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 Adams to Addams: Sam took this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees to dark, dark places – namely boarding school.
What’s giddy, grim, and black and white and pink all over? You’ve guessed it: just when the discourse has died down, A Damn Fine Cup of Culture goes all Barbenheimer on y’all. Join Alan and Matt as they talk about their impression of the memetic phenomenon of 2023 and discuss Greta Gerwig’s ultra-meta toy ad Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s ultra-Nolany drama Oppenheimer. Just why did these two films capture audiences’ imaginations to the degree that they have? Does Oppenheimer escape the traps of conventional biopics? Does Barbie manage to find a good balance between comedy, drama and message movie? And what other films should be combined into similarly striking (or strikingly mismatched) double bills?
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.
Matt may not have been won over by the film Disco Boy – but he did like its trailer a lot, which gives us the perfect starting point for this post.
Seeing how we’re usually at our local cinema several times a week, we tend to end up watching certain trailers half a dozen times or more before the films are ever shown. In some cases, I might find a trailer appealing the first two or three times I see it, but by the time I’ve seen it so often that I could lip-sync along to the dialogue I feel I’ve seen enough and don’t even want to watch the whole film. Perhaps in a year or two, once it’s appeared on Film Four or on one of the streaming services we’re subscribed to, but I’m just glad to have seen the last of it for now.
Some trailers are different, though, and each time I watch them I find myself more intrigued. Often, these are the trailers that don’t much focus on plot or dialogues, they’re more about the aesthetic and the vibe of a film. The trailer for Disco Boy by the Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese is a case in point: obviously the film stars Franz Rogowski, an actor I’ve come to appreciate a lot in recent years, but more than that it was the images and the soundscape of the trailer. It was also the hints at the film’s themes: soldiers, colonialism, identity and doubling, intertwined in ways that felt poetic rather than literal. And yes, I’d also heard good things from film festivals, suggesting that Disco Boy was something to look out for.
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 first instalment in a new series – after his trip through Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre, Matt has begun watching Criterion’s Federico Fellini box set, starting with Variety Lights. Sadly, there’s no trailer for the film on YouTube… but here’s the next best thing: the entire movie. Enjoy!
Our summer of collaborations continues with an iconic duo from Minnesota: the Coen Brothers are probably among the filmmakers of recent decades most associated with the (flawed) notion of the auteur – but at the same time, they’re among the directors who keep working with the same collaborators, whether they’re actors (Obviously Frances McDormand, but also Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, John Turturro, George Clooney, and several others), composers (Carter Burwell) or cinematographers (Roger Deakins). In this month’s podcast, we discuss three key films in the Coens’ filmography – Blood Simple (1984), Fargo (1996) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) – which all star McDormand and feature soundtracks by Burwell, and we ask ourselves: to what extent are the Coens’ films defined by the brothers’ frequent collaborators? And how much are these collaborators shaped by their work on the Coen Brothers’ films?
Note: Since this podcast was recorded earlier in the summer, we talked about the supposed ‘break-up’ of Joel and Ethan Coen, both of whom have made solo films (The Tragedy of Macbeth and the upcoming Drive-Away Dolls) since their hiatus from one another after 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs – but they’ve since mentioned in interviews that they are working together on a new film.
For last year’s summer series of podcasts, check this link:
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture: Summer of Directors (2022)
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!
Here’s a puzzle for you: who has two thumbs, an English mother, but his mother tongue is German? This guy!
Okay, okay, that was not very good, even worse than the usual “two thumbs” jokes – but it’s true. My dad was German, my mother English, I was born and raised in the Swiss German-speaking part of Switzerland, and the language I learnt first was German, not from my dad (who, like most fathers of his generation, was much less present) but from my mother. She did try to teach my sister and me English, but… well. Let’s say she was partly successful: we learnt how to understand English, but when we were small we’d always answer in German. Once we did start learning English in earnest, it was admittedly easier for us, but even though I talk and write English much more than any other language these days, I would not call myself a proper native speaker. Half-native, maybe, which sounds like a weird term from 19th century literature; Kipling, maybe, or Joseph Conrad.
Ladies and gentlemen, step right up! The time of drily ironic Swedes grappling with existentialist despair and God’s extended silence, indeed His existence, came to an end earlier this year. It’s taken us a while to move forward, but we have finally arrived at our destination: Essential Fellini, Criterion’s gorgeous box set including fourteen of the Italian director’s most important films.
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.
Ridley Scott’s career has been uneven, and arguably he made most of his best films in the first decade or two of working as a director – but it still comes as a surprise that he’s only just made his first appearance in the Criterion Collection, with Thelma & Louise. Matt revisited the film and was not only bowled over by how good it looks in 4K, but also surprised by how well it holds up thirty years later. Though the original trailer definitely misrepresents this one to a large degree.
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!
We’re not hosting an intergalactic kegger down here! ~Zed
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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 