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!
~ Here be spoilers.
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 saw the first Six Damn Fine Degrees post by a new contributor: Doctor John Smith (now why does that name ring a bell?) wrote about movie vampires and their ties to the aristocracy and to capitalism. After all, they do like to bleed us dry, don’t they?
Is Roma a sort of stealth sequel to Fellini’s previous film, Satyricon? It can certainly be seen as such: like the film Fellini made three years earlier, it is a sprawling tapestry that is focused less on telling a coherent plot than on moving from episode to episode and from setpiece to setpiece. Where Satyricon depicted, and satirised, ancient Rome, the city’s story is taken into the more recent past and even the present in Roma, making the two films a sort of History of Rome, Parts I & II. But where the earlier film was based on the writings of Petronius, Roma‘s angle is decidedly subjective.
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!
I’ve been thinking a lot about vampires recently.
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.
We spent much of this week on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture looking back by many, many decades, starting with Alan’s ruminations on Howard Hawks’ screwball comedy Ball of Fire and the ways its cast of characters would lend itself to spin-offs.
For this year’s summer series, A Damn Fine Cup of Culture focused on remakes, from men who knew too much and trucks bearing explosive goods to planets that create their own remakes and finally to stars being born and dying. But these are the obvious remakes (whatever their directors might say, depending on which day of the week it is): what about iconic films – that almost no one knows to be remakes? In this episode, Julie and Alan get together to talk about two films that are infinitely more famous than the originals that preceded them: Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Maltese Falcon (1941). Why do these films escape the frequent criticism of remakes: that originality is dead and that Hollywood only knows how to repeat itself? How do the originals compare to the more iconic later films? And what’s the key to making a remake that will eclipse the film(s) that came before?
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!
1941’s Ball Of Fire is an absolute gem of a film. Powered by a whip-smart script from Billy Wilder, it tells the story of fusty linguistics Professor Potts (Gary Cooper) falling for the quick-talking Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck at her very. very best) as he conducts his own research into slang. It’s a romance that encompasses all the essentials for a great screwball comedy – sassy innuendo, comic misunderstandings, a brilliant ensemble cast, the thrill of crime and, of course, the slow, academic research required in the compilation of Encyclopaedias.
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.
We all love a good Agatha Christie yarn here at A Damn Fine Cup – but they’re not all cosy and twee. There’s plenty of Christie beyond Death on the Nile and Murder, She Said, and in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Matt writes about the darker sides of cosy crime.
The Cinema REX in Bern, my favourite cinema, and indeed the best cinema in Bern/Switzerland/Europe/the world, shows new releases, mostly independent films or world cinema – but that’s not why they’re my favourite: it’s their curated programme. More or less every month, they’ve got a programme focusing on a theme, genre, country or filmmaker – in parallel to which they will also be running other, longer-term series, e.g. on film history or LGBTQI+ cinema or kids’ movies. Thanks to the REX I’ve seen classics on the big screen that otherwise I might not have had the chance to see at an actual cinema, from Apocalypse Now to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, from North by Northwest to Fanny and Alexander. The other movie theatres in the city that have survived the Great Cinema Purges of recent years also offer curated programmes, such as a series on Cult Movies and Worst Movies, but none are focused as much on providing a curated programme.
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!
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Agatha Christie, her stories and her characters. Somehow, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot have always been around, much like modern mythology. Settings such as the manor house, scenes where a sleuth has assembled all the suspects and lays out all the clues, feckless local law enforcement: I knew all of these – without ever having read a single one of Christie’s novels or short stories or having seen any of the numerous adaptations. Again, I was aware of Margaret Rutherford in black-and-white movies and of Peter Ustinov in glamorous locales, sporting a silly moustache and a sillier accent. But the actual thing passed me by for the longest time.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 