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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Julie‘s lucid case for All About Eveover Sunset Boulevard as the ultimate satire on Hollywood stardom reminded me that beside these classic companion pieces, there is a third: a bookend, so to speak, a swan song: Fedora (1978), Billy Wilder‘s last truly big-budget film, a film so maligned and obscured, it took me years to come by it and begin to appreciate it as the wonderful gem that it is.
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.
Let’s change our usual approach to Trailer Sundays and start with new trailers – because we’ve got one here that’s close to our hearts.
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:
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 post, Matt argued that sometimes the past haunting us isn’t a Native American burial site under the floorboards of our suburban home, but just the first version we saw when we were young, to the point where, for us, it’s the ‘correct’ version: such as Blade Runner with the voiceover that Harrison Form famously hated, or Poltergeist without the scene where a terrified parapsychologist pulls off his face with his bare hands.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 