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 been a while, but Matt has been at the Criterion cabinet again – watching all 14 episodes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.
In the August instalment of our Summer of Genre, we talked about that most ’70s of genres: the disaster movie. But the genre didn’t vanish after its heyday following the release of Airport in 1970: especially in the 1990s, as CGI made it possible to put bigger, badder, more destructive disasters on the screen, we got tornadoes, volcanoes, asteroids, often in double, as with Dante’s Peak and Volcano or Deep Impact and Armageddon. The biggest, most successful disaster movie of the era, however, was James Cameron’s epic Titanic, which combined the historical disaster with a love story between teen heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who three years earlier had burst onto the scene with Heavenly Creatures and was well on her way to becoming a superstar. Titanic was at risk of becoming a disaster itself, but when it finally was released in late 1997, it became not just the highest-grossing film of the year but indeed the highest-grossing film of all time – until Cameron’s next film, Avatar. Join Sam and Julie for our August espresso as they sneak aboard that grand, doomed ocean liner. Did Titanic save the disaster movie genre, or did it sink it for good? And how well does Cameron’s blockbuster hold up almost thirty years after it originally came out?
Continue readingWelcome 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!
I had the best start at Uni that any mid-’90s geek could have wished for: on my first day as a university student, I was introduced to another student who’d already been studying for a couple of years and who was a fellow geek, so before I’d even started signing up for seminars and lectures, I found that the place where I would be spending much of the next ten years or so (yes, I did hang around at Uni for a fairly long time), there was a bunch of likeminded people who were just as much into the geeky fare of the time as me. Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and especially the still relatively new hotness that was The X-Files: differently from school or from home, where I was pretty much the only one who was into these series, people here were just as excited as I was about Captain Picard, Data, Commander Sisko, Major Kira, Odo, Agents Mulder and Scully, Assistant Director Skinner, The Cigarette Smoking Man, and all the other heroes, villains, monsters and freaks.
Is there any other period in German history that feels as unsettlingly familiar in 2026 as the Weimar Republic? It’s become something of a cliché, but it’s frighteningly easy to tell a story about Germany after the First World War and before Hitler seized control of the country that also speaks to the present day: you don’t have to squint hard to see the Weimar Republic as a time akin to ours in many ways. In the years culminating in the Great Depression, authoritarianism and totalitarianism seem more and more attractive to all too many, while others put their heads in the sand and ignore the warning signs. (Stop me if this sounds familiar.) And the time lends itself to telling stories that appeal to audiences: the big-budget neo-noir series Babylon Berlin tells exactly that story, even if it may be too enamoured with its own aesthetic, making something of a fetish out of the period, and there’s Cabaret, the musical (and later film adaptation), based on Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin, which has been revived recently on the stage, attracting big stars.
During the era itself, too, you’ll find iconic films that are suffused with the anxieties of the day, such as Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), which film geeks will certainly be familiar with. Maybe less familiar, at least to those who didn’t go to school in a German-speaking country, is the 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, one of the classics of modernist German literature – which Rainer Werner Fassbinder, enfant terrible of New German Cinema, adapted for television in 1980.
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.
In Alan’s countdown of Academy Award Best Picture winners from the very beginning of the Oscars, he’s arrived in 1936 with The Great Ziegfeld. The film stars William Powell, so Alan’s bound to love it. Right?
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 interconnectedne
To me when I was growing up, the anarchic sense of liberation that British humour offered on television was an essential tool to cope with the impending doom of the late stage Cold War world: Monty Python gave more than their middle fingers to conservative British society, their offspring (Fawlty Towers, A Fish Called Wanda) stretched the boundaries of propriety to the brink, and seemingly endless reruns of Rowan Atkinson in Black Adder and especially Mr. Bean cemented the sense of absolutely absurd, often silently physical comedy. I only discovered French and Saunders a bit later, but their spoofs of anything but the kitchen sink must have added another joyful layer to the rich cake that British TV humour became to me. There was a sense of security in having these characters and sketches available all the time, and their spread on YouTube and social media has made them even more timeless since.
Continue readingWelcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?
6/10
When I first looked through the complete list of films that I’d be watching for this exercise, one of the titles that stood out was The Great Ziegfeld. There was one reason for this – William Powell. He plays the lead in this film and I’m a huge fan of his. Yet despite being someone who long ago fell for the man’s charms, I’d never watched this particular film. Mainly because, unlike the likes of My Man Godfrey, How To Marry A Millionaire and especially The Thin Man, it’s not a film of his that gets remembered and rescreened alongside those classics. Even among dedicated Powell-istas (Powell-ites? Powell-ians?) its reputation is that of a bit of a dud.
Continue readingJoin 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.
Earlier this week, the singer-songwriter and actor Glen Hansard died after a motorcycle crash. You could do worse than to rewatch (or watch for the first time) Once in his memory.
When it comes to genre, there is one especially that is instantly recognisable. The moment someone says, “This ship cannot sink/this building cannot burn/this plane cannot crash!”, you know you’re in a disaster movie. The genre flourished for a brief period in the 1970s, but it never reached those heights again: even if there is the occasional disaster movie these days, it doesn’t have the draw of the classics of the genre, and it certainly doesn’t have the same kind of cross-generational star power that seems right out of a ’70s Agatha Christie film. In the third episode of our Summer of Genre, Sam, Matt and Alan look at three undisputed classics of disaster movies: Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). How do these films hold up more than 50 years later? What made the genre tick, and why was it such a staple of Hollywood cinema in the ’70s? Why was its reign so brief? And what place has big-screen disaster in today’s movie landscape?
P.S.: For more on disaster movies, make sure to check out Sam’s Six Damn Degrees post on “Pandemic and Disaster in The Cassandra Crossing”!
Continue readingWelcome 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!
There’s something fun about discovering a show via word of mouth. When friends who know you well start asking if you’ve seen the latest thing on television because, in their opinion, it’s “very you”. And then the subsequent joy when you finally get round to watching it and discover that it is indeed “very me”.
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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 