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.
There are few cartoon shorts better than the Merrie Melodies classic Duck Amuck – which is why Matt dedicated this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees to it.
Was The Elephant Man (1980), David Lynch’s follow-up to his first feature Eraserhead, my first Lynch? I’m not sure: it’s possible that I saw Twin Peaks first, at least the first half or so of the series, in a German dub, or perhaps I caught Blue Velvet on television late one night. It is even possible that I watched Eraserhead first and am repressing that traumatic memory. But The Elephant Man is often brought up as a good way to get started on Lynch: it tells a fairly straight-forward story, one that is based (albeit loosely) on the life of Joseph Merrick, a man suffering from severe deformities who lived in late 19th century London. You can see what would have drawn Lynch to the material, but the resulting film does not have the expressedly avant-garde edge of Eraserhead or of many of his later works. Aside from The Straight Story, it’s probably the film by Lynch that I would recommend first to people who haven’t seen anything else by him, unless I knew that they were into surrealist art.
But does that make The Elephant Man less Lynch, somehow?
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, Sam reminisced about the animated line art of his childhood – or, more precisely, he wrote about his memories of the Italian cartoon La Linea, which featured a little man made up of a single line and his ongoing fight against the vicissitudes of life… and the whims of his animator. No trailer this time; instead you’re getting an entire La Linea cartoon (and the accompanying doo-bee-doo 1970s soundtrack), courtesy of YouTube.
It’s that time of the year again, when we look at films we didn’t enjoy originally and give them another chance. This time it’s Sam and Alan having another look at movies they’d previously bounced off of, and both films feature Shirley MacLaine: Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) (yes, Alan hasn’t been a big fan of the film to date!) and MacLaine’s first film, The Trouble with Harry (1955), her first feature appearance and one of the movies generally considered to be lesser Hitchcock. Will our intrepid two come away with a new appreciation of these films, or will their original opinions be reinforced?
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.
This week, Alan contributed to our ongoing Six Damn Fine Degrees series with his look back at accidentally discovering the ’90s Italian comedy Volere Volare. Sadly, it’s as difficult to find a trailer for the film as it is to find the film itself, so here’s a short sequence (in Italian) that’s a nice illustration of how Volere Volare blends live-action film and animation.
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 young, in distant, far-off days when television in the UK was limited to just four channels, you could sometimes find yourself idly watching the box when a genuine oddity would come up. Nothing you would actually have ever thought about watching, but it was on and, before you knew it, BANG, you were hooked.
Continue readingSomehow, losing David Lynch hits harder, not only because of his art, which is often beautiful and disturbing in equal measure, but also because of who Lynch seems to have been: a kind, strange, generous soul, as an artist and as a human being. As anyone looking at our front page and at the name of our site will be able to tell: Lynch had an impact on us, and his absence will be felt.
We’ll dedicate most of this week’s trailer post to the weird, frightening, wonderful worlds of David Lynch, but first, let’s have a look at what we did this week.
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Sometimes they come back: in late 2024, Robert Eggers broke with his series of films titled “The” followed by a proper noun with the release of his remake of Nosferatu. Following F.W. Murnau’s 1922 version, a rip-off of Dracula so good that it took on a life (or should that be undeath?) of its own, and the 1979 remake by living legend Werner Herzog, Eggers’ Nosferatu calls back to the earlier versions while putting its own spin on the material. Join Alan and Matt for their discussion of the film: What does Eggers’ Nosferatu bring to the table? How does it compare to other versions of Nosferatu and of Dracula? What are the film’s greatest strengths, and where does it perhaps falter? And where do Matt and Alan stand on big bushy moustaches?
For more talk of the undead, make sure to check out our episode “Three Draculas” from October 2023, in which Julie, Sam and Matt talk about Murnau’s Nosferatu as well as the 1958 and 1992 versions of Dracula.
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!
Although I try to avoid plot spoilers, for those who have never seen L.A. Confidential: skip this article and see the film first. It’s worth it, and inevitably there will be minor spoilers ahead.
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.
Remember this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees instalment, or have you already forgotten it? Continuing from the theme of revenge of the previous week, Matt looks back at the first film by Christopher Nolan he saw, Memento – which, while not perfect, is still his favourite movie by the director.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 