The Barista Collective

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: It’s the pictures that got small

21/05/2023The 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.

For every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction – and for every attempt to rehabilitate Fedora, we get a counterpoint: in this case, Alan’s post expressing his issues with Billy Wilder’s late-career flop, drawing a direct line to his iconic Sunset Boulevard.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Big Fish

14/05/2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

We had a busy Friday this week, with not just one post but two – including Sam’s look at one of the rarely mentioned (and even more rarely appreciated) films in Billy Wilder’s filmography: Fedora.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Some hate sand, some don’t

07/05/202307/05/2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Let’s change our usual approach to Trailer Sundays and start with new trailers – because we’ve got one here that’s close to our hearts.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #68: Documentary film – The drama of the truth

06/05/202301/07/2023The Barista Collective2 Comments

It had to happen sooner or later: for our May episode, Alan, Julie and Matt got together to talk about the genre of documentary films. Their subjects may not be the ones you might expect: while the likes of Ken Burns, Werner Herzog and Errol Morris get a mention, our three cultural baristas picked examples of the genre that are perhaps less well known: Nostalgia for the Light (2010) by the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, which draws a line from the astrological observatories in the Atacama Desert to the women who still search the desert for the remains of their loved ones who were murdered by the Pinochet regime; Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020), writer-director Kirsten Johnson’s attempt to come to terms with her father’s dementia and the reality of a death foretold, in which the daughter enlists the help of the eponymous Dick Johnson to pre-enact possible (and impossible) scenarios of his demise; and Mark Rappaport’s 1995 video essay From the Journals of Jean Seberg, about the actress who was hounded to her death by the FBI and the culture of a movie industry for whom women are commodities and screens onto which men can project their wishes, needs and fantasies. The focus of the conversation is firmly on these films, but obviously no discussion of documentary films can be complete without getting into questions like “What is a documentary?”, “How does it differ from fictional features?”… and “What are the worst documentaries we’ve ever seen?”

For more talk about documentaries and related topics, make sure to check out:

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #28: Werner Herzog
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #60: Summer of Directors – Martin Scorsese (in which Julie talks about Scorsese’s 1995 documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Film)
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #55: Based on a true story (in which we talk about fiction that is based on true stories… well, more or less)

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The quick and the dead

30/04/2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees post, Matt argued that sometimes the past haunting us isn’t a Native American burial site under the floorboards of our suburban home, but just the first version we saw when we were young, to the point where, for us, it’s the ‘correct’ version: such as Blade Runner with the voiceover that Harrison Form famously hated, or Poltergeist without the scene where a terrified parapsychologist pulls off his face with his bare hands.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Fear itself

23/04/2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

A number of us here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture like horror films, and this is reflected (see what we did there?) in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, with Mege’s thoughts on how horror reflects us back at ourselves. Lake Mungo, the film he mentions most prominently, is not as well known as the big names in the genre, but this little-known Australian gem is sad and terrifying, like many of the best ghost stories.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: All These Women

16/04/2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Trust Julie to do a fun, interesting deep dive into topics the way only she can: on Friday, she wrote about actress Gene Tierney, Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, and the unexpected connections between the two.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: April 2023

15/04/202314/04/2023The Barista Collective1 Comment

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is not an easy watch – and for a long time it was especially difficult to find an opportunity to watch it, but thanks to its top slot in the Sight & Sound critics’ poll in 2022, it returned to a number of cinemas, giving some of us a chance to watch (or even rewatch) Akerman’s contribution to radical cinema. At 3 hours and 21 minutes, during which little happens that would make up the plot of conventional movies, Jeanne Dielman asks a lot of its audiences – but, as Julie and Alan argue, it gives a lot back. What did the two of them get out of Akerman’s film dedicated to three days in the life of a widowed bourgeois housewife and occasional sex worker? How does its running time and structure work? And will their suggestion to shorten the title to a potentially catchier JD stick? Tune in to find the answer to, well, most of these questions!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: What a tangled web we weave

09/04/202309/04/2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

The recent news that apparently a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo was in the works sent ripples of outrage through some corners of the internet – but it seems that our resident Hitchcock-phile Sam is remarkably open-minded about the possibility of someone else taking a stab at the classic.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Asteroids and Androids!

02/04/2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Even someone who might consider themselves a reasonable Hitchcock fan might not have heard of Young and Innocent before – which is all the more reason to check out Alan’s Six Damn Fine Degrees post from this week. And as YouTube doesn’t seem to have a trailer for the film, here’s the next best thing: the entire movie. Enjoy!