Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Hollywood, the Dream Factory – it is actually quite silly, and none are more silly than Hollywood superstars. Drop them in the real world on their own, without their entourage, and they wouldn’t survive five minutes. They’re shallow, self-centred and vain, they barely have a personality of their own, which is probably why they choose acting in the first place. But then, they bring joy to all our lives, so all is forgiven. We love you, Hollywood superstar!
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.
Everyone knows Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. How many who just know Agatha Christie from the film and TV versions have ever heard of Endless Night, the 1972 mystery featuring Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett, Britt Ekland and George Sanders? Perhaps this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees by Sam will point a few people in the direction of this forgotten Christie adaptation, not least because of its score by Bernard Herrmann!
We weren’t originally going to do an espresso podcast in December, but then the timing and theme of our main episode for the month almost made it obligatory for us to replan: since our recent episode “Ozmosis” only covered Wicked, the first part of the movie adaptation of the hit musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, and not its 2025 continuation, Wicked: For Good, we are hereby remedying this. Join Matt and Sam as they take a trip to the Emerald City to talk about part 2 of this revisionist take on L. Frank Baum’s classic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Did they find the film a worthy follow-up to the 2024 hit? Are Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande still as effective as Elphaba and Glinda? Do the new songs live up to the best numbers of either part? And just how does The Wizard of Oz fit into Wicked? Follow us down the Yellow Brick Road for this concluding conversation in our final espresso of the year.
Continue readingWelcome 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!
Waves crash against anonymous moonlit rocks while the credits promise an eclectic mix of British and international talent: it’s Hayley Mills and Hywell Bennet (fresh off 1968‘s Twisted Nerve), Swedish actor/director Per Oscarsson (from 1966’s Hunger) and fellow countrywoman Britt Ekland (between her Peter Sellers and Rod Stewart relationships and soon to be Bond Girl). There’s eternal Miss Moneypenny Lois Maxwell and All About Eve‘s George Sanders, and it’s directed by Sidney Gilliat (author/producer of Hitchcock’s early British films) and, unmistakeably, scored by Bernard Herrmann – its ondulating, dramatic main theme reminiscent of the perturbing romanticism of Vertigo and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Have I gone to cinematic heaven? How could I have missed a film like this one, the 1972 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s late novel Endless Night?!
Continue readingJoin 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 ongoing chain of associations, Six Damn Fine Degrees, arrives in 1989, with Julie’s entry on the BBC mystery series Campion, starring Peter Davison (who’s also played various kinds of doctors, and Doctors, throughout his career) and Brian Glover (who, among other performances, provided a particularly memorable death scene in Alien 3). And, unexpectedly, there’s even a trailer for it!
Arguably, the big event movie of this year’s holiday season is Wicked: For Good, the second part to last year’s hit film Wicked. (Sorry, Avatar fans, but that’s just how it is.) Most people loved the first instalment adapting the stage musical, which in turn adapted Gregory Maguire’s 1995 revisionist take on L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wizard of Oz and especially its iconic 1939 reincarnation as iconic Technicolor musical fantasy.
At the time this podcast was recorded, Wicked: For Good was just about to be released, prompting Sam, Alan and Julie to talk about the 2024 blockbuster and to revisit the Judy Garland classic. How does The Wizard of Oz stand up, and what does our trio think of the first Wicked film?
P.S.: Since we can do what Hollywood does as well, it is just about possible that we’ve split our discussion of Wicked into two separate podcasts. Watch out for the forthcoming December espresso, for good or for bad!
Continue readingJoin 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 only rarely that we get to show off the fact that one of our baristas is a Doctor Who fan of many, and I mean many, years. This week offered one such opportunity, as Alan got to talk about season 23 of the original run of Doctor Who, also known as “The Trial of a Time Lord”.
Most people, when asked to think about spy movies, will think of James Bond, of Sean Connery or Roger Moore or Daniel Craig. They’ll think of shootouts and stealth and suave secret agents bedding exotic beauties.
The novels of John Le Carré, inspired and informed by Le Carré’s own work for both MI5 and MI6 in the mid-20th century, are as far from James Bond as one could imagine – though it is just about possible to bend them into something more Bond-like in the name of entertainment, as happened for instance with the TV adaptation of The Night Manager that was released in 2015. As written, Le Carré’s stories are often less thrillers, though they can be thrilling, than tragedies, infused with existentialism, paranoia and a Kafkaesque sense of inevitability. And these are rarely as much in evidence as they are in Martin Ritt’s 1965 adaptation of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.
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 this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Sam stopped by to check out the storied, colourful career of Roger Corman: producer, director, writer, actor, and the man who boosted the careers of the likes of Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante and James Cameron.
Murder, memory, sharks. Two-faced cats. Corpses left to rot. Disembodied legs cleaning up the seedy underbelly of Recife, one well-placed kick at a time. The story may just be reactionary and homophobic – but hey, the hairy leg sells newspapers! Want to hear another story?
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 