Author: The Barista Collective

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Floating in space

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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 seems we’ve been doing our weekly feature Six Damn Fine Degrees for a while: this week saw the release of the 200th instalment – which prompted Alan to take a time-out from the usual free association and look back on some of his favourite posts and associations. Follow him down this particular rabbit hole here.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: September 2024

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We’ve talked about the Alien franchise before on our podcast, so we didn’t want to miss the opportunity presented by the release of the latest addition to the series, Alien: Romulus, which came out in August. Join Sam and Alan as they talk about Fede Álvarez’ return to the roots of the franchise. How successful is the movie’s ‘back to basics’ approach? How scary can the film be after an entire series has done a lot to strip its iconic set of monsters of their original mystery? What have Álvarez and his collaborators done to keep all things xenomorph fresh, how do they play with an almost overpowering legacy? And what about that unexpected return from the dead: an effective homage or a tacky reference?

For more thoughts on the long-running Alien franchise, check out the following podcast episodes:

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: You gotta know when to hold, know when to fold

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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.

Our Summer of Remakes podcast series ended at the beginning of the month, but Sam – whose idea the series theme was – had some thoughts looking back. So let’s start this week’s trailer -out not with a trailer but with what appears to be the first remake ever: Georges Méliès’ “Playing Cards”.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Listen to them, the children of the night

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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.

How do we choose the things we watch? And is there such a thing as too much choice? In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Matt wrote about the extremely limited viewing choices of his childhood – and how they are in part the reason why he’s so much into film.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #84: Summer of Remakes – A Star is Born

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Our Summer of Remakes is coming to an end, with a conversation about not one, two, three or four films, but a whopping five, starting with What Price Hollywood? (1932), which was adapted in 1937 into A Star Is Born – and again in 1954, starring Judy Garland and James Mason. Then, in 1976, the story got the Streisand treatment, and in 2018 we got Bradley Cooper’s version, starring himself and Lady Gaga. Join Julie, Sam and Alan as they talk about the remake extravaganza. What is it about the material that makes it so enduring? How do the films tell their story differently? And, if A Star Is Born, is such an enduring tale, what would our cultural baristas expect from a near-future remake, should one be forthcoming?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Back to school

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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.

For this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Mege wrote about The Umbrella Academy. What’s this: a Netflix series that is actually allowed to run until the end?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Women at the edge of getting lost on an Australian landmark

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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, on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, Matt wrote about what happens when three girls vanish during a school outing, in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: If I could turn back the clock

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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.

One of the filmmakers we, like so many cinephiles, keep circling back to is Alfred Hitchcock – most recently in our latest Six Damn Fine Degrees, in which Sam wrote about his love for Rear Window.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: August 2024

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Imagine not only being a cinephile, and not only writing and talking about film – but doing this professionally: being a film critic is something many of us in the blogosphere dream of. Meet Alan Mattli: Alan is not only teaching and doing research into literature and film at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, he is also a reviewer for the German-language Swiss film and TV platform Maximum Cinema and (Swiss German) the Maximum Cinema podcast. While his reviews at Maximum Cinema and on his website Facing the Bitter Truth (which he launched in 2008, while still at school), and while much of his writing at these sites is in German, you can find his writing in English on Letterboxd. In our August espresso podcast, Matt talks to Alan about his way to becoming a film critic, whether he watches films differently as a critic, and how film criticism has changed in recent years.

P.S.: Here’s a list of Alan’s favourite current film critics:

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Memories of Disney murdering childhood memories

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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 on Six Damn Fine Degrees, Alan reminisced on Memories of Murder – though since we featured the trailer not too long ago, here’s something else instead: Tony Zhao’s “Every Frame a Painting” video essay on Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece.

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