Author: The Barista Collective

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Sssnakes and Laddersss

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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.

We started the week (albeit fashionably late, on Friday) with Alan’s reminiscences of the story tapes of his childhood and Magnus Magnusson’s reading of Tales from Viking Times in particular. Apparently the MCU Thor isn’t exactly accurate to Norse mythology – but that won’t stop us from sharing the Thor: Love and Thunder teaser that recently dropped, will it?

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A Damn Fine Espresso: April 2022

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We’ve now been doing monthly podcasts for almost five years at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture – and today we’re starting A Damn Fine Espresso: shorter, more impromptu small doses of all the cultury goodness you’ve come to expect from us! To launch the new smaller cups of culture, join Julie and Sam as they have a chat about what they’ve checked out recently. From Parisian getaways and serendipitous record stores to bad moustaches, worse CGI and films that can’t decide what they want to be…

Starting with this episode, you can get your monthly espresso where you get all of your Damn Fine goodness – so indulge in a tiny cup of our pop culture musings and let us know what you think!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Know any jokes on ‘Dafoe’?

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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.

A week too late for Easter, Matt followed up on Sam’s post on Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon with a little something on religious films: the good, the bad and the ugly. Well, mostly the former.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Uncle Upside Down

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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 Easter Sunday, so Sam’s pick for this week’s instalment of Six Damn Fine Degrees is quite fitting: Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon about the life of Saint Francis of Assisi – a film that Roger Ebert memorably called “an excess of sweetness and light”, with dialogue consisting of “empty, pretty phrasing”. Not all Easter excesses of sweetness consist of too much chocolate pressed into bunny form!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Pirates and the Art of Monkey Maintenance

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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.

While the Criterion Collection is basically catnip for a certain kind of film lover, not every Criterion film is an unreserved triumph, and while there are things to like about Czechoslovak New Wave fairytale Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Matt wasn’t altogether enchanted. (What you’ll find isn’t so much a trailer as an introduction to the film that Criterion put together. Trust me: I’ve looked at the trailer that’s available, and you don’t want to see that one.)

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #55: Based on a true story

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What is your reaction when you read those words? Is a story better if it actually, really happened? Or are all stories partly fiction, partly true? Where does truth lie in fiction, and where does a story begin to turn into a pack of lies? Join Julie, Sam and Matt as they discuss these questions on Oliver Stone’s conspiracy epic JFK (1991), the four-part true crime/black dramedy hybrid Landscapers (2021) and Sam Mendes’ 1917 (2019). What are the ethics of telling stories based on actual events? Can fiction get at deeper truths? What are the lines each of us draws when it comes to tales based on true stories?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The Roaring Rories

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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 Friday, Julie gave us another one of her deep dives, this time on Agatha Christie and the books she’d set in the desert – which is a perfect opportunity to post the trailer for Death on the Nile. No, not that one. The other one.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Trains, trains, and more trains

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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.

The movies can make us dream about faraway places – and they can make those places something of a disappointment when you finally see them up close and with your own eyes. On Friday, Matt wrote about his disappointment with the Sphinx – but Petra, Jordan was all the more impressive for turning out not to have been a matte painting back when he first saw it in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: I hate sand

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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.

This week has been course, and rough, and irritating, and it got everywhere… Okay, not quite, but you probably see what we’re getting at: without us even planning for it, this has been something of a Tatooine week, starting with Matt’s disappointment at The Book of Boba Fett, a Star Wars story that first and foremost raises the question of why it exists.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Going Places

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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.

While some of us at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture are sci-fi fans, others are a bit more ambivalent about the genre. Yes, Mege, we’re looking at you. Though even then, there are cracks in his sci-fi sceptical shell: and one of these, surprisingly, is the 2000 Don Bluth animation Titan A.E. Remember that one?

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