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.
Our long-running Bergman series finally came to an end… of sorts, with Matt checking out, among other things, a recent documentary on the director that doesn’t hold back with criticism. Does it change his take on Bergman’s films?
Where do you go after seeing most of Ingmar Bergman’s films and TV productions, over a span of almost four years? Do you go back to the beginning and start again? There are definitely quite a few of these that I’ll want to rewatch, but no, I don’t want the rest of my life to be on a permanent Bergman loop. Do I seek out the remaining films (seven, apparently) and watch those as well, for the sake of completeness? Some of the films not included on Criterion’s set are from the early years, and while those films are not uninteresting, for many of them I found the main interest to be the glimpse they provide at a Bergmann who hasn’t quite found his groove yet – and lesser Bergmann can leave you with a sense of “Why didn’t I watch Smiles of a Summer Night or The Seventh Seal or Persona or Fanny and Alexanderinstead?”
So how about watching some films about Bergman instead?
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.
Hooray for Hollywood… OR IS IT??? It’s the weekend of the 95th Academy Awards, and Alan and Matt got together in cyberspace to talk about this year’s Oscars. What are their thoughts on the Academy Awards in general? Are they big fans of the Oscars? And what do they think of this year’s nominees for the big awards: Best Actor, Best Actress and, obviously, Best Picture? What are their thoughts on who should win – and, perhaps as importantly, who shouldn’t? What do the nominations say about 2023 Hollywood? And how easy is it to watch a performance in a film you consider flawed or even bad and judge whether it’s worthy of receiving an award? Featuring Polish donkeys, blue anti-colonialists, Freudian symbolism, #metoo conductors, with a generous helping of war being hell and a pair of Irishmen who just don’t like each other no more!
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!
Learning that films are going to disappear from a streaming service is a good motivation for finally watching them. Suddenly there’s a deadline, and if it’s missed, who knows when there’ll be a chance to catch up. So it was that at the end of February 2023, I found myself rushing through the entire cinematic Mission Impossible franchise, as a sinister countdown clock ticked down to all the films self-destructing (on that streaming service only).
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.
Murder in 16th century Bavaria, mysteries in a medieval abbey, illustrated manuscript and forbidden books: for someone who considers the film adaptation of The Name of the Rose one of his formative cinema experiences, the recently released Pentiment is catnip, as Matt will gladly confirm in spite of the few hundred years in between the two settings. But since we recently featured the trailer for this game (which was released late last year), let’s instead indulge in some quality post-Bond Sean Connery.
Our baristas have shown before that they have an eye for interesting locations in movies, in their discussion of their home towns and their appearances in films as well as in last summer’s episode on the cinema of Dario Argento. This month they’re going from a geographical, ‘on location’ scale to the more individual, designed spaces of interior and exterior architecture. Sam is joined by Alan and Julie to talk about architectural design in cinema: staircases that range from grand to absurd and dreamlike, the modernist villains’ lairs (watch out for a feline cameo in keeping with the theme!) and iconic War Rooms of Ken Adams, and the grand, retro-futuristic design and cityscapes of Blade Runner and other epic-scale sci-fi. What do our cinephile sightseers like better: grand bespoke sets or on-location shots of existing places? Matte paintings, miniatures or CGI architecture? And what are some of the staircases that no movie lover should miss?
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!
While reading Matt’s musings about the heist movie genre and Steven Soderbergh’s knack for it, my head was inevitably raided by musical themes: jazzy and cool, funky and bold, sneaky and witty they were – and all wonderfully descriptive of the act of boldly scheming, meticulously planning and sneakily (or spectacularly) executing! Is it a coincidence that a large majority of the most popular heist movies are associated with scores that often remained the most memorable aspect about the films? Maybe the indelible combination of suspense, anticipation and audacity is among the most fruitful contexts for a composer to create dynamic and energetic themes.
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!
Pretty much from its infancy, cinema recognised the dramatic potential of crime.Whether we’re talking about whodunnits in the style of their literary ancestors, films in which the protagonists were sleuths and detectives, or their counterparts, the movies that told the stories of gangsters, thieves and murderers, crime pays – at the very least in ticket sales. Something else cinema exceeds at: showing us people who are very, very good at what they do. There’s a joy to watching consummate professionals at work. (There’s even a phrase for it, competence porn, and Breaking Bad‘s Mike Ehrmantraut is its laconic patron saint.) And, of course, there’s the place where the Venn diagram meets: many a highly entertaining film has been about criminals who are good at their particular genre of crime. The con men and women, the safe breakers and thieves, and yes, even the killers who are just so damn adept at killing that it’s delightful to watch them go about their gruesome business.
And at the heart of the intersection of those two sets is a particular brand of movie, about a particular brand of criminals who do a very specific kind of crime requiring the upmost professionalism: the heist movie.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 