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!
We’ve been talking about it for years, and now it’s finally happening: we are dedicating an episode of our Damn Fine podcast to the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – with a special slant. In our May episode, Matt and Alan look at three of the duo’s films that arguably were all made to be propaganda: 49th Parallel (1941), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and A Canterbury Tale (1944) were all made during the Second World War, and they all have a purpose and elements that can be described as propagandistic: to persuade the audience, at a time of national crisis, of a certain mindset or course of action. And at the same time, these films very much bear the hallmarks of Powell and Pressburger’s work: they are whimsical, inventive, humorous, earnest, and cinematically adventurous, playing with the audience’s expectations. (For instance: who would expect a precursor of 2001‘s famous time jump from prehistoric times to the Space Age in a whimsical tale set in rural Kent?) Join our baristas as they discuss what makes propaganda, and how Powell and Pressburger – a born Brit and an immigrant who made England his chosen home – put their own spin on the format.
P.S.: For listeners interested in the topic of cinema and propaganda, check out our episode from last year’s summer series on propaganda feature films from the Third Reich: Lost Summer – Films from the Poison Cabinet.
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.
Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good?And why did it win?
It seems fitting that the first Academy Award for a Sound Picture should go to a musical. The arrival of the Talking Picture had caused all sorts of chaos in Hollywood as it struggled to get to grips with the new technology. However filling the Big Screen with songs was an immediate winner when it came to using the Modern Day Marvel That Is Sound™
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.
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!
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 saw the start of a new series called One Best Picture After Another: Alan’s revisiting every single Best Picture Academy Award winner! Yes, you’ve read that right: over the coming months and even years, he will be watching, and writing about, each film that won the Oscar for Best Picture, and on Monday he started with the 1927 winner Wings. Sadly, this trailer isn’t the original – were there even trailers back then? -, but it’ll give a good idea of what Wings is all about.
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.
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.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 