A Damn Fine Espresso: July 2022

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture has talked about musicals before – but this month’s espresso is a special treat: Alan has seen the production of Cabaret that is currently being shown at the Playhouse Theatre in London. He and Julie talk about the production and how it compares to Christopher Isherwood’s original stories that Cabaret is based on, as well as the 1972 film by Bob Fosse, featuring Liza Minelli in her iconic turn as Sally Bowles. How do the various production choices change the characters and the overall depiction of Berlin during the Weimar Republic? And, obviously, what are Alan’s thoughts on the stage production: is this time jump to 1929 Berlin worth taking if you happen to find yourself in London?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: If you believe they put a man on the moon

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.

In 1989, the documentary film For All Mankind provided a different perspective on the Apollo programme and the moon landing. In 2022, Matt finally got around to watching the film and writing about it.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Release the Beast

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.

When we started our weekly Six Damn Fine Degrees series of posts, who would’ve thought that we’d get to Give My Regards to Broadstreet: the album, the film, the 8-bit game?

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #58: Summer of Directors – Ida Lupino

Our Summer of Directors reaches its midpoint, with an episode that is special in two different respects. For one thing, we’re talking about an artist whose name should be much, much more familiar than it is: Ida Lupino, the English-American actress, singer, writer, producer, and, yes, director, whose films such as Outrage, The Bigamist and The Hitch-Hiker are fascinating, intriguing, and unusually frank (not only for the time!), dealing with topics such as rape and its social fallout or toxic masculinity long before such topics were common in the movies, and in ways that are more intriguing and nuanced than many more modern films. The episode is also special for another reason: Julie and Alan are joined by Johannes Binotto, lecturer at the University of Zürich and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, who’s written and spoken about Lupino. (You can check out some of his work on Lupino in video and text format – in German, but it’s still well worth checking out if you understand the language or trust DeepL to do a reasonably good job of translating it.) Many thanks to Johannes for his time and for sharing his views and profound knowledge of the subject with us and our listeners!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The One With Almost No Trailers

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.

It’s Bergman time again: this week, Matt stopped by one of Bergman’s early films, Port of Call. It may not be the most Bergman (the Bergmanest?) of all the Bergmans, but after a slow start it turned out… surprisingly engaging! Sadly, finding a trailer for Port of Call proved almost impossible.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Music and moonlight and love and… monsters?

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 a director can be on a wavelength too different from your own, and such differences may be irreconcilable. Will Matt ever learn to love Olivier Assayas, or will Irma Vep (1996) be as good as it gets for him?

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A Damn Fine Espresso: June 2022

We’ve talked about movies and music before, and for our June Espresso episode, Sam and Matt pick up the tune again, talking about two films they’ve recently seen that are all about the music. Sam watched Ennio, the 2021 documentary about iconic composer Ennio Morricone, directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (of Cinema Paradiso fame), while Matt caught Academy Award winner Summer of Soul (2021) at the cinema, which combines the genres of documentary and concert film to celebrate artists from Mahalia Jackson and B.B. King to Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone and Nina Simone – and talk about the relevance of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival to African American culture and politics. Sam and Matt also discuss what, for them, makes a good film about music and musicians, and what is necessary for a musical performance to come to life on film.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: I will show you fear in a drop of blood

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.

After something of a break from Nordic existentialism, Matt returned to his Bergman boxset, watching an early film by the director, Thirst (1949). Unfortunately the age of the film, and possibly the fact that Thirst isn’t exactly one of Bergman’s most memorable films, means that there isn’t a trailer to be found on YouTube – so, instead, please enjoy this trailer for Park Chan-wook’s 2009 vampire movie Thirst, loosely based on a 19th century French novel.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: You’ll never get that out of the carpet!

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 1994, when Peter Jackson became known to an audience much larger than aficionados of shlocky horror and bad taste (or indeed Bad Taste)? Julie certainly does, and her latest Six Damn Fine Degrees post takes us back to Heavenly Creatures and to the murder case that the film is based on.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #57: Summer of Directors – Dario Argento

And our Summer of Directors continues: after celebrating the tactility of Jane Campion’s films last month, we continue with a very different kind of physicality, with the variform violence done to bodies and minds in the phantasmagoric cinema of Italian filmmaker Dario Argento. Join Sam, Julie and Alan as they dissect a trio of Argento’s films, from giallo classic The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) via Deep Red (1975) – a film called by some the best giallo ever made to perhaps the most famous film by Argento, the supernatural horror film Suspiria (1977). What makes these films potent to this day? How important is plot to an Argento film? How much of a successor was the director to Alfred Hitchcock? Just what is “impure cinema”? And just how does our gang draw a direct line from classic movie musicals to Dario Argento’s films?

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