The Barista Collective

A Damn Fine Espresso: March 2024

Mar 9, 2024Mar 10, 2024The Barista Collective1 Comment

It’s the weekend before the Big Mama, the White Whale, the movie awards to end all movie awards: the Oscars. Who will win the Academy Awards 2024? Will Christopher Nolan And Cillian Murphy explode with the metaphorical force of a thousand suns? Will Barbie get what it can, in spite of the snubs for its director and star? What about Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, The Holdovers – or the European dark horses Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest? Join Sam and Matt as they discuss their own Oscar thoughts: who was snubbed? Who was nominated but shouldn’t have been? And which films should win which awards?

For more discussion of some of the 2024 Oscar favourites and underdogs, make sure to check out these posts:

A Damn Fine Espresso: August 2023 (in which Alan and Matt talk Barbenheimer)
A Damn Fine Espresso: November 2023 (in which Sam and Matt discuss Killers of the Flower Moon)
Girl, you’ll be a woman soon: Poor Things (Matt’s post on Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film)

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #78: Just one more thing – The Columbo Episode

Mar 2, 2024Mar 1, 2024The Barista Collective1 Comment

TV and murder are made for one another, and the crime series is still one of the most popular genres in television – but there’s no one quite like Lieutenant Columbo, the crumpled, harmless-seeming homicide detective played so memorably by Peter Falk, in ten seasons and 69 episodes over a stretch of 35 years (if you include the specials). What makes the series, and the character, so enduring? Join Sam, Julie (valiantly fighting a sore throat in order to take part in this conversation on one of her favourites!) and returning special guest Johannes Binotto (video essayist and Professor for Film and Media Studies in Lucerne and Zürich) – who, counter to Columbo tradition, won’t turn out to be the murderer after all… or will he? – as they discuss their all-time favourites and guilty pleasures, ranging from fan favourites “Any Old Port in a Storm” and “Etude in Black” to darker and stranger cases such as “By Dawn’s Early Light” and “Make Me a Perfect Murder”.

(Make sure also to check out our 2022 episode on Ida Lupino, featuring the first appearance on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture by Johannes – and if you’re looking for more material on all things Columbo, there’s always Shooting Columbo: The Lives & Deaths of TV’s Rumpled Detective by David Koenig.)

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Directing movies is a complicated profession

Feb 18, 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.

There should be a fictional documentary about a society of film fans that consider mockumentaries entirely true, and that have constructed an elaborate conspiracy theory around how subjects too dangerous are defused by turning them into mockumentaries. You can’t handle the truth about Spinal Tap, or Kiwi filmmaker Colin McKenzie, or the Mayflower Kennel Club Show. But in the meantime we have mockumentary greats such as “Soldier of Illusion” and “The Goof Who Sat By the Door”.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: February 2024

Feb 17, 2024Feb 16, 2024The Barista Collective1 Comment

Much as with Pringles, the problem with musicals is this: once you’ve enjoyed one or two, you can’t just stop. Earlier this month, Sam and Matt gave two movie musicals a second chance: A Chorus Line and Dancer in the Dark. While they didn’t necessarily come away from this with a renewed appreciation of those films, it felt to them that their conversation ended way too soon – so they went back to the well to talk about their formative experiences with the genre. Which musicals did they watch growing up? How did they come to appreciate the genre? How have they experienced the difference between musicals on screen and on stage? From Jesus Christ Superstar to Aladdin, from Fiddler on the Roof to Cabaret and Victor/Victoria: how did Matt and Sam learn to stop worrying and love a good musical?

(And, as before, if you’re looking for more musical talk, make sure to check out our episode #41 from 2021: The Musical Episode!)

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: With fiends like these

Feb 11, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Once you’re caught in the Herzog Maelstrom, it’s very difficult to get away from it – just ask Julie, who dedicated this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees to one of the most famous pairs of frenemies in cinema.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Pop quiz, hotshot

Feb 4, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

This week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees took a well-deserved break from its recent Werner Herzog fixation in order to reminisce about the Swiss chapter of A Damn Fine Cup’s film quiz successes over the years. (And we were so close with the title of the tenth Fast & Furious film, we just got the wrong one of the two available adjectives…)

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #77: Second Chances (2024)

Feb 3, 2024Feb 3, 2024The Barista Collective4 Comments

Another year, another opportunity to give some films we didn’t particularly like another opportunity. Was it the films? Was it us? Was it just the wrong time to watch these? For this year’s movie revisit, Sam and Matt talk about two musicals that, at a first glance, couldn’t be much more different: Richard Attenborough’s 1985 adaptation of A Chorus Line and Nordic provocateur Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. What is the result of our return to these musicals? Did we come away with a new appreciation of Michael Douglas’ foray into musicals (and then he doesn’t even get to sing!), and did things finally fall into place when we rewatched the musical melodrama led by Icelandic multitalent Björk?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: When you absolutely, positively need to drag a boat across a mountain

Jan 28, 2024Jan 28, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

What better way to start the end-of-the-week post than with that most loveable of odd couples, Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski? Definitely the guys you want to have with you if you need to build an opera house in the Amazon. Make sure not to miss Alan’s Six Damn Fine Degrees post on Fitzcarraldo!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Adventure has an old name

Jan 21, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Remember that time when two films about volcanos came out practically at the same time? No, not those two films – we’re talking about the two documentaries made about the volcanologist couple Katia and Maurice Krafft that came out in 2022, Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love and Werner Herzog’s The Fire Within.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: January 2024

Jan 20, 2024Jan 20, 2024The Barista Collective1 Comment

For our first espresso podcast episode in 2024, Julie and Sam sit down together over a virtual coffee to talk about the Austrian director G.W. Pabst (1885 – 1967). Taking Pabst’s silent film classic Pandora’s Box (1929, adapted from Frank Wedekind’s play Lulu) as a starting point, the two discuss the director’s career as a filmmaker during the Weimar Republic, his emigration from but later return to Nazi Germany, and his filmmaking under the Nazi regime and the auspices of the Ministry of Propaganda led by Josef Goebbels, but also the recent novel Lichtspiel, a fictionalised biography of Pabst, written by Daniel Kehlmann. How does a filmmaker go from making progressive, formally daring and even scandalous cinema criticising the society of its day to becoming an accomplice to the propaganda machinery of the Third Reich?

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