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.
In 1982, while England was whipped into a frenzy of nationalism by a wedding that, in hindsight, didn’t seem to benefit any of the parties involved, our Alan was taken to see Richard Attenborough’s Academy Award-winning Gandhi and got a glimpse of the ways that the British Empire wasn’t perhaps all it was cracked up to be.
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.
Every now and then I’m amazed at how pop culture doesn’t actually require you to have seen, read, heard or played something for you to have, or at least think you have, a fairly clear idea what it is. I’m sure I’ve seen snippets of versions of Alexandre Dumas’ Musketeers stories, but I don’t think I’d seen an entire Musketeers film – let alone watched a series or read any of the original novels – until a few weeks ago. (Not even Douglas Fairbanks’ silent-era original.) Nonetheless, I had quite a concrete image in my head: four friends in dashing 17th century outfits, wielding swords (but not muskets – go figure) and getting into swashbuckling adventures, rescuing damsels and foiling the wicked plans of scheming authority figures.
What I didn’t expect: that the three Musketeers (feat. D’Artagnan) would basically turn out to be The Beatles from A Hard Day’s Night… in dashing 17th century outfits, wielding swords (but not muskets – go figure) and getting into swashbuckling adventures, rescuing damsels and foiling the wicked plans of scheming authority figures.
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!
In the autumn of 2009, my mother was in the last few months of her fight against cancer. In fact, she’d battled more than one cancer throughout her life, and even when she was doing well, the knowledge of how it had affected her life and the fear of its return, at some point, in some shape, was always with her. Earlier in 2009, an episode had revealed that one of the tumors had returned and metastasized, making it clear, if not to her then to most of her family members, that this would be her last fight, and it was just a matter of time until she lost it.
My father, who had retired early (not entirely of his own volition), looked after her while she was still at home, before her final stay at hospital. They’d not always been very happy together, but they had seemed to find a way of being kind with each other during the last couple of years they were both alive. But there was a weekend when my dad said he wouldn’t be around – I don’t remember the details, but I assume he needed a break, as anyone would. So my sister and I split the weekend between ourselves, and I looked after my mum for the first part of it. This meant that I prepared dinner for the two of us – pasta, predictably – and, just as predictably, I brought along a film we could both watch together. The film: The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, in which Geoffrey Rush played the iconic English comedian and actor.
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.
If anyone had told me a few years ago that not only would a Star Wars story open itself up to comparisons with the likes of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, it would bear up to these comparisons, I would have dismissed it as hyperbolic fanboy self-importance. Star Wars is Star Wars, a pop-culture blend of samurai film, westerns, war movies and sci-fi serials. Does it need to make itself look important? Relevant? Is that the measure of its worth?
Now, after Andor has run its course, I’m a convert. Not only can Star Wars be about something: it can do so while remaining essentially Star Wars.
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.
Straight from Little Rock, this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees has Julie talk about what she had instead of Disney princesses: Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei and Jane Russell’s Dorothy.
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 the films we watch as children affect our taste as adults? And what if we don’t really watch children’s films when we’re growing up, but instead our parents take us to see Amadeus or The Last Emperor? Matt has a thought or two on these questions.
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.
There are a number of films that have been immensely influential on video games. Their thumbprints can be found all over gaming. An obvious example of this is Aliens; even beyond actual adaptations of the IP, you find the trope of space marines fighting insectoid xeno creepy-crawlies on hostile planets again and again – and sometimes, ironically, it’s the literal, licensed Aliens spin-offs that are among the games worst at replicating the Aliens playbook, more so than the games that are basically Aliens with the registration number filed off.
Another one of the clear inspirations for many games are the Indiana Jones films. It’s a perfect match, really: Indy makes for an appealing character type that gamers would want to play, there’s the appeal of mysterious legends and foreboding ruins, and the films are even structured in ways that lend themselves to being translated into the gaming medium: find artefact A, which opens door B, behind which there’s puzzle C, and so on, leading to legendary MacGuffin Z. Cue end credits.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 