A Damn Fine Espresso: July 2022

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture has talked about musicals before – but this month’s espresso is a special treat: Alan has seen the production of Cabaret that is currently being shown at the Playhouse Theatre in London. He and Julie talk about the production and how it compares to Christopher Isherwood’s original stories that Cabaret is based on, as well as the 1972 film by Bob Fosse, featuring Liza Minelli in her iconic turn as Sally Bowles. How do the various production choices change the characters and the overall depiction of Berlin during the Weimar Republic? And, obviously, what are Alan’s thoughts on the stage production: is this time jump to 1929 Berlin worth taking if you happen to find yourself in London?

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The Compleat Ingmar #35: Cries and Whispers (1972)

While the supposed heaviness of Bergman’s filmography is frequently exaggerated (or am I the only one who finds The Seventh Seal with its snarky Death entertaining, even if the film undoubtedly isn’t a laugh riot beginning to end?), it is certainly true that many of his films deal with heavy themes. Mortality in the abstract is a frequent motif, but so is death in the very concrete. And death in Bergman’s films may never have been as harrowing as in his 1972 film Cries and Whispers, the first half of which depicts the suffering and agony of Agnes, one of its four main characters.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: If you believe they put a man on the moon

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 1989, the documentary film For All Mankind provided a different perspective on the Apollo programme and the moon landing. In 2022, Matt finally got around to watching the film and writing about it.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #86: Grace Jones, I’ve Seen That Face Before

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 in Florence some years ago, it was a one-week holiday, and it should have gone on longer, because I grew to like the city a whole lot. For instance, in the Nelson bookstore, you could take any book you wanted from their shelves and into their coffee shop and read it or leaf through it. The downside was that some of their books no longer looked pristine. The downside includes that the shop does not seem to exist any longer – at least I was unable to find it, and I seem to remember that it was at one side of a huge square.

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Criterion Corner: For All Mankind (#54)

Earlier this year, we saw Summer of Soul, Questlove’s documentary/concert film hybrid about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. In its last third, the film juxtaposes the festival, an event by and for the African America community that at the time (and not just then) was sorely disadvantaged and underserved, and the first moon landing, where NASA put Whitey on the Moon. Why are millions spent on space exploration when the planet we live on is severely lacking in so many respects?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Release the Beast

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.

When we started our weekly Six Damn Fine Degrees series of posts, who would’ve thought that we’d get to Give My Regards to Broadstreet: the album, the film, the 8-bit game?

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #58: Summer of Directors – Ida Lupino

Our Summer of Directors reaches its midpoint, with an episode that is special in two different respects. For one thing, we’re talking about an artist whose name should be much, much more familiar than it is: Ida Lupino, the English-American actress, singer, writer, producer, and, yes, director, whose films such as Outrage, The Bigamist and The Hitch-Hiker are fascinating, intriguing, and unusually frank (not only for the time!), dealing with topics such as rape and its social fallout or toxic masculinity long before such topics were common in the movies, and in ways that are more intriguing and nuanced than many more modern films. The episode is also special for another reason: Julie and Alan are joined by Johannes Binotto, lecturer at the University of Zürich and the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, who’s written and spoken about Lupino. (You can check out some of his work on Lupino in video and text format – in German, but it’s still well worth checking out if you understand the language or trust DeepL to do a reasonably good job of translating it.) Many thanks to Johannes for his time and for sharing his views and profound knowledge of the subject with us and our listeners!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #85: Give My Regards To Broad Street

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!

When I was young I bought my pop music on Cassette. If you made a bit of money on your birthday you could head to the shops and buy yourself an album. (If you’d really cleaned up with the relatives you could get two.) The only vinyl player we had in the house was very much off-limits to the children, mainly the domain of curious spoken word affairs that the grown-ups found funny. Although they had covers that tended to give me nightmares.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The One With Almost No Trailers

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.

It’s Bergman time again: this week, Matt stopped by one of Bergman’s early films, Port of Call. It may not be the most Bergman (the Bergmanest?) of all the Bergmans, but after a slow start it turned out… surprisingly engaging! Sadly, finding a trailer for Port of Call proved almost impossible.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #84: Why Indy 3 single-handedly ended my gaming career

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!

Matt’s confession in last week’s post about the scores of digital characters killed in his gaming career so far made me wonder about why I had never become a gamer myself. It wasn’t that video and computer games weren’t available in the late ’80s and ’90s (friends of our family were GameBoy addicts, for example) or that our family were somehow technological hermits (my grandfather had introduced us to his AMIGA Commodore by 1987 – game discs included). I also got off to a good start when our parents bought us a brand new computer for Christmas in 1994 and I was able to get my hands on fresh gaming content.

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