A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Running away to join the clone club

May 12, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

Our Fellini series continued this week with Matt’s post on 8 1/2: a film that is likely to evoke strong reactions, both for the filmmaking and for the way in which it does arguably indulge its man-child Fellini stand-in protagonist, even when it’s mocking him.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #181: Reduce it to its bones

May 10, 2024MegeLeave a comment

The story goes that Bruce Springsteen recorded his darkest album Nebraska (1982) in his bedroom, most of it in one day. There are absolutely no adornments, no frills, just his voice and his guitar, sometimes a short bit from his harmonica, not much more. He intended those recordings as demo versions, but they just wouldn’t fly when he played them together with his E-Street Band. So the demo version it was for the album for almost all of the songs. Because the Boss is strumming away on his guitar, the effect is one of being there listening, as if it was a live album in a more unusual sense of the word. The same is true for the Cowboy Junkies’ debut album The Trinity Sessions (1988), which was recorded live in Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity, and the band gathered around the only microphone. Like with Springsteen’s album, there is an immediateness that would be hard to replicate in any studio.

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Forever Fellini: 8 1/2 (1963)

May 9, 2024Matt1 Comment

Watching Fellini’s 8 1/2 for the first time in 2024 is a strange experience: it is so clear that this film has inspired many directors who’d go on to make films of their own that are very much inspired by Fellini’s. From Bob Fosse’s All that Jazz via Tom Di Cillo’s Living in Oblivion to Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York and Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth – and that’s just some of the movies that, like 8 1/2, focus specifically on artists in a protracted state of crisis, trying to produce a work that, to all extents and purposes, is the film we’re watching.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Disney… Why’d it have to be Disney?

May 5, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Does anyone still watch the Disney films of the ’60s and ’70s? Not the animated ones, many of which are considered classics, but the likes of Flubber, or That Darn Cat!, or The Moon-Spinners, which Julie wrote about in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees.

Since it’s difficult to find trailers for this film, though, here’s something… better? At least it’s something interesting: the introduction that film critic Leonard Maltin did for Turner Classic Movies.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #80: Swan song

May 4, 2024May 3, 2024Matt1 Comment

We often talk about the films directed by the big names at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture – but the films we end up talking about are rarely the final works of these directors. Enter Alan and Sam, who in our latest podcast episode discuss the directorial swan songs of two of the most famous Hollywood directors of all time: Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder. Why do people rarely talk about Family Plot, Hitchcock’s black comedy thriller of 1976, or about Wilder’s comedy Buddy Buddy (1981), in which Walter Matthau plays a professional hitman and Jack Lemmon the suicidal husband whose attempts at taking his life foil Matthau’s plans? Where were Hitchcock and Wilder in their careers at the time when they made these films, and how do they fit into the directors’ oeuvres? Is either film a diamond in the rough, or are they clearly lesser works?

For further damn fine reading and listening material on the two directors, make sure to check out Six Damn Fine Degrees #129: All About Fedora (by Sam) and Six Damn Fine Degrees #130: Sunset Fedora (by Alan), as well as A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #33: The Good, the Bad and Alfred Hitchcock, Sam’s first podcast appearance (still as a guest at the time).

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #180: The Moon-Spinners (1964)

May 3, 2024May 3, 2024Julie1 Comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Bedknobs and broomsticks, lamas and firearms

Apr 28, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

When it comes to magic knobs, Alan’s the man for you – as his latest entry in our Six Damn Fine Degrees series amply proves.

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Through a lens darkly: Fantastic Machine (2023) and Civil War (2024)

Apr 27, 2024Apr 27, 2024Matt1 Comment

When it comes to the inventions that changed the world, what are the ones you think of? I suspect that most would come up with the likes of the wheel, the printing press, and the steam engine, electricity and the computer. But what about the device that has perhaps become more ubiquitous in the last twenty years than any other: the camera? While it is likely that fewer people own an actual, bespoke camera in 2024 than at the beginning of the millennium, everyone who owns a phone has in their possession a powerful device that can record still images as well as moving pictures, and people make use of this to an extent that would have been unthinkable before the smartphone. We’re all photographers and filmmakers: an estimated 5 billion photos are taken on a daily basis, and 3.7 million new videos are uploaded to YouTube alone every single day. What are the effects of this? Is the world different when you’re looking at it through the lens of a camera? Or, to ask differently: Are we different when we’re looking at the world, and at ourselves, through the lens of a camera?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #179: Bedknobs And Broomsticks

Apr 26, 2024Apr 25, 2024Alan Kuhl Graham3 Comments

When looking at the vast filmography of family Disney films there is undoubtedly a top tier. The likes of Mary Poppins, Frozen or Cinderella. These are the iconic movies that helped define Disney as a brand globally. The songs have entered the popular culture, while images from these films have been marketed so aggressively they probably have more widespread recognition that most trademarks.

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