Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good?And why did it win?
It seems fitting that the first Academy Award for a Sound Picture should go to a musical. The arrival of the Talking Picture had caused all sorts of chaos in Hollywood as it struggled to get to grips with the new technology. However filling the Big Screen with songs was an immediate winner when it came to using the Modern Day Marvel That Is Sound™
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.
Oh boy… I’ve not posted one of these in a while – not because I haven’t been watching any Criterion releases, but because… I don’t honestly know. Most likely, it’s just this: sometimes the working week, and whatever else is happening in my life, leaves me with little time and/or energy to sit down and write a post, even if it’s one I’ve been wanting to write. And then a week passes, two weeks, a month, another one – and I’ve missed the moment.
But: while I cannot do these two films justice in full-length posts, I still remember enough about my reactions to them that I can give you my impressions. And if these make you curious, all the better!
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 saw the start of a new series called One Best Picture After Another: Alan’s revisiting every single Best Picture Academy Award winner! Yes, you’ve read that right: over the coming months and even years, he will be watching, and writing about, each film that won the Oscar for Best Picture, and on Monday he started with the 1927 winner Wings. Sadly, this trailer isn’t the original – were there even trailers back then? -, but it’ll give a good idea of what Wings is all about.
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 things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.
Virtual Reality is one of those technologies that sound tremendously cool – on paper. No longer are you just looking at a 2D representation of whatever world a game creates: you can be fully immersed in a real world! Except it’s not that easy. For one thing, not everyone has the necessary space at their disposal, so you can actually walk around in the virtual world. For another, not a few people simply get nauseous in VR. And then there’s the challenge of tactility: not just seeing but feeling and touching whatever you’re interacting in the virtual world. There is a not inconsiderable gap between the idea of VR and the actual practice – a gap that can be reduced by means of clever game design, but this kind of design doesn’t necessarily lend itself to what people expect from VR gaming.
Ten years after the release of Oculus Rift, VR isn’t the runaway success that some breathless PR people predicted, and as a result, less and less money is being put into the development of VR experiences and games. If your audience is relatively small, you can’t really afford to develop VR fare that has the kind of AAA production values you get in normal video games. And this generally means that big games, with large worlds, the kind of thing you find regularly in non-VR gaming, are a rarity when it comes to Virtual Reality. A lot of games developed for the tech are much smaller in scope, somewhere in between an escape room and a theme park ride, and they are generally as on-rails as the latter. With a modest budget, you may still be able to put together a handful of interconnected rooms that are reasonably detailed and nice to look at; a whole world, though, is an entirely different matter.
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.
Another year, another Second Chances episode: in this month’s podcast, Sam and Alan get together to revisit two historical pieces, though they couldn’t be much more different – one has decadence, deviance and Nazism, the other offers Hollywood mystery, Communists and dancing sailors. Yes, we’re taking a second look at Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film The Damned, the cause of something of a memorable, and traumatic, early movie memory of Sam’s, and at the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! (2016) (which we also wrote about here), generally one of the less-appreciated films of the writer-director siblings – but perhaps one that is unfairly maligned?
And if Alan and Sam’s chat about fascists, fixers, murders and musical numbers has got you in the mood, why not check out these earlier Second Chances episodes?
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!
Myself, I’ve never been to Sarajevo. In fact, I’ve not been to much of the East of Europe. I’ve been to Bratislava, which has the coolest little pancake place. And I’ve been to Prague – which is almost a bit of a cliché, at least for my generation (which, as you may have guessed, lies somewhere between W and Y). At Swiss grammar schools, classes would go on what is called a ‘Matura trip’ (the Matura being the final exam), which teachers would try to make as educational as possible, while students would try to make sure would provide ample opportunity for partying, and pretty much the generic destination for a Matura trip in the early to mid-’90s was Prague. Plenty of education, plenty of culture, plenty of beer.
However, that’s not the trip to Prague I remember most fondly. Even though I did get my CD of the Blade Runner soundtrack there.
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.
Another month is close to passing, which means: another Shortcuts. Including, among other things, a few thoughts on the strange, delirious The Testament of Ann Lee, Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, and last year’s Dust Bunny, which may deserve more attention than it got at its release.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 