I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Slippers and Rita and nuns, oh my!

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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.

It’s amazing how time flies during a pandemic, sometimes leaving little time for blog posts other than the bare minimum… On Friday, Matt wrote a blog post about his discomfort with camp (the style, that is, not the thing where as a kid or teenager you go away for a week in the woods, only to get killed by a hockey mask-wearing maniac). Though these days Matt is much more comfortable with camp of any sort – and you can’t start a post with a picture of Dorothy’s ruby slippers and not follow up!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #27: Fear of a Camp Planet

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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!

Camp, adj. - Ostentatiously and extravagantly effeminate (typically used of a man or his manner); ... deliberately exaggerated and theatrical in style. (Definitions from Oxford Languages)

For the longest time, I would shy away from a lot of media that I associated with camp. From what little I could see, I thought it was tacky, in poor taste and attention-grabbing: “Look at me! I’m in your face! I’m different – and I’m unafraid to be different!”

I’m still not automatically a fan of things that I consider ostentatious and in-your-face, and I guess there is a lot of camp that leaves me non-plussed. But that’s true for a lot of art – and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. If I’m entirely honest: looking back, I wonder how much of my negative reaction to it was that, as little as I like to acknowledge it, young Matt was a teensy bit of a homophobe.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: And now for some animated conversation

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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.

Does Death only play chess? Or could he also be talked into a different challenge, say, Mario Cart or Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64? Then again, if you’re a Swedish knight returning home from the Crusades, it’s probably the Game of Kings that lends itself to the situation. So yes, you’ve probably guessed correctly: The Seventh Seal was the most recent stop on Matt’s travels with Ingmar. Hey, it doesn’t get much more iconic than that!

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #44: Isao Takahata – radical naturalism

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When Isao Takahata died in 2018, the world lost one of the uncontested masters of animation. Takahata, long-time creative partner of Hayao Miyazaki and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, created some of the most striking, memorable anime there is. Together with guest Patrick Martignoni, Eric and Matt discuss Takahata and his thematic and aesthetic concerns, especially his idiosyncratic, experimental take on naturalism and how animation can be used to get to the essence of characters. In our discussion, we focus mainly on Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Only Yesterday (1991), Pom Poko (1994) and what is arguably Takahata’s magnum opus, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) – but we don’t forget to look in on his TV career, as all three of us were raised on Heidi, Girl of the Alps. Join us as we remember the great, idiosyncratic and surprising storytelling of Isao Takahata!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #26: That ’70s Gay Cliché!

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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!

Last week’s fascinating look by Alan at previously coded gay relationship between Marvel cartoon characters made me once again fully aware of how secretively (and also inventively) homosexual characters and relationships were allowed to feature in mainstream popular culture before the proper arrival of LGBTQ+ cinema in the past two or three decades or so.

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The Compleat Ingmar #22: The Seventh Seal (1957)

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It’s been a while since we last visited with the Swedish master of existential crisis, but we’re returning with what is probably his most famous, most iconic work. Mention Bergman’s name, and what do people think of? Max von Sydow on a desolate beach playing chess with Death, probably.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: By the time you watch ’em, one of these may have won an Academy Award!

The 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 week at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture began with singing, dancing, rain – and Matt’s ambivalence about cinemas opening again in Switzerland, in spite of a shaky epidemiological situation. But let’s not let this distract us too much from the glory of seeing Singin’ in the Rain live on a cinema screen!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #25: Mystique

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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.

It’s only in the last couple of years that Marvel comics have finally acknowledged the truth about one of their oldest coded gay relationships in its superhero universe. In 2019, the characters finally got to share an on-panel kiss and at the beginning of 2020 the first ever direct reference to their exact status made it to a published comic.  Nearly forty years after the supervillains Mystique and Destiny had first appeared in a comic together (and thirty years after the latter’s demise), that they had been a homosexual couple was made unambiguously clear.

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The Corona Diaries: Hello darkness, my old friend

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Here we are, Sunset and Camden: yesterday, for the first time in almost half a year, I sat in a movie theatre, watched the lights go down, the curtain open, and the film begin. Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor, all wearing yellow raincoats, begin to sing that iconic song. Sitting in the satiny dark of the cinema felt like coming home – but, like so many homecomings, there’s a note of ambivalence.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Heroes, villains and wolves

The 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.

We’re afraid that this week wasn’t particularly fruitful in terms of posts. What can we say – it’s been a busy time, for various reasons. Or perhaps there were more posts, but then some big, mean, purple-chinned alien warlord snapped his fingers and half the posts vanished into thin air? (And here’s a small reminder that we did two podcasts on Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, and those haven’t been snapped away.)

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