The Barista Collective

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

28/01/202428/01/2024The 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.

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!

Continue reading →

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

21/01/2024The 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.

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Espresso: January 2024

20/01/202420/01/2024The 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?

Continue reading →

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

07/01/2024The 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.

Continue reading →

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

06/01/202401/03/2024The 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!

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast Christmas Special 2023

24/12/202324/12/2023The Barista Collective1 Comment

As the sheer Ho-ho-honess of the season descends on us, here’s a little something for under your tree: our 2023 Christmas Special. This year we’re taking the opportunity to put a Damn Fine fingerprint on the media meme of the year: Barbenheimer. Join us – Julie, Sam, Alan and Matt, but also Damn Fine O.G. Mege and favourite frequent guest Dan Thron of Martini Giant (who took some time this autumn to talk all things Exorcist with us) – as we come up with double bills and mash-ups of wildly divergent and strangely complementary movies, taking our listeners from Paddiface and The Wizard of Chess via a very special Boris Karloff two-header and Wonkas of the Flower Moon to The Sound of Eagles and Under the Hours. (FYI, most of these are working titles that we’ll have to workshop before the final product is pushed out the door, or so Marketing tells us.) So, in the spirit of plastic dolls come to life and Cillian Murphy’s piercing eyes, of learning to start worrying and hate the bomb and of being Just Ken, we at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture wish all of our listeners happy holidays filled with good films, series, books, games and music!

P.S.: For more on Baby Face and Killers of the Flower Moon, make sure to check out these episodes:

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #42: The Complicated Women of Pre-Code Cinema
A Damn Fine Espresso: November 2023 (in which Matt and Sam talk about Killers of the Flower Moon)

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The Beginning is the End is the Beginning

17/12/2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Sadly, there are no trailers for animated shorts – so instead, here is the opening and closing of the Looney Tunes film “Hollywood Steps Out”, which Alan wrote about for this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees.

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Espresso: December 2023

16/12/202303/02/2024The Barista Collective3 Comments

In a little over a week it’s Christmas – and what goes together better than Christmas and forging signatures, telling lies, impersonating practically anybody… and a little murder? Matt’s recently had an opportunity to check out the film adaptations of the adventures of a very naughty boy: Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. In this month’s espresso podcast, join Matt and Sam as they talk about these adaptations that vary massively in tone, theme and quality: from Plein Soleil (AKA Purple Noon) and The American Friend to Ripley’s Game and Ripley Under Ground – not missing out The Talented Mister Ripley, of course. It’s a rare case that a series of novels is adapted not into a series of films but into very different individual movies, all treating their central character very differently. How talented are these various Ripleys, whether they’re played by Alain Delon, Matt Damon, Dennis Hopper, Barry Pepper or John Malkovich?

For a deep dive specifically into The Talented Mister Ripley and its two famous movie adaptations, make sure to check out our podcast from way back in June 2021: Ripley vs Ripley.

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Thieves like us

10/12/2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Can a week go wrong if it starts with a slice of Fellini? Probably not – though Matt wasn’t entirely taken with Il Bidone, which is probably a better film than Fellini’s pre-I Vitelloni films, but it also lacks a certain… Fellini touch, perhaps?