Movies – Page 15 – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

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

Feb 28, 2025Mar 7, 2025Alan Kuhl Graham3 Comments

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!

Feb 23, 2025Feb 23, 2025The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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)

Feb 22, 2025Feb 22, 2025Matt2 Comments

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!

Feb 16, 2025Feb 16, 2025The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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 16^th 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

Feb 15, 2025Feb 16, 2025The Barista Collective1 Comment

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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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck

Feb 10, 2025The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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.

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Criterion Corner: The Elephant Man (#1051)

Feb 8, 2025Feb 7, 2025Matt1 Comment

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 19^th 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?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Walk the line

Feb 2, 2025Feb 2, 2025MattLeave a comment

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.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #89: Second Chances (feat. Shirley MacLaine)

Feb 1, 2025Feb 2, 2025The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The ball goes into the hole

Jan 26, 2025Jan 26, 2025MattLeave a comment

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.