Movies – Page 28 – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The Quick and the Undead

Jan 14, 2024Matt1 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.

Sam wouldn’t be Sam without his deep, abiding love for all things James Bond – so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his first Six Damn Fine Degrees entry of 2024 would focus on the special agent with a license to kill, and Roald Dahl’s connection to Bond.

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Criterion Corner: A Matter of Life and Death (#939)

Jan 13, 2024Jan 12, 2024Matt2 Comments

Of all the tropes in romantic stories that I’m not a big fan of, two people falling instantly in love is probably the most common. I can buy immediate attraction, especially of a sexual kind, and I am also okay with an almost instant sense of sympathy, a sort of mutual resonance that develops into something further – but when we’re supposed to believe in love at first sight, that there is deep, abiding love between two people the moment they meet, I roll my eyes, and they keep rolling if this instant romantic attachment is given a significance that is practically metaphysical. I am no fan of the notion in romances that someone is ‘the one’, that destiny has preordained certain couplings. In fact, I don’t find the idea particularly romantic to begin with.

There is perhaps one film where I buy into such almost instant love, and not just begrudgingly but entirely, 100%. That film is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s wonderful A Matter of Life and Death (1946).

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #164: Double-O-Dahl

Jan 12, 2024Oct 12, 2024samlinder3 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.

Oddly enough, my first encounter with a Roald Dahl story did not come via Mathilda or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, nor with The Witches (even though I saw the Anjelica Houston version early and loved it!), Fantastic Mr Fox (so joyfully discussed in Julie’s last post) or one of his many short stories (repeatedly adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents). It was that one foray of the world-famous children’s book author and macabre genius into the world of James Bond that I was compulsively obsessed by starting at age 12: his screenplay to 1967’s You Only Live Twice.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Out with the old, in with the new

Jan 7, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Remember just a week ago when we were still in 2023? In the last couple of weeks we’ve skipped the trailer posts, but now we’re catching up on some of the films we wrote about, such as Miyazaki’s likely swan song The Boy and the Heron, Paul King’s non-Paddington confection Wonka and some of the movies Matt liked best last year.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #76: Buster Keaton

Jan 6, 2024Mar 1, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Welcome to 2024! We at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture are beginning the year with a discussion of one of the greats of early Hollywood cinema: Buster Keaton, the Great Stone Face himself. Join Alan, Julie and Sam as they discuss three films by the master of deadpan physical comedy: One Week (1920), in which a newlywed couple attempts to assemble a house kit that, unbeknownst to them, a rejected suitor has sabotaged, Sherlock Jr. (1924), perhaps Keaton’s best-known and -loved comedy next to The General, and The Navigator (also 1924), with its amazing underwater scenes. How does Keaton hold up next to the other two greats of early comedy, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd? And what happened to Keaton and his career in later decades?

If you are interested in learning more about Keaton, make sure to check out Dana Stevens’ Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, and take note of the writings of the late, great Cari Beauchamp, who wrote extensively on the era and who passed away on 14 December 2023.

Finally, all three of the Buster Keaton films discussed in this episode can be streamed on YouTube – and there are definitely worse ways to brighten your early January!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #162: The Wonders of Wonka

Dec 29, 2023Oct 12, 2024Mege3 Comments

Yes, I am of the firm opinion that Die Hard (1988) is a Christmas movie, but enough about that. In Paul King’s Wonka (2023), there is often snow on the cobblestones of the old town renowned for its chocolate. It could be Paris or Charles Dickens’ London, while the shopping arcades reminded me of Milan, but it matters little where the story is set: it’s an olden-time dream world where it’s possible to manufacture magical chocolate if you are ready to go and milk a giraffe at the local zoo.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast Christmas Special 2023

Dec 24, 2023Dec 24, 2023The Barista Collective1 Comment

As the sheer Ho-ho-honess of the season descends on us, here’s a little something for under your tree: our 2023 Christmas Special. This year we’re taking the opportunity to put a Damn Fine fingerprint on the media meme of the year: Barbenheimer. Join us – Julie, Sam, Alan and Matt, but also Damn Fine O.G. Mege and favourite frequent guest Dan Thron of Martini Giant (who took some time this autumn to talk all things Exorcist with us) – as we come up with double bills and mash-ups of wildly divergent and strangely complementary movies, taking our listeners from Paddiface and The Wizard of Chess via a very special Boris Karloff two-header and Wonkas of the Flower Moon to The Sound of Eagles and Under the Hours. (FYI, most of these are working titles that we’ll have to workshop before the final product is pushed out the door, or so Marketing tells us.) So, in the spirit of plastic dolls come to life and Cillian Murphy’s piercing eyes, of learning to start worrying and hate the bomb and of being Just Ken, we at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture wish all of our listeners happy holidays filled with good films, series, books, games and music!

P.S.: For more on Baby Face and Killers of the Flower Moon, make sure to check out these episodes:

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #42: The Complicated Women of Pre-Code Cinema
A Damn Fine Espresso: November 2023 (in which Matt and Sam talk about Killers of the Flower Moon)

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The sound of wings: The Boy and the Heron (2023)

Dec 23, 2023Dec 25, 2023Matt2 Comments

Apart from the ’70s anime version of Heidi (which I, like so many kids growing up in Switzerland in the 1980s, watched much more of than any more ‘native’ versions of the story), for which Hayao Miyazaki worked on scene design, layout and screenplay, my first proper encounter with the director and his work that I was aware of was Princess Mononoke (1997). Japanese animation didn’t often make it into Swiss cinemas at the time, at least other than the occasional showing of a classic of the form such as Akira or Ghost in the Shell, so I had to travel to another city to catch the film at the cinema.

It was absolutely worth the journey: seeing Princess Mononoke was a breathtaking experience. The film felt archaic and epic and strange, though at the same time intimate and very personal. It grappled with big moral questions, but without reducing these to good vs evil simplicity. (Ian Danskin’s video essay “Lady Eboshi is Wrong” on the topic is well worth watching.) Even just on an aesthetic level, Princess Mononoke was visually stunning, and its score, easily one of Joe Hisaishi’s best, complemented the visuals perfectly. Miyazaki’s films deserve to be seen on a big screen – and yet, since seeing Princess Mononoke at a cinema, I only managed to do the same with Spirited Away. All of Miyazaki’s other films (and everything that Isao Takahata did) I only ever saw on my TV.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #161: Hollywood A-Listers Assemble!

Dec 22, 2023Oct 12, 2024Matt3 Comments

When I was a child, I remember there being a certain Hollywood magic to films that seemed to have simply everyone in them. I’m not talking about your average ensemble cast (or the kind of ensembles that Robert Altman worked with, which were very much their own thing), but the kind of cast where every name that is dropped in the credits makes you go, “Ooh, wasn’t he in… And didn’t we see her in…? And wasn’t he great as…?” In my head, the archetypes of this kind of film are the 1970s Agatha Christie adaptations featuring Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express, in which you’d get Lauren Bacall on the table next to Ingrid Bergman and Jacqueline Bisset, looking across the aisle at Richard Widmark, Michael York, Sean Connery and John Gielgud, or Death on the Nile, whose cast ranged from Bette Davis via Angela Lansbury to Mia Farrow, and from David Niven to Jack Warden, and that’s not mentioning the Maggie Smiths, Jon Finches and Peter Ustinovs. Then there’s the grimmer but equally star-studded A Bridge Too Far, again with Sean Connery, but also Gene Hackman, Dirk Bogarde, Edward Fox, Michael Caine, and many, many others.