The Barista Collective

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’…

06/11/2022The 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.

On his grand Criterion journey, Matt got to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up… for the first time ever. It’s amazing how you can almost reach 50 without having seen some of these iconic movies – but then, as always, too much to watch, too little time.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #62: Second Chances (2)

05/11/202205/11/2022The Barista Collective4 Comments

Second Chances, second time: a little over a year ago we first decided to give a couple of films we’d not been overly enamoured with another try to see if time or adjusted expectations had changed anything – or if our first, negative take persisted. This year, it’s Alan and Sam’s turn to revisit films they didn’t like the first time around – and, in keeping with our directorial focus this year, they selected two films by the same director, David Fincher. Sam wanted to give Fight Club (1999) another chance after bouncing off of the film hard when it originally came out, and Alan thought it only fair to return to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). Has time softened their views? Did they find anything else, anything new in the films – or did they find even more they don’t like? Join us for this Fincher/Pitt team-up double bill and for another set of second chances!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: This year, the holidays come early

30/10/2022The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

The contest that was first turned into a documentary (Hands on a Hardbody), then a musical, and most recently a film by German director Bastian Günther: Hands-On, in which rural Americans desperate to win a truck spend day and night with their hands on a truck. There’s something nearly religious about this – but sadly, Matt didn’t find Günther’s film One of These Days (although it definitely has things going for it) worthy of worship.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: That distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice

23/10/2022The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

For our first Six Damn Fine Degrees after our 100th post in the series, Mege wrote about the legendary Dave Grohl and his autobiography The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music, published in 2021 – a good start to the next hundred instalments! And since Anton Corbijn’s Control (about Ian Curtis of Joy Division) got a mention, here’s a trailer for the 2007 film.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: October 2022

22/10/202221/10/2022The Barista Collective1 Comment

As with our September shot of espresso, in which we talked about the first season of the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, we’re staying in the land of Netflix: this month Julie and Alan talk about Andrew Dominik’s Blonde – again an adaptation, this time of Joyce Carol Oates garage-sized novel. What did our cultural baristas think of Dominik’s much-debated and much-derided film? Spoiler: though the two come at the film from slightly different perspectives, neither is a big fan of the film. Join them for their discussion about Ana de Armas’ performance, biopic vs Hollywood fable, and (of course) all the talking fetuses you want!

If you’re interested in more on Blonde and Marilyn Monroe, make sure to check out Christina Newland’s BFI interview with Andrew Dominik, Farran Nehme’s thoughts on the film (please note that this is behind a paywall) – and obviously our episode on Marilyn the icon, her movies and her legacy from September 2020!

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

16/10/202216/10/2022The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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

14/10/202224/06/2026The 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

09/10/2022The 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

02/10/2022The 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!

01/10/202201/10/2022The 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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