The Barista Collective

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: For all your cheeseboarding needs

Oct 16, 2022Oct 16, 2022The 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 would Matt be, or do, without his beloved Criterion backlog? He recently got around to watching Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, a film he hadn’t known previously, and wrote about it here. Definitely worth it already for Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #100: celebrating connections

Oct 14, 2022Feb 28, 2026The Barista Collective3 Comments

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Everything is connected: somehow it seems like we only got started on our weekly exercise in free-fall association yesterday – but no, we’ve already arrived at the hundredth instalment of Six Damn Fine Degrees – and what better occasion than this to reflect on the feature and on cultural links of all sorts?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Kingdoms, bears and broken mirrors

Oct 9, 2022The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Matt is almost done with his extended trip through Ingmar Bergman’s films, and before the final double-whammy of Fanny and Alexander in its TV and cinematic versions, he watched Autumn Sonata – undoubtedly a good, well-acted film, but not necessarily one that brings anything new to the director’s oeuvre… other than a certain iconic actress with a very familiar surname.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Stop and go

Oct 2, 2022The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Sometimes we like to mix and match our forms of culture, so in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees Julie talked about the works of William Shakespeare adapted to the screen. There’s so much great cinematic Shakespeare to choose from, so here’s a trailer for a film about staging Shakespeare instead: Kenneth Branagh’s In the Bleak Midwinter (or A Midwinter’s Tale, as the Americans know it, if they actually knew the film).

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #61: Festival!

Oct 1, 2022Oct 1, 2022The Barista Collective3 Comments

Summer is over, as is our Summer of Directors – and this also means that the main festival period of 2022 has come to an end. The last few years, festivals have been greatly affected by the pandemic, and especially in 2020 and 2021 many of the big festivals were vastly reduced or didn’t happen at all. But this year they came back – and after our five big courses focusing on directors, from Jane Campion via Ida Lupino to Martin Scorsese, here’s a palate cleanser in which Alan, Julie and Matt talk about their own festival memories and experiences. Whether it’s the classic open-air music festivals of our youth, contemporary arts or local film festivals: what are our thoughts on the format? Do festivals change how we enjoy culture? What are our favourite memories? How essential are schedules and spreadsheets to the perfect festival experience… and just how damn middle-aged have we become while we weren’t watching?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: In the Swiss mountains

Sep 25, 2022The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

It’s been, oh, months since we featured the last post on a samurai film, so Matt decided it was finally time to watch the Samurai Trilogy, three films about the legendary swordsman Musashi Miyamoto, directed by Hiroshi Inagaki and starring the iconic Toshiro Mifune. He didn’t enjoy the films as much as, say, the samurai films with Mifune directed by Akira Kurosawa, but he still found things that he liked a lot.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Layer Cake

Sep 18, 2022The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

We don’t often have posts about music on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, which is a shame – but usually when there is a post with a musical topic, it’s Mege, and this week he dedicated his Six Damn Fine Degrees to a loud, loud concert by Scottish band Biffy Clyro. Bands don’t usually come with trailers, but in this case we are lucky that they did the score for the 2019 film Balance, Not Symmetry. Enjoy!

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A Damn Fine Espresso: September 2022

Sep 17, 2022Sep 18, 2022The Barista Collective2 Comments

Last month, Netflix released the first season of its adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s seminal graphic novel The Sandman – and seeing how Julie and Matt met on the Neil Gaiman message board and began their ongoing conversation about films, books, TV and all things cultural there, we couldn’t really let the opportunity pass. How well does Netflix’ Sandman work as an adaptation? What do we think about the changes? How does it address the fact that it’s been thirty years since Gaiman’s comic first started coming out? What do we think of the cast, starting (but definitely not ending) with Tom Sturridge as Dream and Kirby Howell-Baptiste’s Death? And what do we think about the series’ chances, seeing how Netflix and the Almighty Algorithm determine the fate of its original programming?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The name’s Welles. Orson Welles.

Sep 11, 2022The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

This week, our Summer of Welles (Editor’s note: Not a real thing.) continued with Sam’s post about Welles in Portugal and Spain. What better opportunity to take Sam’s mention of the dreadful 1967 Casino Royale and post this trailer for it, a great indication of just how dreadful the film is?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Sceptred isles, hunchbacked toads

Sep 4, 2022Sep 4, 2022The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Matt is inching ever closer to completing his epic journey through the works of Ingmar Bergman. This week he wrote about the lesser-known Brink of Life – but, he argues, it definitely deserves more recognition than it has received to date. That lack of recognition is reflected by a lack of a trailer – unless we search further afield and find this video advertising a Hungarian stage adaptation of the film from 2011.