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, on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, Matt wrote about what happens when three girls vanish during a school outing, in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: pupils from a girls’ school in Australia go on an outing to a nearby geological formation. Some of the girls go to explore the area – and disappear. One turns up later, with no memories of what happened. The others remain gone. No traces are found, no blood, no bodies. Nothing.
The mystery is never solved. And it is this, not knowing what happened, that begins to corrode the lives of those left behind.
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.
One of the filmmakers we, like so many cinephiles, keep circling back to is Alfred Hitchcock – most recently in our latest Six Damn Fine Degrees, in which Sam wrote about his love for Rear Window.
Imagine not only being a cinephile, and not only writing and talking about film – but doing this professionally: being a film critic is something many of us in the blogosphere dream of. Meet Alan Mattli: Alan is not only teaching and doing research into literature and film at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, he is also a reviewer for the German-language Swiss film and TV platform Maximum Cinema and (Swiss German) the Maximum Cinema podcast. While his reviews at Maximum Cinema and on his website Facing the Bitter Truth (which he launched in 2008, while still at school), and while much of his writing at these sites is in German, you can find his writing in English on Letterboxd. In our August espresso podcast, Matt talks to Alan about his way to becoming a film critic, whether he watches films differently as a critic, and how film criticism has changed in recent years.
P.S.: Here’s a list of Alan’s favourite current film critics:
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!
As Alan describes so well in last week’s post on seeing Memories of Murder as his perfect post-pandemic return to the cinema, the question about what we love most about movies can reveal itself within just one such film: a fantastically involving plot, equal levels of suspense and amusement, inspiring visuals and soundscapes, carefully fleshed-out characters and themes, as well as a totally satisfying ending. With a different film at hand, I just felt the same again with Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the film I always describe as probably the best cinematic experience ever made.
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 on Six Damn Fine Degrees, Alan reminisced on Memories of Murder – though since we featured the trailer not too long ago, here’s something else instead: Tony Zhao’s “Every Frame a Painting” video essay on Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece.
We’re back, several months after 8 1/2 (sorry!), with a film that I find frustrating and confounding – and yet I’m difficult to shake it off: Juliet of the Spirits. Two years after Fellini’s last film, and after two movies in which Marcello Mastroianni played variants (albeit more overtly attractive ones) of the director himself, Fellini cast his wife Giulietta Massina, for the first time in eight years (he’d last directed her in Nights of Cabiria) – and, in a twist on what he’d done with Mastroianni, Masina plays a character not dissimilar from herself: Giulietta Boldrini is an upper-class housewife, married to a philandering, self-centred husband, and while the details are vague but specific enough to show that the Boldrinis aren’t literally Fellini and Masina, the constellation of their marriage isn’t a hundred miles from that of the famous film-making couple.
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!
Warning: Spoilers ahead for the film Memories of Murder.
Towards the end of lockdown, when the cinema’s reopened, I have fond memories of my earliest trips to see movies. I mean, it wasn’t quite the same. At least half the seats in most cinemas had been removed to create gaps between punters. Masks were compulsory and the experience felt jarring. But there was still something about being able to see films again on the Big Screen – especially given concerns just a few months earlier that the cinemas might never reopen.
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 this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Matt wrote about films and TV series that depict real-life people, the extent to which it matters if the actors look like the individuals they’re supposed to portray – and the ways in which they sometimes get it very, very wrong.
But we want to start this trailer post with the Real McCoy (or should that be the Real McCartney?), so here goes:
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel, is classic sci-fi cinema: as can be expected of a film by Tarkovsky, it is intriguing, hypnotic, at times sublime, but undoubtedly also confounding and even frustrating at times. It is a product of its time in some ways but timeless in others. Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002) is unlikely to stand the test of time to the same extent – but is it still a worthwhile take on Lem’s novel? Is it indeed a remake – and, if so, is it a meaningful, worthwhile one, or is it an uncanny replica of the original material, much like the revenants that Lem’s mysterious planet produces, possibly in an attempt to communicate with humanity? Join Matt, Alan and Sam for the third episode in our Summer of Remakes, as they discuss these two films and their takes on both. How do they compare, in their approaches to Lem’s story, and in how successful those approaches are in creating a memorable film?
For another take on the films of Steven Soderbergh, make sure to check out our 2020 episode (featuring Dan Thron of Martini Giant): A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #35: Soderbergh’s Schizopolis, Schizopolis’ Soderbergh
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