The year is almost at its 2/3 mark, so this is us getting in a few more shortcuts before we enter that final third, which always tends to accelerate more and more quickly until we blink twice and it’s already Christmas… Here are some thoughts on what we’ve been watching and reading recently.
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.
Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’: in his series on the Academy Awards Best Picture winners, Alan has arrived at 1937’s The Life of Emile Zola.
Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?
6/10
A surprising number of Best Picture winning films can be described as “Truly Forgotten”. For all their success at the time, they have left no cultural trace. They don’t get shown again in retro cinemas, nor do they get fancy extras-laden 4K Criterion releases.
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.
It’s been a while, but Matt has been at the Criterion cabinet again – watching all 14 episodes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.
In the August instalment of our Summer of Genre, we talked about that most ’70s of genres: the disaster movie. But the genre didn’t vanish after its heyday following the release of Airport in 1970: especially in the 1990s, as CGI made it possible to put bigger, badder, more destructive disasters on the screen, we got tornadoes, volcanoes, asteroids, often in double, as with Dante’s Peak and Volcano or Deep Impact and Armageddon. The biggest, most successful disaster movie of the era, however, was James Cameron’s epic Titanic, which combined the historical disaster with a love story between teen heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who three years earlier had burst onto the scene with Heavenly Creatures and was well on her way to becoming a superstar. Titanic was at risk of becoming a disaster itself, but when it finally was released in late 1997, it became not just the highest-grossing film of the year but indeed the highest-grossing film of all time – until Cameron’s next film, Avatar. Join Sam and Julie for our August espresso as they sneak aboard that grand, doomed ocean liner. Did Titanic save the disaster movie genre, or did it sink it for good? And how well does Cameron’s blockbuster hold up almost thirty years after it originally came out?
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.
In Alan’s countdown of Academy Award Best Picture winners from the very beginning of the Oscars, he’s arrived in 1936 with The Great Ziegfeld. The film stars William Powell, so Alan’s bound to love it. Right?
Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?
6/10
When I first looked through the complete list of films that I’d be watching for this exercise, one of the titles that stood out was The Great Ziegfeld. There was one reason for this – William Powell. He plays the lead in this film and I’m a huge fan of his. Yet despite being someone who long ago fell for the man’s charms, I’d never watched this particular film. Mainly because, unlike the likes of My Man Godfrey, How To Marry A Millionaire and especially The Thin Man, it’s not a film of his that gets remembered and rescreened alongside those classics. Even among dedicated Powell-istas (Powell-ites? Powell-ians?) its reputation is that of a bit of a dud.
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.
Earlier this week, the singer-songwriter and actor Glen Hansard died after a motorcycle crash. You could do worse than to rewatch (or watch for the first time) Once in his memory.
When it comes to genre, there is one especially that is instantly recognisable. The moment someone says, “This ship cannot sink/this building cannot burn/this plane cannot crash!”, you know you’re in a disaster movie. The genre flourished for a brief period in the 1970s, but it never reached those heights again: even if there is the occasional disaster movie these days, it doesn’t have the draw of the classics of the genre, and it certainly doesn’t have the same kind of cross-generational star power that seems right out of a ’70s Agatha Christie film. In the third episode of our Summer of Genre, Sam, Matt and Alan look at three undisputed classics of disaster movies: Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). How do these films hold up more than 50 years later? What made the genre tick, and why was it such a staple of Hollywood cinema in the ’70s? Why was its reign so brief? And what place has big-screen disaster in today’s movie landscape?
P.S.: For more on disaster movies, make sure to check out Sam’s Six Damn Degrees post on “Pandemic and Disaster in The Cassandra Crossing”!
Continue readingWe’re almost at the end of July, which for many of our readers (if the WordPress stats are to be believed) means that they’re at the height of summer – and what better way to escape the summer heat than to plonk down in the dark with a good film or book or game? That is, if we have any good films or books or games to recommend…
