Author: Matt

I’m shooting at the man in the mirror: Disco Boy (2023)

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Seeing how we’re usually at our local cinema several times a week, we tend to end up watching certain trailers half a dozen times or more before the films are ever shown. In some cases, I might find a trailer appealing the first two or three times I see it, but by the time I’ve seen it so often that I could lip-sync along to the dialogue I feel I’ve seen enough and don’t even want to watch the whole film. Perhaps in a year or two, once it’s appeared on Film Four or on one of the streaming services we’re subscribed to, but I’m just glad to have seen the last of it for now.

Some trailers are different, though, and each time I watch them I find myself more intrigued. Often, these are the trailers that don’t much focus on plot or dialogues, they’re more about the aesthetic and the vibe of a film. The trailer for Disco Boy by the Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese is a case in point: obviously the film stars Franz Rogowski, an actor I’ve come to appreciate a lot in recent years, but more than that it was the images and the soundscape of the trailer. It was also the hints at the film’s themes: soldiers, colonialism, identity and doubling, intertwined in ways that felt poetic rather than literal. And yes, I’d also heard good things from film festivals, suggesting that Disco Boy was something to look out for.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #141: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to reading in other languages

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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!

Here’s a puzzle for you: who has two thumbs, an English mother, but his mother tongue is German? This guy!

Okay, okay, that was not very good, even worse than the usual “two thumbs” jokes – but it’s true. My dad was German, my mother English, I was born and raised in the Swiss German-speaking part of Switzerland, and the language I learnt first was German, not from my dad (who, like most fathers of his generation, was much less present) but from my mother. She did try to teach my sister and me English, but… well. Let’s say she was partly successful: we learnt how to understand English, but when we were small we’d always answer in German. Once we did start learning English in earnest, it was admittedly easier for us, but even though I talk and write English much more than any other language these days, I would not call myself a proper native speaker. Half-native, maybe, which sounds like a weird term from 19th century literature; Kipling, maybe, or Joseph Conrad.

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Forever Fellini: Variety Lights (1951)

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Ladies and gentlemen, step right up! The time of drily ironic Swedes grappling with existentialist despair and God’s extended silence, indeed His existence, came to an end earlier this year. It’s taken us a while to move forward, but we have finally arrived at our destination: Essential Fellini, Criterion’s gorgeous box set including fourteen of the Italian director’s most important films.

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Criterion Corner: Thelma & Louise (#1180)

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In her fascinating series “Erotic ’90s”, Karina Longworth, creator and host of the long-running podcast You Must Remember This, discusses Thelma & Louise, Ridley Scott’s early ’90s pop-feminist modern classic. (Should I leave out that “modern” once a film is over 30 years old?) I remember being faintly aware of the cultural conversation about Scott’s film at the time, but as a teenager in the pre-internet age I certainly didn’t get more than the occasional snippet. At school, our English teacher had a subscription to Newsweek, so I may have read an article about the film, but other than I wouldn’t have been known about the brouhaha in the US that Thelma & Louise prompted. Listening to Longworth’s podcast, it’s crazy to imagine the culture wars hysterics that gripped especially male critics – but then, in 2023, no amount of culture war craziness should come as much of a surprise.

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Cash on delivery: the films of Johnny Cash

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Henrik “Henke” Hermans is an indie game developer from Finland. He’s created lovably goofy games such as Stilt Fella and Crossing Guard Joe. His guest post at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture isn’t about video games, however, but about the original Man in Black, Johnny Cash and his movies – in particular those that can be watched for free on YouTube!

There is a treasure trove of old Johnny Cash movies on YouTube, just sitting there! For free! Some of them are in the public domain and others I guess no one just cares enough for to take down. Anyway, I watched a bunch of ’em and I’m here to tell you what I thought.

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Criterion Corner: Army of Shadows (#385)

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Superficially, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows isn’t too dissimilar from the gangster movies the director is famous for: it is a chilly meditation on a world inhabited predominantly by men following a grim, unforgiving code. Trust is rare, paranoia habitual – but there are islands of friendship and absolute loyalty, so that betrayal, if and when it strikes, is all the more tragic. And yet: even if the protagonists of Army of Shadows resemble the cops and robbers of Le samouraï or Le cercle rouge, even if they live their lives according to similar rules, they are heroes in ways that Melville’s gangsters aren’t. Their goals aren’t self-serving. They fight the Nazi occupation of France.

So why does their fight feel so unheroic?

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They create worlds: Sable

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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.

If I were to reduce the specific appeal that video games hold for me over any other medium, it wouldn’t be the predictable one. It wouldn’t be interactivity. Obviously it’s cool that games react to your actions, but let’s be honest: that interaction is often pretty limited – and, ironically, it tends to highlight the many ways in which the games aren’t actually particularly interactive. You can choose between option A and option B, or you choose whether to run left or shoot right. These actions can be fun, they can even be meaningful, but the freedom they offer isn’t exactly enormous.

No, the thing I’ve found that appeals to me most in games is exploration – and this is where I experience the freedom of games the most.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #136: Some like it cult

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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!

The classic series The Avengers has frequently popped up on my radar, and it’s usually mentioned in positive terms. And yet, I’ve never bothered to seek it out. Too much to watch already, too many things that come first on my TV bucket list – and that’s before I even get into the favourites I’d like to revisit – if the streaming services of my choice haven’t taken them off their catalogue and erased out of existence, that is. Same with, say, Miami Vice, or Absolutely Fabulous or (don’t tell Alan) Randall and Hopkins (Deceased). And, to be honest, one main reason is that people talked about them with a great sense of reverence – or they don’t talk about them at all. They’re cult TV – and that’s something that tends to make me hesitate.

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Criterion Corner: Le silence de la mer (#755)

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There are many kinds of resistance. The one that’s perhaps most familiar to us – more so from the cinema screen than from personal experience, most likely – is that of taking up arms against the oppressor. The French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville made a number of films in which the French Résistance and its fight against the occupying German army featured, most famously perhaps Army of Shadows (which may come up more prominently in a future post), and as one might expect, the film depicts a heroic (if bleak) armed struggle.

While the setting is a similar one – the Second World War, occupied France -, the resistance of Le silence de la mer (The Silence of the Sea) is of a very different kind; as is, arguably, the characters’ struggle with each other and with themselves.

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In France, they call it le Fleabag: Léon Morin, Priest (1961)

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She’s in her 30s. She’s smart, savvy – and perhaps a little too proud of her critical abilities. She’s an atheist, and when she enters a church and sees the confessionals, what she thinks of isn’t faith or confession, she thinks of how she can challenge the curates. So she talks to the young, sexy priest, seeing if she can shake his faith – and the conversation that develops with them, over several meetings, is as much about belief and ethics as it is an extended flirtation. She is drawn to him, and while he doesn’t say so, his actions suggest that the attraction isn’t one-sided. What exactly is he trying to convert her to – and what is she trying to convert him to? And where can this ongoing, and increasingly erotic, duel of wits lead?

The young woman is Barny (played by Emmanuelle Riva, icon of French arthouse cinema), and the sexy priest (Jean-Paul Belmondo, just one year after Breathless) is the title character Léon Morin. But even considering how much of a cliché the constellation is – a sexy priest, an attractive young woman -, it is difficult not to think of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s modern classic Fleabag.

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