Talking Movies With Ty and Theresa

Happy New Year's, everyone! In honor of 2021 coming to a close, we're discussing George Cukor's appropriately named Holiday (1938). Cary Grant plays Johnny, a self-made man who is engaged to Julia, the daughter of a wealthy man of business. Johnny is an independent spirit who sees business only as a means to an end, and has no interest in accumulating wealth. He hopes to amass enough money to "retire" young, giving him time to go on adventures and discover more about himself, and then...

Merry Christmas, everyone! We hope you're having a lovely holiday. On that note, we're continuing our series on holiday movies with arguably the biggest one of all, Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. George Bailey (James Stewart) is a would-be adventurer and entrepreneur who has, throughout his life, continually postponed and sacrificed his ambitions for the betterment of the people around him. He has suffered for years from bitterness over those sacrifices, as well as insecurity over his...

Sorry about the delay! Today, we're beginning our series on holiday films with everyone's favorite sorta kinda Christmas movie, Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan. We all know the story - a group of well-heeled European terrorists-turned-thieves take over an LA skyscraper during a Christmas party, and it's up to one good cop on the loose in the building to muck up their plans. The story itself is well-trodden territory, but there's novelty in the protagonist, a fallible and vulnerable...

We're finishing up our series on Audrey Hepburn with one of her last roles, in Peter Bogdanovich's They All Laughed (1981). Hepburn plays Angela, the wife of a wealthy European businessman who has hired John Russo (Ben Gazarra) to spy on her out of suspicion of infidelity. Russo and Angela wind up becoming involved, however, which parallels Russo's colleague Charles (John Ritter) falling in love with the woman he is tailing, Dolores (Dorothy Stratten). All manner of other hijinks ensue, in...

Happy belated Thanksgiving! We apologize about the delay in getting this episode up. For our penultimate Audrey Hepburn film, we're talking about Charade (1963). Hepburn plays Regina Lampert, who returns home from vacation to find her husband has been murdered and her house has stripped clean. She soon becomes harassed by a trio of thugs who claim she has $250,000 that belongs to them, and is told by the CIA that they want the money, as well. To make matters worse, her one supposed...

In our second episode on Audrey Hepburn, we're taking a look at 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Hepburn plays Holly Golightly, a young, quirky "cafe society" girl in New York City in the early 60s. She catches the eye and fascination of a young writer who has just moved into the same apartment building as her. The two form a friendship over the course of the film that begins to build to romantic feelings, which jeopardizes her pursuit of a wealthy husband - as well as her preference to keep...

Hello, listeners! Today, we're kicking off a series on the iconic Audrey Hepburn, and we're starting with her Hollywood debut: Roman Holiday. Hepburn plays a princess who feels trapped by the pressures and responsibilities of her status. While on a tour of Europe, she decides to abscond in the middle of the night, to at least briefly leave her responsibilities behind and experience Rome the way common people are able to. In the process, she meets Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck), a reporter who...

We hope everyone had a safe and happy Halloween! To cap our series on Universal Monster Movies, we're taking a look at the last really iconic horror creation the studio produced, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. After partial, fossilized remains of a strange, human-like amphibious creature are found in a remote Amazonian location, a small team of researchers is dispatched to try and find the rest of the remains in hopes of it leading to a scientific breakthrough. Shortly after their...

For part 3 of our series on classic Universal Monster movies (and the last to actually post before Halloween!), we're taking a look at The Wolf Man (1941), directed by genre-filmmaking stalwart George Waggner. Lon Cheney Jr. (following in his famous father's footsteps) plays Larry Talbot, who has returned home following his brother's death in a hunting accident. Shortly after doing so, he's bitten by a werewolf, and subsequently becomes one himself (but only when the moon is full and the...

Welcome back, listeners! For the second installment in our Halloween series, we're looking at another James Whale: The Invisible Man (1933). Claude Rains plays Dr. Jack Griffin, a scientist whose research has resulted in him becoming invisible. Unfortunately, he doesn't know how to turn himself back. Additionally, the experiment has had the unfortunate side effect of turning him completely insane. This drives him to ever-escalating displays of his power, starting with childish pranks but...

