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 June espresso is a special one: differently from the vast majority of our podcast episodes, this one had Alan and Matt recording in the same room, talking into one mic – and the topic of their conversation is the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Matt’s local cinema, the REX Bern, recently showed a series of Kore-eda’s films, from his first feature Marobosi to his latest, Monster, and Matt’s been wanting to do a Kore-eda episode for a long time, so the two took this opportunity to finally fulfil that wish. Join them as they discuss what makes a Kore-eda film, which ones they like best, and (obviously) what they would choose, After Life-style, as the sole memory to be filmed and taken into the beyond.
For more on Hirokazu Kore-eda, make sure to check out these blog posts:
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.
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.
From the invaluable supporting actors to the hidden gems of cinema and TV: sometimes it isn’t the main events, the Brad Pitts and Jennifer Lawrences, the Oppenheimers and the Barbies, that we gravitate to. In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Mege pinpointed some of those gems that take some looking for – including the fascinating Finnish historical horror film, Sauna.
It’s that time of the year again: A Damn Fine Cup of Culture is dedicating its next four main episodes to a single theme. After 2022’s Summer of Directors and last year’s Summer of Collaborations, this year’s hot months are dedicated to remakes. And yes, remakes tend to get a bad rap from film fans, but there’s enough there that is interesting, fascinating and worth watching – and, yes, in many cases worth criticising. We think we’ve picked an interesting bunch of films and remakes, and we’re starting with a special case of one of the greats of Hollywood cinema remaking one of his own films: Alfred Hitchcock and The Man Who Knew Too Much. First in 1934, in one of his British films, and then again in 1956, Hitchcock told the same overall story of a couple whose child is kidnapped because of a secret plot they’ve uncovered by accident – but while a lot is the same, from the basic setup to the climax at the Royal Albert Hall, these are still two very different flavours of Hitchcock. Join Sam and his co-baristas Julie and Matt as they discuss multiple men who knew too much. What does each version bring to the table? Which did we prefer? If we had to choose, what would we go for: Peter Lorre’s pitch-perfect baddie or Doris Day belting “Que Sera, Sera”?
For further listening on Alfred Hitchcock, make sure to check out our earlier episodes, “The Good, the Bad and Alfred Hitchcock” (#33) and last month’s “Swan Song” (#80), in which Alan and Sam talked about the final films of Hitchcock and Billy Wilder.
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.
Remember those perennial supporting actors? Those faces that you’d see in many, many films, and that would always make you take notice when they turned up? Sam certainly does! And, seeing how he mentions The Tamarind Seed, a film that many of our readers are unlikely to have heard of, here’s a trailer for this 1974 movie by Blake Edwards.
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 not that much of a jump from last month’s espresso topic of cinematic women behaving badly (well, at least in the eyes of the society) to this month’s theme. Over the last month or so, the best cinema in the world showed a series of films by the American director Dorothy Arzner, who was mainly active from the 1920s to the early 1940s. Arzner stands out not only as a female director who helped launch the careers of actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell and Lucille Ball, her films are also impressively ahead of their time in terms of their depiction of women and their critique of marriage and of heteronormative pairings as the sole path to contentment. Working in genres from screwball comedy and melodrama to literary adaptation and war films, and being more than willing to blend genres and tone, Arzner directed films that both reflect their times and feel strikingly modern. Join Julie and Matt as they discuss some of Arzner’s greats, from Dance, Girl, Dance to Merrily We Go to Hell, and from Working Girls to the flawed but fascinating Christopher Strong and Craig’s Wife.
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 Fellini series continued this week with Matt’s post on 8 1/2: a film that is likely to evoke strong reactions, both for the filmmaking and for the way in which it does arguably indulge its man-child Fellini stand-in protagonist, even when it’s mocking him.
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.
Since it’s difficult to find trailers for this film, though, here’s something… better? At least it’s something interesting: the introduction that film critic Leonard Maltin did for Turner Classic Movies.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 