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!
You’ll almost certainly have seen Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 early slasher horror classic. And you’ll also probably have seen enough horror sequels in your time to know the score that, if there is one thing that virtually all such follow-ups are guilty of, it’s predictability. The studio will have realised that there’s a market for a certain type of terrifying carnage so they’ll cut and paste those visceral thrills into the sequel.
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.
Travels with our Sam: our resident James Bond expert/soundtrack fiend went back to La La Land itself for his summer holidays. Want to find out what Sam did on his hols? Join him and Julie as they talk about Sam’s SoCal adventures: bumping into movie stars at Starbucks, checking out the rides and the studio tours (but failing to find a good studio shop – what’s wrong with you, Hollywood?!), and finding the coolest ever record store with the oldest ever shop attendant. We hope you enjoy this latest espresso of a podcast episode as much as Sam obviously enjoyed his LA vacation!
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 was a teenager when I first watched Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic Psycho – though at the time I’d already picked up much of the plot through cultural osmosis, including that twist. As a result, there was little in Psycho that surprised me, except for this: even with me knowing who’d get killed how, why, and by whom, the film was still supremely tense. And that’s still true now, dozens of years later: as much of a cliché as the shower scene has become, for instance, it still works. It’s still one of the best scenes of its kind, and it’s difficult to top.
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.
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!
An Ennio Morricone-scored movie that exists in a variety of versions? When reading Alan’s latest insightful piece on the many cuts initially made to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, I couldn’t help but be possessed by my teenage memories of watching that infamous sequel to a great horror classic, Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and learning about the many different re-edits it had gone through – to no avail: The movie was a massive critical and commercial failure and, despite releases of all kinds of versions, has found few friends since.
Léa Mysius’ mystery drama The Five Devils (in the original: Les Cinq Diables) is a frustrating film. It is beautifully made and features great central performance. Its ideas are intriguing, and it looks gorgeous to boot, if in a foreboding, even menacing way. (There are shades of the French series The Returned, and not just in the film’s aesthetics.) There is a lot to like here – but the film is weighed down by misusing a metaphysical conceit that, while it could work well in a different film, prompts the audience to focus on all the wrong things and ask all the wrong questions. What we end up with feels like an incongruous blend of Céline Sciamma’s Petite Mamanand the German Netflix series Dark.
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.
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!
There’s a lot that gets written about lost Director’s Cuts. Original versions of films that the studio took, re-edited, ruined and then released to mostly audience indifference. Many film fans would queue around the block for a chance to see Billy Wilder’s original version of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes or David Lynch’s original take on Dune. But occasionally there’s another version of a film that’s the tricky one to find. The maligned, original studio cut.
The order in which you watch, read, listen to things matters. It changes how you experience these things. Criterion’s Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema was organised thematically first and foremost. Even if a clear delineation wasn’t always possible, you’d get a set of films about marriage and relationships, followed by some movies about actors and performers, and then you might get a couple of films about crises of faith. Even though many of these themes pop up across all of Bergman’s films, there was still the sense of thematic focuses. And after watching Scenes from a Marriage, other stories about relationships gone sour would always have a certain subtext; Through a Glass Darkly would be lurking in the background when watching, say, Winter Light.
In contrast to this, Criterion’s Essential Fellini box set is ordered chronologically. This comes with pros and cons: you lose the thematic unity (that may be imposed or at least reinforced by the curators to some extent), but it’s easier to concentrate on how Fellini develops as a director if you’re watching the films in the sequence in which they were made – but with Bergman I was glad that we didn’t have to watch a whole slew of his early films first. Crisis and A Ship to India, to mention just two, certainly show some promise, but if Bergman hadn’t turned out pretty okay at this whole directing thing later in his career they’d probably be forgotten by now, and for good reason. And that’s the sense I get of these early Fellini films: that they were made by someone who’s talented, but whose talent isn’t fully in evidence yet. But boy, there’s some stuff here that hasn’t aged well at all, there are comedic bits that would have been lazy and clichéd at the time already, and those things don’t sit well with this idea of a timeless filmmaking genius.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 