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.
Our June espresso is a special one: differently from the vast majority of our podcast episodes, this one had Alan and Matt recording in the same room, talking into one mic – and the topic of their conversation is the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Matt’s local cinema, the REX Bern, recently showed a series of Kore-eda’s films, from his first feature Marobosi to his latest, Monster, and Matt’s been wanting to do a Kore-eda episode for a long time, so the two took this opportunity to finally fulfil that wish. Join them as they discuss what makes a Kore-eda film, which ones they like best, and (obviously) what they would choose, After Life-style, as the sole memory to be filmed and taken into the beyond.
For more on Hirokazu Kore-eda, make sure to check out these blog posts:
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.
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.
From the invaluable supporting actors to the hidden gems of cinema and TV: sometimes it isn’t the main events, the Brad Pitts and Jennifer Lawrences, the Oppenheimers and the Barbies, that we gravitate to. In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Mege pinpointed some of those gems that take some looking for – including the fascinating Finnish historical horror film, Sauna.
It’s that time of the year again: A Damn Fine Cup of Culture is dedicating its next four main episodes to a single theme. After 2022’s Summer of Directors and last year’s Summer of Collaborations, this year’s hot months are dedicated to remakes. And yes, remakes tend to get a bad rap from film fans, but there’s enough there that is interesting, fascinating and worth watching – and, yes, in many cases worth criticising. We think we’ve picked an interesting bunch of films and remakes, and we’re starting with a special case of one of the greats of Hollywood cinema remaking one of his own films: Alfred Hitchcock and The Man Who Knew Too Much. First in 1934, in one of his British films, and then again in 1956, Hitchcock told the same overall story of a couple whose child is kidnapped because of a secret plot they’ve uncovered by accident – but while a lot is the same, from the basic setup to the climax at the Royal Albert Hall, these are still two very different flavours of Hitchcock. Join Sam and his co-baristas Julie and Matt as they discuss multiple men who knew too much. What does each version bring to the table? Which did we prefer? If we had to choose, what would we go for: Peter Lorre’s pitch-perfect baddie or Doris Day belting “Que Sera, Sera”?
For further listening on Alfred Hitchcock, make sure to check out our earlier episodes, “The Good, the Bad and Alfred Hitchcock” (#33) and last month’s “Swan Song” (#80), in which Alan and Sam talked about the final films of Hitchcock and Billy Wilder.
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 got nothing against a good blockbuster – some time ago, I sang the praises of Mad Max: Fury Road, and so I am itching to go see Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. And I have seen almost everything there is to see in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including the Basel exhibition, thanks to my favorite daughter. But there are some unsung gems out there that only I and three or four others know about. I think I’ve written about Lake Mungo more than once, so that one is no longer an obscure indie film since it crops up on many 12 horror gems you’ve never seen before! lists.
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 those perennial supporting actors? Those faces that you’d see in many, many films, and that would always make you take notice when they turned up? Sam certainly does! And, seeing how he mentions The Tamarind Seed, a film that many of our readers are unlikely to have heard of, here’s a trailer for this 1974 movie by Blake Edwards.
If you look at Mathieu Kassovitz’ 1995 modern classic La Haine with a dispassionate eye, it’s easy to criticise the film. It is obnoxious in the way it demands our attention, not too dissimilar from some of its protagonists and their look-at-me-fuck-you-too way of life. It can be accused, and fairly so, of being derivative, in terms of its style and its story: there’s more than a little Mean Streets and Do the Right Thing to the the film. And it’s not exactly subtle – when given the choice between going loud and going nuanced, nine out of ten times it will choose the former.
But, bloody hell, if La Haine isn’t still tremendously effective – and timely.
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 Matt’s latest pieceon discovering film stars in their early performances before their eventual breakthrough, I was wondering how many actors actually never really got to that point yet still remain so easily recognisable. You know the ones I’m talking about: the instantly familiar faces that are hard to place but that you’ve seen repeatedly in films or on television; the staple supporting cast of many well-known directors from Alfred Hitchcock to Blake Edwards or Mel Brooks to the Quentin Tarantino; the returning characters in any franchise from Bond to Marvel and long-running series like The Avengers or Sex Education.
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.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 