The Barista Collective

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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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Out with the old, in with the new

Jan 7, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Remember just a week ago when we were still in 2023? In the last couple of weeks we’ve skipped the trailer posts, but now we’re catching up on some of the films we wrote about, such as Miyazaki’s likely swan song The Boy and the Heron, Paul King’s non-Paddington confection Wonka and some of the movies Matt liked best last year.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #76: Buster Keaton

Jan 6, 2024Mar 1, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Welcome to 2024! We at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture are beginning the year with a discussion of one of the greats of early Hollywood cinema: Buster Keaton, the Great Stone Face himself. Join Alan, Julie and Sam as they discuss three films by the master of deadpan physical comedy: One Week (1920), in which a newlywed couple attempts to assemble a house kit that, unbeknownst to them, a rejected suitor has sabotaged, Sherlock Jr. (1924), perhaps Keaton’s best-known and -loved comedy next to The General, and The Navigator (also 1924), with its amazing underwater scenes. How does Keaton hold up next to the other two greats of early comedy, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd? And what happened to Keaton and his career in later decades?

If you are interested in learning more about Keaton, make sure to check out Dana Stevens’ Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, and take note of the writings of the late, great Cari Beauchamp, who wrote extensively on the era and who passed away on 14 December 2023.

Finally, all three of the Buster Keaton films discussed in this episode can be streamed on YouTube – and there are definitely worse ways to brighten your early January!

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