Author: Melanie

Six Damn Fine Degrees #302: This blew me away

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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!

We’ve had a run of posts about movies and shows that have influenced us in the past. (Given the crowd here, they’ve mostly been creepy.) Which is timely: my kids, at 12 and 15, are just old enough that I can show them my favourite movies that live rent free in my brain. It’s great. They haven’t seen enough yet to be jaded by tropes. Everything is new and wonderful. The Sixth Sense, for instance, had them yelling “PLOT TWIST” and “no wayyyyy”. Back to the Future III, in which Doc falls in love in the Wild West but has a falling out with the lady, had my twelve year-old wail “My ship! They sunk my ship!”

It’s been educational for all of us.

Bruce Willis having his own big reveal in M. Night Shyamalan’s best movie, The Sixth Sense (1990)
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Six Damn Fine Degrees #296: Two trips to hell

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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!

What if. What if hell were a university campus. In R.F. Kuang’s most recent bestseller, Katabasis, grad students Alice and Peter battle their way through eight Dantean circles to bring back their deceased advisor, the charismatic Jacob Grimes. One of their recurring discussions: they have no idea what circle he could be in. Greed? Violence? They are all too petty, too small for a man of his brilliance, for an academic visionary of his magnitude. Sure, he stole his male students’ research and was handsy and vindictive towards his female students. And sure, he abused them all, but, you see, he abused them and in doing so he elevated them. Sure, he made them do things, but they did them willingly, hungering for his approval. Grimes was the sun around which they were in perpetual orbit. What even is a crime, when it serves the greater good, as surely the work of such a lone genius must?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #291: Homer in the Age of TikTok

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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!

I admit that I needed the help of the next generation in writing this post. This is because there are only two experts on Epic: The Musical in the house and neither of them is me. The fifteen-year-old is currently studying for her biology exam, but the twelve-year-old was kind enough to assist.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #286: The King’s Avatar

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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!

Oh boy, do I have opinions on actors and the right age to cast them. One of them being: You can’t fake age. An old actor, no matter how brilliant, can’t believably inhabit the role of a young man, or the other way round. The body doesn’t play along. It’s too stiff, or not stiff enough. The voice is too rough. The mind doesn’t play along. It’s too careful, or too reckless in how it launches the body forward to claim space. The really good actors who try, have a sort of uncanny valley effect on me, an unsettling nimbus of “not quite right”. This is what made Dorian Gray so compelling: he found a magical loophole to fake his own youth.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #281: Mélusine: The fantasy romp that’s really about complex trauma

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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!

The past and the way it influences the present featured strongly in the last two instalments. Being from Vienna, I very much enjoyed and related to Matt’s dive into his trip to neighbouring Prague. I’m even a little sorry that I’ll now proceed to wrench this theme of past and present onto a completely different track.

Let me take you back to the year 2005 and a release that you probably missed because there was so much else going on.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #276: I read, therefore I am

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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!

Did you know? Your reading diet casts quite an accurate picture of who you are. Or, more precisely, of those aspects of yourself that you’re focusing on, perhaps even obsessing about. You do know it. Of course.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #271: Boom ⇒ Snooze ⇒ Boom

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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!

Bai Jing Ting (left) and Zhao Jin Mai (right) star as soulmates in an endlessly harrowing meet cute

Last week, Mege hit us with “I didn’t like Oppenheimer. That’s largely because I didn’t understand the second half of the movie.” In its bluntness, this is one of my favourite Six Degrees posts so far, and Mege is spot on. The funniest thing (to me) is that he went right back to watch it again and still didn’t get it, and now he’s apparently seriously contemplating watching it a third time. Noooooo. Cut your losses, Mege!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #267: Family and other horrors

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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!

Hello and welcome to the New Year. Yuletide has come and gone. You have survived holiday family dinners – well done, you – and if you have a certain kind of family, you might be feeling, how do I put it, a little frayed around the edges. A little frazzled. A little freaked, even. A little absolutely and forever done with all that crap.

Last week, Alan gave you spooky Christmas stories. This week, I’m talking about the real holiday horrors, in the shape of one of my favourite series of the year. You won’t find it on Netflix or Amazon. It’s a one-woman-show on social media by @ShawnatheMom (YouTube link). It doesn’t even have a name, I think, and was originally meant to be consumed one short clip a day. And it’s the best portrayal I have ever seen of what it’s like when everyone slowly realises they’re dealing with a narcissistic family member.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #260: Teens discover Little Shop of Horrors

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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!

Moving on from the uncanny to straight up spooky: I used to love Halloween. I threw massive parties and carved pumpkins with agonised faces barfing up sepia spaghetti!

Then, I had kids.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #253: The Untamed and the joy of fan translations

MelanieLeave a 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!

Sam’s post on Hitchcock’s odd movie out, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, reminded me not only of the delights of watching a sniping couple, but also of that very specific joy that blooms when you consume something completely different and it rocks.

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