Movies

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Magic, mayhem, artificial colouring

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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.

Sadly, this week started with Matt not particularly enjoying Ingmar Bergman’s The Rite, a TV adaptation of a stage play that is at the same time bitter and tacky. Sorry, Ingmar, that’s not a combination that many people could pull off, even if they’re as talented as you and your cast, consisting of Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin and Anders Ek. Also, for the purpose of the Sunday trailer post, there doesn’t seem to be a trailer of The Rite available on YouTube – so here’s something else about rituals and masques and the like. Enjoy this trailer of the film adaptation of John Fowles’ The Magus! (Is that something of a tenuous link? Probably!)

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #50 – The “True” Story of Lina Lamont

Alan Kuhl Graham4 Comments

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!

“They can’t make a fool out of Lina Lamont. They can’t make a laughing stock out of Lina Lamont.“

There’s one important lesson that needs to be learnt by any student of Hollywood history: don’t believe the hype. Don’t buy into the spin. And certainly don’t be fooled by popular tales that demonise and blame those that dared to challenge the system.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: A PTA meeting to look forward to

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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.

What do you get if you put together revenge, toxic masculinity and probability mathematics? Add some Mads Mikkelsen, season generously with action and black comedy, and you might end up with Anders Thomas Jensen’s Riders of Justice, which Matt wrote about last week.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #49 – Three generations of songs in A Star is Born

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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!

To me, Julie’s fascinating comparison of the earlier variations of what came to be A Star is Born triggered many a musical memory and it made me wonder how besides plot, characters and settings the musical flavours of this often-remade screenplay had changed over time. Specifically, what would the three Oscar-recognised songs from the Judy Garland version (“The Man that Got Away”, 1955), the Streisand remake (“Evergreen”, 1976) and the recent Lady Gaga iteration (“In the Shallows”, 2018) tell us about each moment this star-making (or -breaking) story hit the big screen?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: My god, it’s full of stars!

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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.

While 2020 and 2021 weren’t exactly great years for cinemas, they were pretty good for cinema. Plenty of good, interesting films came out – if not always in the preferred format – during the ongoing pandemic, and one of those found a grateful audience in Mege: Miranda July’s Kajillionaire.

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Footnotes: The Music Makers

The Barista Collective2 Comments

We thought long and hard about whether we wanted to put musical excerpts in our podcast episode on movie soundtracks, but in the end we decided against it – not least because these pieces should be heard in their entirety, and they tend to work best when you listen to them along to the respective scenes from the films they’re from. So, below you’ll find our picks and some more of our thoughts about these wonderful tunes and composers.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #49: The Music Makers

The Barista Collective5 Comments

Bernard Hermann, John Barry, Ennio Morricone, Jerry Goldsmith: so many of our favourite movie moments wouldn’t be the same without their iconic soundtracks. What would Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud be without Miles Davis’ melancholy jazz trumpet? Or the title crawl of Star Wars: A New Hope without John Williams’ epic orchestral fanfare? What does music add to films that can’t be done in any other way? Can great music make a mediocre or even bad film memorable? What about films that use pre-existing music? And can there be too much of a good soundtrack? Join Julie, Matt and Sam as they discuss their favourite movie music moments!

Want to listen to the music we talked about for this episode? Check out our Footnotes post for some choice soundbites!

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Family Anatomy: Kajillionaire (2020)

Mege1 Comment

There is always a moment for me, early in any movie rather than late, where I ask myself if the storytelling is going to be good (or memorable, or quippy, or smart). Sometimes I am fooled into believing that it’s going to be great, as in The United States vs. Billie Holliday, where the movie starts out fine, gets bad and worse the longer I am sitting there, watching it crumble despite Andra Day’s fabulous performance. With Miranda July’s Kajillionaire, I knew that the story it was about to tell me was going to be a keeper, and I was not wrong. If you see Richard Jenkins standing at a downtown L.A. bus station, how can you not think of the pilot of Six Feet Under? The movie could easily be based on a graphic novel along the lines of Ghost World, and three streets along, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia might be unfolding.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: To every brief candle, its wick

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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.

Phew… Busy, busy week – but not so much here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, sadly. (Next week there’ll be more going on, promise!) Nonetheless, we did have a post by Matt about how he thinks we should stop worrying and learn to love the potential in remakes and reboots. So, let’s start with a trailer for one of the best remakes ever! Warning: There be bees.

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