Movies

Six Damn Fine Degrees #225: Heidi, you’re not in Switzerland anymore!

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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!

Growing up in Switzerland, everyone is of course hyper-aware of its uber-famous orphan story Heidi, Johanna Spyri’s 1880 novel about an alpine transplant who performs miracles on grumps, frumps and wheelchair-bound aristocrats. Needless to say that even much before the iconic 1974 Japanese animé adaptation so poignantly remembered in Matt’s last post, Heidi had become a global ambassador for idealised images of our country and had spawned a wide range of stage, film and TV adaptations. And despite Switzerland’s best efforts, the most interesting versions were contributed by other countries and cultures, and I don’t just mean Japan.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Domo arigato, Swiss Miss

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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.

What’s the kids’ TV we grew up with? For Matt, who grew up in Switzerland, it was a surprising number of TV series based on European children’s books but made in Japan. (Okay, this is not a trailer so much as it is the title sequence of Heidi, Girl of the Alps in the Japanese original, I know, but what can you do.)

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Criterion Corner: Something Wild (#563)

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a conventional yuppie who, if you look at him from the right angle, reveals a streak of disaffection with his life bumps into a free-spirited young woman. She introduces him to the wild side of life, and they embark on a whirlwind romance. All together now: can you say “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”?

If you rolled your eyes at this, rest assured: that was pretty much my first reaction to Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild – so much so that after about half an hour I ejected the Blu-ray and watched something else instead. For those first 20-30 minutes, I felt more and more that I really didn’t need yet another take on that particular well-worn cliché. Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels) and Lulu (Melanie Griffith), as she calls herself to begin with, weren’t endearing to me: I found them and their idea of what breaking free from convention looked like grating. It’s one thing to watch teenagers who believe they’re the first ever to break free from the bonds of social mores; it’s quite another to watch two supposedly grown-up people behaving like those teenagers. There’s something to it that is smug and self-satisfied and, frankly, a bit boring.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: What’s in the envelope?

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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 a franchise that has had eleven films so far, you’d think the movies would be good, wouldn’t you? Well, Alan’s gone and watched the entire Pink Panther series of films, and he’s not a fan. Check out his good reasons to be grateful that he took this particular hit for the team!

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #90: And the Oscar goes to…

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This Sunday, the 97th instalment of the Academy Awards, more commonly known as the Oscars, will be awarded in Hollywood. In keeping with the times, it has been an uncommonly heated lead-up to this year’s awards, and not everyone is a big fan of the line-up – but it is undeniably a very varied Oscars year, and the big nominees range from the controversial (Emilia Pérez) via the outlandish (body horror favourite The Substance) to the monumental (The Brutalist with its run time of over 3½ hours). Will 2025 be the kind of year where one film sweeps most of the awards, or will the Tinseltown love be spread out across musicals, biopics, dramedies, ecclesiastic thrillers and sci-fi sequels? Join Matt, Julie and Sam as they talk predictions and favourites – and make sure to tell them how wrong they were come Monday!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #223: A Pride of Pink Panthers

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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!

When I was a kid, the Pink Panther films seemed to be regulars on the television. Not quite as ubiquitous as Bond or the Carry Ons, but probably not far behind. As a result I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know of Inspector Clouseau of the Sûreté, a clumsy comedy incompetent with an amusing French parody of an accent. I even have a distinct memory of one of the films being on when I was very young, and Sellars getting attacked by his assistant Cato (Burt Kwok playing a lazy Orientalist stereotype of a martial artist a world away from the characters in Julie’s post last week). Seeing the obvious shock and distress in my face, it was patiently explained to me that Clouseau paid his assistant to attack him at random times, to make sure he was always ready. I seemed to find this incredibly reassuring.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Do the monkey!

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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.

Whether you’re a martial arts fan or not, don’t miss this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, in which Julie writes about the Hong Kong extravaganza Iron Monkey, starring Donnie Yen.

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Forever Fellini: Fellini’s Casanova (1976)

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Giacomo Casanova: a man of many talents (allegedly). Check out his Wikipedia entry – which he would have probably loved doing! – and you’ll find that he “was, by vocation and avocation, a lawyer, clergyman, military officer, violinist, con man, pimp, gourmand, dancer, businessman, diplomat, spy, politician, medic, mathematician, social philosopher, cabalist, playwright, and writer”. (Wikipedia’s “citation needed” never seemed more apt.)

Yet, ask anyone what they know about Casanova, and they’ll tell you one thing: he was the lady’s man, a playboy extraordinaire, a big hit between the sheets. No one remembers the diplomacy, the philosophy, the writing. He might as well have been little more than a walking phallus, a sex toy with aristocratic aspirations.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here!

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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 is not your ordinary Journey to the West: for this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, which fittingly coincided with Valentine’s Day, Melanie introduced us to A Korean Odyssey (or, in the original, Hwayugi), a Korean adaptation of the classic Chinese novel from the 16th century – set in the present day, and turning the story into a… modern-day fantasy rom-com?

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A Damn Fine Espresso: February 2025

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For our February espresso podcast, we’ve got a very special treat: this month, Matt and Julie talk to British writer, critic, curator and film historian Pamela Hutchinson. Pamela, a regular contributor to the Guardian and to Sight & Sound, joins us for a look at The Lady with the Torch, a selection of films that played at the Locarno Film Festival 2024 and that was recently featured (in part) at the Kino REX in Bern, Switzerland, where Pamela spoke about the films and Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat in particular. Find out more about what made Columbia Pictures special, how its co-founder and president Harry Cohn was both a terror and a boon to the studio, and how Columbia Pictures ended up offering opportunities especially to the women working there that were unheard of elsewhere – and watch out for our recommendations for the Columbia Pictures films of the era you need to see, from the biting screwball comedy of Twentieth Century (1934) to the heartbreaking darkness of In a Lonely Place (1950) and the prescient political drama of All the King’s Men (1949). Don’t miss this special treat for lovers of classic Hollywood – and a big thank you to Pamela from all of us at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture!

P.S.: As director Dorothy Arzner features in the history of Columbia Pictures and comes up in our conversation with Pamela, make sure to check out last year’s May espresso podcast for a closer look at Arzner and her films.

P.P.S.: You can find Pamela’s talk at the REX on Columbia Pictures and The Big Heat here.

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