Happy Halloween, everybody! In honor of this spookiest of months, we're doing a series on classic Universal monster movies. And to kick things off, we're discussing the James Whale adaptation of Frankenstein (1931). Earlier in 1931, Universal had released the original Dracula to massive box office success. They decided to capitalize on that success by commissioning more films in the same vein. Frankenstein released to even large acclaim, and cemented horror as one of the most popular genres...

We're finishing our series on the Coen Brothers with the film that made them household names: Fargo. Jerry Lundergard, desperate for money to pay off an unspecified debt, hires two goons to kidnap his wife and demand a ransom from his wealthy father-in-law, part of which Lundergard will keep for himself. But, as is usually the case in the world of the Coens, the scheme does not go according to plan, as the hired guns leave a pile of dead bodies in their wake and Frances McDormand's pregnant police chief is soon on their trail. The Coens had enjoyed a career of critical acclaim and cult cachet among cinephiles up to this point, but Fargo is what brought them into the mainstream. A darkly comic neo noir, as well as a kind of treatise on contentment and domestic bliss, the film was immediately hailed as a masterpiece, with the character of Marge Gunderson becoming instantly iconic. The Coens have made better films, but they have never again captured the zeitgeist in quite the same way as with this cold, melancholy little crime classic.

We're onto part 3 of our series on the work of the Coen Brothers, and we've decided to discuss their 2000 screwball classic, O Brother, Where Art Thou? George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson play fugitives from a chain gain in the Depression-era South, running from the law and pursuing treasure. On the way, they rob banks with Baby Face Nelson, upend a Klan rally, and become recording superstars. O Brother is arguably the most sheerly enjoyable movie the Coens have ever made,...

Welcome back, everyone. Today, we're continuing our series on the Coen Brothers with a big one: their 1990 gangster masterpiece, Miller's Crossing. I'll dispense with any pretense of a summary this time, as the plot's complexity makes such a task basically impossible. Instead, I'll just say that this happens to be my (Ty's) favorite movie of all-time. I first discovered it nearly 20 years ago and have probably seen it north of 25 times now, with every viewing yielding even more richness...

Welcome back, everyone! This week's episode as pulling double-duty as a postscript to our series on the Western and the opener for our series on the Coen Brothers: True Grit. As we discuss in the episode, this film finds the Coens in an atypically traditionalist mode, making a relatively straightforward and even sentimental Western. One of the rare instances of the duo adapting someone else's writing, the film tells an earnest story of Mattie Ross, a 14 year old girl, as she partners with a...

Hello, listeners! Today, we're wrapping up our series on the Western genre with Robert Altman's elegiac classic, McCabe & Mrs. Miller. In the late 1960s, what's now known as the Revisionist Western become the dominant trend within the genre, with films self-consciously offering correctives to the myths propagated by the Classical Western. Altman's film nominally falls within that sub-genre/movement, but also stands somewhat apart from it. It isn't especially interested in subversively...

Welcome back, listeners! For the third installment in our series on the Western genre, we're talking about Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. Leone made this film after completing his Dollars trilogy, and it feels like his grand summation of the genre, and to some degree the culmination of the classical Western genre as a whole. The Western as American foundation myth, but elevated to a kind of operatic grandeur and grandiosity. The traditional archetypes and conventions of the...

Hi there, listeners! For part 2 of our series on the evolution of the Western, we’re taking a look at Howard Hawks 1959 classic, Rio Bravo. In the 1950s, the Western genre increasingly began to enter darker, less romanticized territory, with the nerve-jangling violence and psychological complexity of films by Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and others. Even John Ford’s work began to grow darker and more cynical. At the same time, though, the genre was becoming popular on television, with the...

Welcome back, listeners! We've decided our first series back from our break will be on the Western genre. More specifically, we're looking at how the genre evolved over the years. To kick things off, we're discussing John Ford's 1946 masterpiece, My Darling Clementine. One of the most archetypal of all Classical Westerns, My Darling Clementine covers one of the enduring legends of the old West: the gunfight at the OK Corral, and the conflict leading up to it. While later depictions of the...

Once again, our apologies on the lateness of this episode, due to some technical difficulties we were unable to release this episode Monday. However, we hope you enjoy our discussion as this is our final episode for this season. Stay tuned in August when we return for season 2! Today, we're closing out our series on Hayao Miyazaki with his 2008 classic, Ponyo. A loose adaptation of The Little Mermaid, the film follows the titular character, a goldfish (well, sort of...) whose father is a...