The Barista Collective

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #45: Ripley vs Ripley – who’s the most talented?

05/06/202104/01/2025The Barista Collective3 Comments

For our June episode, we’re sending the cultural baristas on a holiday in sunny Mongibello, Italy, where rich, pretty young ex-pats spend their time and money on the beach – though there are others who may be less harmless… Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley was turned into two films: René Clément’s Plein Soleil (released as Purple Noon in the English-speaking world, in spite of a distinct absence of purple-hued noons), starring a young Alain Delon, and Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation, which took the title from Highsmith’s book, featuring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. Ripley is a fascinating character, a sociopath reflecting the identities of those around him back at them, and it’s fascinating to compare these two very different interpretations of the character. Join Sam, Julie and Matt as they sail the treacherous waters of the mid-20th century Mediterranean and compare the talents of the various Messrs Ripley!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: You’ve always been the Petula Clark

30/05/2021The 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.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy: on Friday, Alan took us back to the Overlook Hotel, to talk about Shelley Duvall’s performance in Stanley’s Kubrick seminal Stephen King adaptation The Shining.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: At play amidst the strangeness and fear

23/05/2021The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Do you like a good scare? Do you like feeling a tad miserable? And do you like great acting? Julie’s Friday post on the HBO adaptation of Stephen King’s The Outsider ticks all three boxes – so if you’ve missed it, make sure to check it out!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Another Night (or Knight?) at the Round Table

16/05/2021The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Another pretty busy week for all of us, though not on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture – so please bear with us while activity isn’t exactly peaking. We’ll be back before long, promise!

Nonetheless, there was a post on Friday: Mege swerved the weekly Six Damn Fine Degrees feature in a surprising direction, giving the wonderful character actor Bill Camp his due. His rare but great appearances in The Leftovers are worth the price of admission, even if The Leftovers may be one of the most difficult series to recommend to others based on a first season that at times is gruelling and very hard to watch. (Which doesn’t change the fact that it is one of Matt’s favourites… or, some may ask, is that why he likes it so much?)

Anyway, here’s a trailer for The Night Of, which features a characteristically strong, memorable Bill Camp performance.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Slippers and Rita and nuns, oh my!

09/05/2021The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

It’s amazing how time flies during a pandemic, sometimes leaving little time for blog posts other than the bare minimum… On Friday, Matt wrote a blog post about his discomfort with camp (the style, that is, not the thing where as a kid or teenager you go away for a week in the woods, only to get killed by a hockey mask-wearing maniac). Though these days Matt is much more comfortable with camp of any sort – and you can’t start a post with a picture of Dorothy’s ruby slippers and not follow up!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: And now for some animated conversation

02/05/2021The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Does Death only play chess? Or could he also be talked into a different challenge, say, Mario Cart or Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64? Then again, if you’re a Swedish knight returning home from the Crusades, it’s probably the Game of Kings that lends itself to the situation. So yes, you’ve probably guessed correctly: The Seventh Seal was the most recent stop on Matt’s travels with Ingmar. Hey, it doesn’t get much more iconic than that!

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

01/05/202104/01/2025The 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!

25/04/202125/04/2021The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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

18/04/2021The 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

11/04/2021The 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.