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’s a trivia question for you: which actor and director, who famously ended up working together, supposedly shared a boarding house in Munich?
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’s Six Damn Fine Degrees took a well-deserved break from its recent Werner Herzog fixation in order to reminisce about the Swiss chapter of A Damn Fine Cup’s film quiz successes over the years. (And we were so close with the title of the tenth Fast & Furious film, we just got the wrong one of the two available adjectives…)
Another year, another opportunity to give some films we didn’t particularly like another opportunity. Was it the films? Was it us? Was it just the wrong time to watch these? For this year’s movie revisit, Sam and Matt talk about two musicals that, at a first glance, couldn’t be much more different: Richard Attenborough’s 1985 adaptation of A Chorus Line and Nordic provocateur Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. What is the result of our return to these musicals? Did we come away with a new appreciation of Michael Douglas’ foray into musicals (and then he doesn’t even get to sing!), and did things finally fall into place when we rewatched the musical melodrama led by Icelandic multitalent Björk?
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!
There is something intensely likeable about movie quizzes. If you know the answer, you feel really quite smug: Yes, I’ve seen the movie, and I know a whole lot about that film – it was even produced by someone you wouldn’t expect. You get that warm, fuzzy feeling in your stomach because you’ve scored a point, while a lot of the others didn’t, you can tell from their puzzled faces, and you are inching just a tiny bit closer to the top spot. And on the other hand, if you don’t know the answer, you go into instant detective mode: I should know the answer, now how can I deduce that from the other movie that very same director has made just before this one? Hmmm… You rack your brain about a name, and then, with your last ounce of with and memory, you may just come up with the right answer. Most of the time, anyway.
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.
What better way to start the end-of-the-week post than with that most loveable of odd couples, Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski? Definitely the guys you want to have with you if you need to build an opera house in the Amazon. Make sure not to miss Alan’s Six Damn Fine Degrees post on Fitzcarraldo!
Just like Fellini used to be a big gap in my filmography – something this series, with a little help from Criterion, is supposed to address -, I’ve not seen all that many films by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The ones I have seen are an eclectic bunch: Mamma Roma (starring a magnificent Anna Magnani), The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and the Greek tragedies: Oedipus Rex and Medea. Based on having watched these, it’s difficult for me to get much of a grip of who Pasolini was as a filmmaker – but tonally he definitely seems to be a fairly different, much more overtly political storyteller from Federico Fellini.
Which makes Nights of Cabiria, on which Fellini collaborated with Pasolini, an interesting blend of the two men’s styles and preoccupations. The role of Pasolini, who was one of altogether four co-writers, was to help with the dialogue of the 1950s Roman demimonde of pimps, prostitutes and their tricks, giving it more authenticity. The world of Nights of Cabiria doesn’t actually seem all that far removed from that of Mamma Roma, who, like Cabiria, is a sex worker dreaming of a different life. However, while the director and his writers evoke a believable world that is earthy, that lives and breathes, this world isn’t what defines the film the most, instead providing a background to the central performance. As in La Strada before it, the star of the show is undoubtedly Giulietta Masina – who may be even better as Cabiria than she was as Gelsomina.
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.
One of the curiosities about the filmography of Werner Herzog is that it contains his own little two-film micro-genre – “fanatical madman played by Klaus Kinski goes up the Amazon to the music of Popol Vuh.” His first foray is 1972’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, which is quite possibly one of my favourite films of all times. So when I came to Fitzcarraldo, the other of the two films, I was both excited and filled with trepidation. Would it meet the earlier film’s dizzying heights?
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 that time when two films about volcanos came out practically at the same time? No, not those two films – we’re talking about the two documentaries made about the volcanologist couple Katia and Maurice Krafft that came out in 2022, Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love and Werner Herzog’s The Fire Within.
For our first espresso podcast episode in 2024, Julie and Sam sit down together over a virtual coffee to talk about the Austrian director G.W. Pabst (1885 – 1967). Taking Pabst’s silent film classic Pandora’s Box (1929, adapted from Frank Wedekind’s play Lulu) as a starting point, the two discuss the director’s career as a filmmaker during the Weimar Republic, his emigration from but later return to Nazi Germany, and his filmmaking under the Nazi regime and the auspices of the Ministry of Propaganda led by Josef Goebbels, but also the recent novel Lichtspiel, a fictionalised biography of Pabst, written by Daniel Kehlmann. How does a filmmaker go from making progressive, formally daring and even scandalous cinema criticising the society of its day to becoming an accomplice to the propaganda machinery of the Third Reich?
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.
It’s a story made for the movies, isn’t it? Two oddballs meet and fall in love with each other – and with volcanoes. They become documentary filmmakers and travel the world, capturing the awe-inspiring power and beauty of volcanoes on camera… until, twenty years later, they die together in an eruption. Perhaps not the happiest ending to a love story, but one so fitting it could have been penned by a screenwriter.
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