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!
Julie‘s lucid case for All About Eveover Sunset Boulevard as the ultimate satire on Hollywood stardom reminded me that beside these classic companion pieces, there is a third: a bookend, so to speak, a swan song: Fedora (1978), Billy Wilder‘s last truly big-budget film, a film so maligned and obscured, it took me years to come by it and begin to appreciate it as the wonderful gem that it is.
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.
Let’s change our usual approach to Trailer Sundays and start with new trailers – because we’ve got one here that’s close to our hearts.
It had to happen sooner or later: for our May episode, Alan, Julie and Matt got together to talk about the genre of documentary films. Their subjects may not be the ones you might expect: while the likes of Ken Burns, Werner Herzog and Errol Morris get a mention, our three cultural baristas picked examples of the genre that are perhaps less well known: Nostalgia for the Light (2010) by the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, which draws a line from the astrological observatories in the Atacama Desert to the women who still search the desert for the remains of their loved ones who were murdered by the Pinochet regime; Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020), writer-director Kirsten Johnson’s attempt to come to terms with her father’s dementia and the reality of a death foretold, in which the daughter enlists the help of the eponymous Dick Johnson to pre-enact possible (and impossible) scenarios of his demise; and Mark Rappaport’s 1995 video essay From the Journals of Jean Seberg, about the actress who was hounded to her death by the FBI and the culture of a movie industry for whom women are commodities and screens onto which men can project their wishes, needs and fantasies. The focus of the conversation is firmly on these films, but obviously no discussion of documentary films can be complete without getting into questions like “What is a documentary?”, “How does it differ from fictional features?”… and “What are the worst documentaries we’ve ever seen?”
For more talk about documentaries and related topics, make sure to check out:
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.
In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees post, Matt argued that sometimes the past haunting us isn’t a Native American burial site under the floorboards of our suburban home, but just the first version we saw when we were young, to the point where, for us, it’s the ‘correct’ version: such as Blade Runner with the voiceover that Harrison Form famously hated, or Poltergeist without the scene where a terrified parapsychologist pulls off his face with his bare hands.
Perhaps my experience of watching Jules Dassin’s Rififi for the first time would have been different, or at least more smooth, if I’d remembered its original French title: Du rififi chez les hommes. The English title, especially if you (like me) don’t know what the word ‘rififi’ means. The film is kind enough to provide something of an explanation, in the form of a song performed in a nightclub to an audience of gangsters, hoodlums and molls: rififi is brouhaha, trouble, especially the kind that goes on between gangsters over money, women, the size of their guns. But without that knowledge, the title Rififi sounded like a cocktail, a musical style that makes you snap your fingers, or a Mediterranean resort town. This together with the film often being described as the quintessential heist movie made me expect something jazzy, breezy, stylish. Something fun.
So when fifteen minutes into Rififi the main character makes his former girlfriend strip and then brutally beats her with a belt because she’d gone off with another man while he was serving five years in prison, I was taken aback – especially when the film in the scenes following the violence seemed to shrug and go, “Well, that’s what men are like, that’s what women are like, and that’s how everyone likes it.” I was ready to press STOP, eject the disk from the Blu-ray player, put it away and never think of Rififi again.
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 probably remember that scene from Poltergeist (the 1982 original, not the 2015 remake): Marty, one of the parapsychologists investigating the Freeling home, goes to the kitchen at night, grabs some food from the fridge – and finds that what he’s taken seems possessed and infested with maggots and evil. Understandably taken aback, he runs to a nearby utility room, he splashes water on his face… and then watches himself in the mirror as slits and cracks open in his face. Blood drips in the sink. And as we’re watching, a horrified Marty pulls off his face chunk by chunk, revealing blood, flesh and bone. A flash of light! – and Marty’s face is where it belongs, where it’s always been. It’s all been in his head… or has it?
Warning: Some graphic albeit cheesy ’80s gore to follow.
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 number of us here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture like horror films, and this is reflected (see what we did there?) in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, with Mege’s thoughts on how horror reflects us back at ourselves. Lake Mungo, the film he mentions most prominently, is not as well known as the big names in the genre, but this little-known Australian gem is sad and terrifying, like many of the best ghost stories.
You’d think this film shouldn’t work, not in 2023. The special effects aren’t outright hilarious at this stage, but they’re definitely ropey. Much of the time you can see that the swarm doesn’t actually exist in the same plane as the people running away from them. Your brain tells you: this is tricks, effects, it’s movie magic. And, more than that, it’s birds! There’s no way they can be this much of a threat, can they?
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!
Most dramas will circle around the problem until they reach their core issue. Horror movies don’t – they seem to go for the jugular while the real issue might be shrouded in mystery until – gasp! – it is revealed, often gorily and always unforgivably visually. What I like about a truly good horror flick is the unflinching way they attack the real issue at the heart of its story.
Take the Australian ghost story Lake Mungo (2008), for instance. At the beginning of the film, it is already too late – we know what the result of the story is, and we get told how things unfolded. In any drama, the focus would be on the grieving parents, but Lake Mungo, while having a lot of feelings for Mum and Dad, uses them to tell the story of how Alice got where she ended up. The movie peels away layer after layer of the mystery until, incredibly, we are confronted with what happened. And that, of course, entails a lot of suspension of disbelief since we are stuck in a very scary ghost story. I may have said so elsewhere, but Lake Mungo is one of the best horror movies in years, and one of the best Australian movies ever.
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