The Barista Collective

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #44: Isao Takahata – radical naturalism

May 1, 2021Jan 4, 2025The Barista Collective4 Comments

When Isao Takahata died in 2018, the world lost one of the uncontested masters of animation. Takahata, long-time creative partner of Hayao Miyazaki and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, created some of the most striking, memorable anime there is. Together with guest Patrick Martignoni, Eric and Matt discuss Takahata and his thematic and aesthetic concerns, especially his idiosyncratic, experimental take on naturalism and how animation can be used to get to the essence of characters. In our discussion, we focus mainly on Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Only Yesterday (1991), Pom Poko (1994) and what is arguably Takahata’s magnum opus, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) – but we don’t forget to look in on his TV career, as all three of us were raised on Heidi, Girl of the Alps. Join us as we remember the great, idiosyncratic and surprising storytelling of Isao Takahata!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: By the time you watch ’em, one of these may have won an Academy Award!

Apr 25, 2021Apr 25, 2021The 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.

Our week at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture began with singing, dancing, rain – and Matt’s ambivalence about cinemas opening again in Switzerland, in spite of a shaky epidemiological situation. But let’s not let this distract us too much from the glory of seeing Singin’ in the Rain live on a cinema screen!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Heroes, villains and wolves

Apr 18, 2021The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

We’re afraid that this week wasn’t particularly fruitful in terms of posts. What can we say – it’s been a busy time, for various reasons. Or perhaps there were more posts, but then some big, mean, purple-chinned alien warlord snapped his fingers and half the posts vanished into thin air? (And here’s a small reminder that we did two podcasts on Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, and those haven’t been snapped away.)

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Don’t give up the ghost

Apr 11, 2021The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Do you know how difficult it is to get your hands on trailers for video games before, say, 1995? The short and boring answer is: pretty difficult. If we wanted to present a trailer for one of the Ultima games featuring the Guardian, the series’ long-time antagonist, we’d have to resort to an ultra-low resolution video for Ultima IX, and that’d be in no one’s interest. (Also, we already posted that one last week.) So instead, here’s a very loosely related trailer for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, which didn’t just feature one Dennis Hopper, but also Bill Johnson, who would later voice the Guardian. These days, we get the likes of Willem Dafoe and Liam Neeson in video games, but in 1992 we had to make do with the guy who played Leatherface.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Hungover cops can’t jump

Apr 4, 2021The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

1994 saw a great disturbance in computer games, as if thousands of geeks suddenly cried out in disappointment and then fell silent – most likely because their Avatar had just failed to successfully jump from one small rock to another. Back then, reloading a save game wasn’t just a matter of seconds: it was a commitment, and the more time you’d already sunk into a game like Ultima VIII, the less likely you were to stop playing, especially if you’d paid close to a hundred dollars, and doubly so if you were a fan of the Ultima series of computer role-playing games. This week, Eric wrote about his memories of his first big computer game disappointment, and it is a pain that many fellow geeks felt at the time.

This was before computer games received trailers, so instead, let’s start this week’s post with the trailer issued for its sequel, and the final single-player Ultima game – which (wait for it) turned out to be even worse in some ways. But hey, at least it wasn’t quite as much of an active exercise in masochism!

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #43: Meanwhile, the war was happening elsewhere…

Apr 3, 2021Jan 4, 2025The Barista Collective1 Comment

As Edwin Starr asked in 1970: “War, huh, yeah! What is it good for?” Hollywood has known the answer to that one for a long time – war makes for very lucrative movies. From the trenches of the First World War to the urban combat of the Iraq War, there are many, many movies ready to show us combat, heroism, excitement and horror – more often than not veering close to, or outright crossing into, propaganda. The genre of war movies – even if we could spend many podcast episodes just trying to find a useful definition of what exactly makes a war movie – is often used to make a statement about one thing or another: nation and patriotism, masculinity, class, ideology. While we talk about all of these things with our guest Laura Binz, we look at an atypical example of a war movie (and one that Roger Ebert famously walked out of): the Italian film Mediterraneo (1991) by director Gabriele Salvatores, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1992. Is there such a thing as a war movie when the war only takes place far, far away?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: In the Heights, everyone can hear you sing

Mar 28, 2021The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Maybe Matt shouldn’t play games during a pandemic – because it seems that he mostly picks ones that translate this whole ‘social distancing’ thing into a video game format: first Journey, then Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Turns out that the most social contact he’s had in a game recently was in the ultra-Swiss folk horror game Mundaun, a grim little tale about deals with mysterious old men and disembodied goat heads that nonetheless talk fluent Romansh. At least that’s not something that the COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly well known for!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Do you think death could possibly be a boat?

Mar 21, 2021The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Last week it finally happened: A Damn Fine Cup of Culture was deemed too raunchy by Facebook. Okay, that may not be quite accurate – truth be told, we will probably never know why Facebook suddenly decided that we’d violated their T&Cs with the name of our page. Was it the “damn”? Was it that we made claims to the extraordinary quality of our cups of culture? Or was it something else entirely, like the wrong number of capitals? Anyway, we are now back on Facebook, complete with what some people might consider naughty words in our name. Let’s see what Mark Z comes up with next, shall we?

All of this happened on the same day that Sam posted another wonderful instalment of Six Damn Fine Degrees, in honour of two of the Grande Dames of dubbing: Marni Nixon, who featured in many a film musical without getting the credit she deserved, and Nikki van der Zyl, the woman who gave a voice to so many Bond girls. We can hear a (sadly, very small) handful of her lines dubbing Ursula Andress in the trailer for the Bond film that started it all, Dr. No.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Taking the Mickey – right out of the trailer

Mar 14, 2021The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

This was a remarkably busy week at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, starting with three journeys – into pre-history, a Jules Verne-style alternate past, to the moon, and beyond! Matt wrote about his encounters with Karel Zeman’s oeuvre in the beautiful Criterion edition of three of his key films. (We would say that you should Czech this out, but obviously we’re above such cheesy puns.)

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #42: The Complicated Women of Pre-Code Cinema

Mar 13, 2021Jan 4, 2025The Barista Collective6 Comments

… or how the Code Ruined Everything. Welcome listeners! For our March episode we will look into the cinema of the 1930s, before the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced in 1934. Just after the roaring ’20s and through the Great Depression, there was a space for stories and characters which would ultimately be lost to Hollywood. A space where there was an opportunity for a different kind of part – especially for women. Where rather than just virgin or vixen, there was room for something in between: something more interesting, more human, and so much more fun! Tune in as Alan and Julie explore what makes pre-code films, and the characters who inhabit them, so special!

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