Author: Matt

A Damn Fine Espresso: May 2023

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For our May espresso we’ve got a crimson-coloured, deeply unsettling treat for our listeners. Italian horror-thriller maestro Dario Argento (Suspiria, Deep Red, Phenomena) already featured prominently in our Summer of Directors a year ago, but a spine-tingling encounter of the unmissable kind has brought Alan and Sam back to the mic to talk about him: the BFI’s recent Argento screenings and a unique Q&A with the director himself! Along the way, they chat about which of his films the event has put on the map for them, what the map of Turin, Italy has to do with Argento’s cinema, and how a high-profile exhibition at that Italian city’s National Cinema Museum has recently shown how Argento is well on his way to the Italian as well as the international movie Olymp. And, last but not least, Alan has met the next generation of Dario Argento fan. Join us to find out more!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #131: Men with hats, boys with tapes

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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!

It’s been too long now for me to know for sure: was Raiders of the Lost Ark the first Indiana Jones film I ever watched? Or was it Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? What I can say for sure is this: I watched The Last Crusade at the cinema, but Raiders I saw on VHS, because it was the first official video release of a film that I ever owned.

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Through a mirror polluted: Extrapolations

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Remember when Don’t Look Up came out, the 2021 satire by Adam McKay about climate change and the way humanity deals with the crisis? Climate change activists generally praised it, conservatives of all stripes berated it for being propaganda, and film critics by and large disliked it as a film. I was largely in the third of these camps: while I agreed with the underlying sentiments, I found too much of the film smug and happy to preach to the choir, and I simply didn’t see much reason to be smug about a film designed to get those people nodding who were already nodding, while being pretty much guaranteed to put those off who weren’t already among those nodding. To my mind, Don’t Look Up was best where it dropped its lazy, easy-target satire (no matter how deserving that satire might be) and went for anger instead of smugness. (Which isn’t to say that I can’t imagine a better, more successful climate change satire than Don’t Look Up, but that’s a different topic.)

Extrapolations, an anthology series by Apple TV+ mostly forgoes the satire, but like Don’t Look Up I am largely in agreement with the thinking behind it. More than Don’t Look Up, though, it fails as activism as well as storytelling – sometimes disastrously so.

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It’s already gone: revisiting Six Feet Under

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Around the time that my father received his cancer diagnosis in 2021, I started rewatching HBO’s Six Feet Under, a five-season series about the lives of the Fisher family who run a funeral home in Los Angeles. I’d watched the entire series before, twice, the last time finishing in 2008. At the time, I wasn’t married yet (though I was already living with my now-wife), and my parents were both still alive, as were my partner’s. My mother was the first of our parents who died, in 2009. On this day a year ago, my dad died, not of the cancer he’d been diagnosed with but of complications in connection with the illness or the treatment or perhaps simply his age, and this morning I watched “Everyone’s Waiting”, Six Feet Under‘s final episode.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #68: Documentary film – The drama of the truth

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It had to happen sooner or later: for our May episode, Alan, Julie and Matt got together to talk about the genre of documentary films. Their subjects may not be the ones you might expect: while the likes of Ken Burns, Werner Herzog and Errol Morris get a mention, our three cultural baristas picked examples of the genre that are perhaps less well known: Nostalgia for the Light (2010) by the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, which draws a line from the astrological observatories in the Atacama Desert to the women who still search the desert for the remains of their loved ones who were murdered by the Pinochet regime; Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020), writer-director Kirsten Johnson’s attempt to come to terms with her father’s dementia and the reality of a death foretold, in which the daughter enlists the help of the eponymous Dick Johnson to pre-enact possible (and impossible) scenarios of his demise; and Mark Rappaport’s 1995 video essay From the Journals of Jean Seberg, about the actress who was hounded to her death by the FBI and the culture of a movie industry for whom women are commodities and screens onto which men can project their wishes, needs and fantasies. The focus of the conversation is firmly on these films, but obviously no discussion of documentary films can be complete without getting into questions like “What is a documentary?”, “How does it differ from fictional features?”… and “What are the worst documentaries we’ve ever seen?”

For more talk about documentaries and related topics, make sure to check out:

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Criterion Corner: Rififi (#115)

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Perhaps my experience of watching Jules Dassin’s Rififi for the first time would have been different, or at least more smooth, if I’d remembered its original French title: Du rififi chez les hommes. The English title, especially if you (like me) don’t know what the word ‘rififi’ means. The film is kind enough to provide something of an explanation, in the form of a song performed in a nightclub to an audience of gangsters, hoodlums and molls: rififi is brouhaha, trouble, especially the kind that goes on between gangsters over money, women, the size of their guns. But without that knowledge, the title Rififi sounded like a cocktail, a musical style that makes you snap your fingers, or a Mediterranean resort town. This together with the film often being described as the quintessential heist movie made me expect something jazzy, breezy, stylish. Something fun.

So when fifteen minutes into Rififi the main character makes his former girlfriend strip and then brutally beats her with a belt because she’d gone off with another man while he was serving five years in prison, I was taken aback – especially when the film in the scenes following the violence seemed to shrug and go, “Well, that’s what men are like, that’s what women are like, and that’s how everyone likes it.” I was ready to press STOP, eject the disk from the Blu-ray player, put it away and never think of Rififi again.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #127: You never forget your first time

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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!

You probably remember that scene from Poltergeist (the 1982 original, not the 2015 remake): Marty, one of the parapsychologists investigating the Freeling home, goes to the kitchen at night, grabs some food from the fridge – and finds that what he’s taken seems possessed and infested with maggots and evil. Understandably taken aback, he runs to a nearby utility room, he splashes water on his face… and then watches himself in the mirror as slits and cracks open in his face. Blood drips in the sink. And as we’re watching, a horrified Marty pulls off his face chunk by chunk, revealing blood, flesh and bone. A flash of light! – and Marty’s face is where it belongs, where it’s always been. It’s all been in his head… or has it?

Warning: Some graphic albeit cheesy ’80s gore to follow.

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Fear the birds

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You’d think this film shouldn’t work, not in 2023. The special effects aren’t outright hilarious at this stage, but they’re definitely ropey. Much of the time you can see that the swarm doesn’t actually exist in the same plane as the people running away from them. Your brain tells you: this is tricks, effects, it’s movie magic. And, more than that, it’s birds! There’s no way they can be this much of a threat, can they?

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They create worlds: Imaginary gardens, real tourists

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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.

I am currently replaying one of the Assassin’s Creed games, in which players are invited to go back in time and hobnob with the likes of Queen Victoria, Leonardo da Vinci and Cleopatra in 19th century London, renaissance Florence and Ptolemaic Egypt. They’re wonderful games for tourists – but they’re also shallow and repetitive, filled with busywork and ludicrous plots about ancient conspiracies and precursor civilisations. For a long time, I would buy each new Assassin’s Creed and play it excitedly, like the history nerd I am, but almost always I would get tired of them before I was even close to the ending.

Nonetheless, when I’ve got a phase where I’m tired from work in the evenings and don’t want anything that engages me too deeply, I often revisit an Assassin’s Creed game, because of the sightseeing. I don’t always need deep, engaging gameplay or storylines – sometimes what I want to do is climb the clocktower of the Palace of Westminster and look out over Dickensian London, smog, chimney sweeps’n’all.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #122: You can be my bad guy any time

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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!

Lock up your daughters (and your sons, quite possibly) – the British are coming! It’s pretty much impossible to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and not be bowled over by the suave charms of its British star. That voice, the confidence, and the man certainly knows how to wear a suit.

But enough about James Mason. Cary Grant is also pretty good in the film.

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