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, Alan’s series of posts about all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture since the very beginning continued with The Broadway Melody (1929). No trailer, once again, but here’s the actual film in its full length – enjoy!
Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
If you were to ask me who my favourite actors are, I wouldn’t have a ready-made answer for you – though, after thinking about the question for a bit, I would probably say that, at this point in time, Jessie Buckley is one of my favourites. In her performances, she has an energy, a rawness which easily tips into vulnerability. In the performances that come to my mind, she doesn’t hold back, there’s nothing of the genteelness to her acting that some of the great thespians of a few decades ago had. Added to which: she has a great voice, and, oh, that crooked smile of hers…
There’s obviously a lot to like about Jessie Buckley – but then I look at her actual roles, and I find that I don’t actually love all that many of them.
Oh boy… I’ve not posted one of these in a while – not because I haven’t been watching any Criterion releases, but because… I don’t honestly know. Most likely, it’s just this: sometimes the working week, and whatever else is happening in my life, leaves me with little time and/or energy to sit down and write a post, even if it’s one I’ve been wanting to write. And then a week passes, two weeks, a month, another one – and I’ve missed the moment.
But: while I cannot do these two films justice in full-length posts, I still remember enough about my reactions to them that I can give you my impressions. And if these make you curious, all the better!
One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.
Virtual Reality is one of those technologies that sound tremendously cool – on paper. No longer are you just looking at a 2D representation of whatever world a game creates: you can be fully immersed in a real world! Except it’s not that easy. For one thing, not everyone has the necessary space at their disposal, so you can actually walk around in the virtual world. For another, not a few people simply get nauseous in VR. And then there’s the challenge of tactility: not just seeing but feeling and touching whatever you’re interacting in the virtual world. There is a not inconsiderable gap between the idea of VR and the actual practice – a gap that can be reduced by means of clever game design, but this kind of design doesn’t necessarily lend itself to what people expect from VR gaming.
Ten years after the release of Oculus Rift, VR isn’t the runaway success that some breathless PR people predicted, and as a result, less and less money is being put into the development of VR experiences and games. If your audience is relatively small, you can’t really afford to develop VR fare that has the kind of AAA production values you get in normal video games. And this generally means that big games, with large worlds, the kind of thing you find regularly in non-VR gaming, are a rarity when it comes to Virtual Reality. A lot of games developed for the tech are much smaller in scope, somewhere in between an escape room and a theme park ride, and they are generally as on-rails as the latter. With a modest budget, you may still be able to put together a handful of interconnected rooms that are reasonably detailed and nice to look at; a whole world, though, is an entirely different matter.
Another year, another Second Chances episode: in this month’s podcast, Sam and Alan get together to revisit two historical pieces, though they couldn’t be much more different – one has decadence, deviance and Nazism, the other offers Hollywood mystery, Communists and dancing sailors. Yes, we’re taking a second look at Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film The Damned, the cause of something of a memorable, and traumatic, early movie memory of Sam’s, and at the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! (2016) (which we also wrote about here), generally one of the less-appreciated films of the writer-director siblings – but perhaps one that is unfairly maligned?
And if Alan and Sam’s chat about fascists, fixers, murders and musical numbers has got you in the mood, why not check out these earlier Second Chances episodes?
Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
Myself, I’ve never been to Sarajevo. In fact, I’ve not been to much of the East of Europe. I’ve been to Bratislava, which has the coolest little pancake place. And I’ve been to Prague – which is almost a bit of a cliché, at least for my generation (which, as you may have guessed, lies somewhere between W and Y). At Swiss grammar schools, classes would go on what is called a ‘Matura trip’ (the Matura being the final exam), which teachers would try to make as educational as possible, while students would try to make sure would provide ample opportunity for partying, and pretty much the generic destination for a Matura trip in the early to mid-’90s was Prague. Plenty of education, plenty of culture, plenty of beer.
However, that’s not the trip to Prague I remember most fondly. Even though I did get my CD of the Blade Runner soundtrack there.
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 you begin with a film like Sátántangó? If you commit to its seven hours and 19 minutes, how much can you trust your own impressions at the end, and how much is the combination of Stockholm Syndrome and Sunk Cost Fallacy talking? There are films where I would say I liked them, possibly a lot – but would I recommend them to anyone else?
What I can say for certain is this: if this film is showing anywhere near you, if you have the time to go and see it, and if you are the least bit curious – go and see it. There are few experiences I am aware of in cinema that are like it, and that includes the other Béla Tarr films I’ve seen. (We were lucky – if that’s what you want to call it, seeing how the occasion was the recent death of the director – to catch Sátántangó as well as The Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horseat the best local cinema over a couple of weeks.) If your experience is anything like mine, the length is the least of your worries. Worry more about the extended scene in which a child tortures and finally kills a cat. I will absolutely defend the scene… and I hope not to see it, or anything like it, in a long, long time.
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.
Last week was the end of February, which means that Wednesday was Shortcuts day, featuring quick takes by the gang about what they’ve been watching, reading and listening to recently.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 