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.
Sometimes it’s the diamonds in the rough of any medium that prove to be the most memorable – or so Matt argues in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees.
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.
From the invaluable supporting actors to the hidden gems of cinema and TV: sometimes it isn’t the main events, the Brad Pitts and Jennifer Lawrences, the Oppenheimers and the Barbies, that we gravitate to. In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Mege pinpointed some of those gems that take some looking for – including the fascinating Finnish historical horror film, Sauna.
It’s that time of the year again: A Damn Fine Cup of Culture is dedicating its next four main episodes to a single theme. After 2022’s Summer of Directors and last year’s Summer of Collaborations, this year’s hot months are dedicated to remakes. And yes, remakes tend to get a bad rap from film fans, but there’s enough there that is interesting, fascinating and worth watching – and, yes, in many cases worth criticising. We think we’ve picked an interesting bunch of films and remakes, and we’re starting with a special case of one of the greats of Hollywood cinema remaking one of his own films: Alfred Hitchcock and The Man Who Knew Too Much. First in 1934, in one of his British films, and then again in 1956, Hitchcock told the same overall story of a couple whose child is kidnapped because of a secret plot they’ve uncovered by accident – but while a lot is the same, from the basic setup to the climax at the Royal Albert Hall, these are still two very different flavours of Hitchcock. Join Sam and his co-baristas Julie and Matt as they discuss multiple men who knew too much. What does each version bring to the table? Which did we prefer? If we had to choose, what would we go for: Peter Lorre’s pitch-perfect baddie or Doris Day belting “Que Sera, Sera”?
For further listening on Alfred Hitchcock, make sure to check out our earlier episodes, “The Good, the Bad and Alfred Hitchcock” (#33) and last month’s “Swan Song” (#80), in which Alan and Sam talked about the final films of Hitchcock and Billy Wilder.
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.
Remember those perennial supporting actors? Those faces that you’d see in many, many films, and that would always make you take notice when they turned up? Sam certainly does! And, seeing how he mentions The Tamarind Seed, a film that many of our readers are unlikely to have heard of, here’s a trailer for this 1974 movie by Blake Edwards.
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.
Remember those instances when you first became aware of an actor? Matt definitely remember the first time he became aware of Jennifer Connelly – and seeing Labyrinth as a kid may also have made him uncomfortably aware of just how tight those tights were that David Bowie wore.
It’s not that much of a jump from last month’s espresso topic of cinematic women behaving badly (well, at least in the eyes of the society) to this month’s theme. Over the last month or so, the best cinema in the world showed a series of films by the American director Dorothy Arzner, who was mainly active from the 1920s to the early 1940s. Arzner stands out not only as a female director who helped launch the careers of actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell and Lucille Ball, her films are also impressively ahead of their time in terms of their depiction of women and their critique of marriage and of heteronormative pairings as the sole path to contentment. Working in genres from screwball comedy and melodrama to literary adaptation and war films, and being more than willing to blend genres and tone, Arzner directed films that both reflect their times and feel strikingly modern. Join Julie and Matt as they discuss some of Arzner’s greats, from Dance, Girl, Dance to Merrily We Go to Hell, and from Working Girls to the flawed but fascinating Christopher Strong and Craig’s Wife.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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