Movies

Six Damn Fine Degrees #192: Star 80

Alan Kuhl Graham1 Comment

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.

In the early ’80s, Bob Fosse’s stock as a film maker couldn’t have been higher. Having revolutionised the world of theatrical dance choreography, he’d spent the ’70s building up a reputation as a major new directing talent. Cabaret and Lenny had been well regarded successes, and he’d ended the decade with All That Jazz – winning the Palme D’Or and four Oscars alongside healthy box office returns.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Who kills the killers?

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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, Julie wrote one of those Six Damn Fine Degrees posts that only Julie can write: a deep dive into the life and career of Natalie Wood, or at least the early years. If you have any interest in the history of Hollywood, make sure to check out the post!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Very Steven Spielberg

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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.

Remember how excited people were when the first season of Stranger Things came out? And how that excitement perhaps flared up again with one or two setpieces in every season (“Running Up the Hill”! “Enter Sandman”!), but somehow it never quite captured that initial feeling that we were watching something that was both familiar and new? In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Sam argues that, just perhaps, J.J. Abrams’ Super 8 was the better Stranger Things to begin with.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #190: The Better Stranger Things

samlinder2 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.

Reading Mege’s critical reappreciation of all Stranger Things from last week, I became aware of how much I had loved that show’s first season. It not only made me a first-time Netflix subscriber but also truly excited me and my friends, leading to numerous binge parties with all the hairs on our necks standing up for most of it. I found the little-boy-lost storyline heartbreaking, the unfolding monstrosities riveting and the bond between the group of friends heartwarming. The ’80s references seemed loving but not overdone and the show came to an almost perfect conclusion.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: French bombshells

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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.

Can you believe that it’s been eight years since Stranger Things premiered? And that it’ll only actually end (if it does) in 2025? Let this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees take you back to the time when Stranger Things was something to be excited about.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #82: Summer of Remakes – Wages of Fear and Sorcerer

The Barista Collective3 Comments

Our Summer of Remakes podcast series continues with its second episode: after June’s Hitchcock double bill, we’re changing country (at least once) but staying with thrills and suspense. Imagine being stuck in a dead-end town, together with other men with murky pasts and little to lose, and with little hope of ever making it out – and now imagine a big corporation offering you a ticket out of there. The only catch? You have to drive a truck loaded with volatile nitroglycerin over treacherous dirt roads. Simple as that. This is the story of Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel Le Salaire de la peur, and to date it has been turned into two memorable films: The Wages of Fear (1953) by Henri-Georges Clouzot, starring Yves Montand, and Sorcerer (1977), directed by William Friedkin and starring Roy Scheider. Join Alan, Julie and Matt as they discuss these two versions of the story. Where do the original and the remake (though Friedkin did sometimes deny that Sorcerer was one indeed) make the same or similar choices? Where do they diverge? And to what effect?

For more on the films of William Friedkin, check out our 2023 Halloween episode on The Exorcist (feat. the one and only Daniel Thron), recorded shortly after Friedkin’s death.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Four Samurai and a Vampire

The 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.

In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees post, Julie wrote about the photographer Peter Lindbergh and what his work meant to her. So, instead of a trailer, here’s a tribute video that was made when he died in 2019.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Come for the cheese, stay for the xenomorphs

The 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.

In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Sam wrote about the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyère, an incongruous celebration of Giger’s sex-and-biomechanics aesthetic in a cosy mountain towns in Switzerland – and since everyone defaults to Alien when it comes to Giger, let’s for once feature two trailers to films that the Swiss artist contributed to that are perhaps a tad less celebrated.

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Criterion Corner: Still Walking (#554)

Matt3 Comments

Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Still Walking was the second or third film by the Japanese director that I watched, after After Life and probably Nobody Knows. In some ways, I now recognise it as a more typical film for Kore-eda than After Life, in terms of its themes and character constellations. Where the earlier film undoubtedly has the feel and emotional heft that I’ve come to recognise as typical of a Kore-eda film, it is much more high-concept in terms of its premise and plot. More than that, though, when I think of Kore-eda, it‘s his families, both biological and found, that come to mind, and where family isn‘t as obviously a theme of After Life, Still Walking is very much about this: the families we find ourselves saddled with, the ones we make for ourselves.

But family isn‘t just about the people we have in our lives, it is also about those we have lost. Still Walking is focused on a theme that is central to many of the director‘s films: considering the kindness and warmth that are perhaps the most apparent characteristic of Kore-eda‘s films at a first glance, it is striking how many of them are in no small part about death.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #187: The Alien in the High Castle

samlinder3 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.

Inspired by Alan’s Scavengers Reign review in last week’s post, and his observation that the series looks as if Swiss Alien designer HR Giger had joined Studio Ghibli in the 1980s, I decided to follow the trail that Giger left behind since his untimely death ten years ago in his and my home country. It quickly turned out that the mothership of his creations these days is, fittingly, a museum in eerie Medieval castle St. Germain high on top of Gruyères, home of one of Switzerland’s most famous cheeses.

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