to have a Halloween without the sordid.
ACF Masters #14 Birth Of A Nation Part 2
October 08, 2021 13:17 - 56 minutes - 77.1 MBTitus & Eric Cook continue our discussion of Griffith's Birth of a nation, we talk about the amazing achievements of the movie & the way they're connected with its damning fault--the strange way in which Progressive pacifism & racism all the way to white supremacy could go together in art. We also talk about the difficulty of giving an account of the Civil War that takes seriously both justice & honor. We've moved on from the old romance that did injustice to blacks to a dark new one that doe...
ACF Masters #13 Birth Of A Nation
September 29, 2021 09:52 - 1 hour - 92.3 MBTitus & Eric Cook of SPEAKING ABOUT SILENTS begin a series on the great achievements of D.W. Griffith, America's first visionary director, a self-made artist, entrepreneur, & aspiring prophet. We talk about The Birth of a Nation, a wonderful picture that's also morally repellant--from the beginning, cinema was powerful & dangerous! Artistic genius in the cause of injustice, animated by a philanthropic desire to bring everyone together! History & lost cause propaganda. Progressive racism, paci...
ACF PoMoCon #38 Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses Of The City
September 25, 2021 17:19 - 1 hour - 129 MBTitus & Paul Seaton & Carl Eric Scott complete our overview of the work of the greatest living French thinker, Pierre Manent,.with special attention to his book, The Metamorphoses Of The City. We talk political philosophy & history, & what it means to be a post-modern conservative.
ACF Critic Series #47 Cinema After 9/11
September 18, 2021 04:40 - 1 hour - 99.3 MBTitus & Telly Davidson talk about the effect of 9/11 on cinema & TV: The darkening of the mood of 21st c. cinema, fantasy as 9/11 reenactment, the absence of great directors in the national memory of 9/11, the difficulty of dramatizing the event & the demeaning ways it's treated out of sentimentality, & finally the madness of the post 9/11 espionage & war shows.
ACF Critic #47 Cinema After 9/11
September 18, 2021 04:40 - 1 hour - 99.3 MBTitus & Telly Davidson talk about the effect of 9/11 on cinema & TV: The darkening of the mood of 21st c. cinema, fantasy as 9/11 reenactment, the absence of great directors in the national memory of 9/11, the difficulty of dramatizing the event & the demeaning ways it's treated out of sentimentality, & finally the madness of the post 9/11 espionage & war shows.
ACF Middlebrow #39 World Trade Center
September 10, 2021 18:16 - 27 minutes - 19.6 MBTitus talks about Oliver Stone's most unexpected, most patriotic movie, WTC< a true story that reveals American character at its best--citizenship, public service, nobility, faith, as well as its basis in the middle class family way of life.
ACF Critic Series #46 Green Knight
September 04, 2021 17:57 - 1 hour - 91.8 MBTitus & Justin Lee & Dave Woods talk about David Lowery's Arthurian tale, The Green Knight, a reflection on mythical decadence & what it might mean for the young to become men. The movie gives you the confrontation of pagan heroism & Christian faith, of ancient & modern ideas, of fear of death & fear of life.
ACF Critic #46 Green Knight
September 04, 2021 17:57 - 1 hour - 91.8 MBTitus & Justin Lee & Dave Woods talk about David Lowery's Arthurian tale, The Green Knight, a reflection on mythical decadence & what it might mean for the young to become men. The movie gives you the confrontation of pagan heroism & Christian faith, of ancient & modern ideas, of fear of death & fear of life.
ACF Middlebrow #38 Master And Commander
August 25, 2021 20:07 - 54 minutes - 74.1 MBTitus & Peter Robinson & John Yoo talk about Master & Commander, the Peter Weir seafaring adventure movie, about the Aubrey-Maturin novels on which it was based, about the charm of military adventures & the series we've been reading. Also, we talk about the detective & lawyer novel series & TV shows--Bosch, Lincoln Lawyer--that fascinate us & which will be our next podcast.