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!
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.
Criterion does have some pretty fine looking films on offer, don’t they? This week, Matt hung out with some Japanese ghosts and goblins in Kwaidan. Hold on to your ears!
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!
There is no other single film that has as consistently shown up in clips and reels in my social media feed as Mommie Dearest (1981), the now legendary adaptation of the tell-all book by Christina Crawford about her mother Joan, infamously starring Faye Dunaway in a practically career-(b)ending turn. The sensationalist account of an abusive Hollywood icon and the deep psychological scars it left on her daughter must have been immediately earmarked for a movie adaptation – and what an adaptation it became! Melanie’s piece about abusive mothers, fathers and their vindictive daughters in Chinese drama series The Glory last week finally gave me a shameless chance to expose myself to Mommie Dearest in full for the very first time!
Continue readingGhosts, demons, spirits: who doesn’t like them and the ways they make life more interesting? Kwaidan is full of them, in various shapes: supernaturally-propelled hair taking revenge on a bad husband, an ice spirit taking on human shape and marrying a human woodcutter until he breaks a promise, nobility and soldiers killed in a long-ago war employing a blind monk for his storytelling skills, and ghostly visitors taking umbrage at being drunk by a samurai when they appear to him in a cup of tea.
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.
Vengeance is a dish best served over many episodes: in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Melanie writes about the rather dark familial goings-on in the Chinese historical drama The Glory.
So many video games are about escapism – but this doesn’t mean that the worlds we escape into when we play are necessarily better worlds than the one we inhabit. No, when we pick up that controller, we often find ourselves in situations that are brutal, life-or-death: warfare, disaster, the apocalypse. It’s therefore not surprising that perhaps the most common player interaction in games is killing – or its flip side, dying. Obviously, though, that’s partly beside the point: in a virtual world, death means very little, whether you’re the one doing the dying or the one who’s killing. One Nazi, zombie, mutant less – or, if it’s the Nazi, zombie or mutant who won that particular fight, you reload and get another chance at killing rather than being killed. The worlds we escape to may not be better than ours, but they’re exciting, and the reversibility of death is obviously a plus.
But is this all these worlds can be: places where we either kill or die, over and over?
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 1982, while England was whipped into a frenzy of nationalism by a wedding that, in hindsight, didn’t seem to benefit any of the parties involved, our Alan was taken to see Richard Attenborough’s Academy Award-winning Gandhi and got a glimpse of the ways that the British Empire wasn’t perhaps all it was cracked up to be.
Our Lost Summer continues, quite fittingly, with another David Lynch film: in our August espresso, Alan and Sam talk about Lynch’s most ’90s nightmare, Lost Highway, in which murder, mobsters, Mystery Men, Patricia Arquette (with black hair) and Patricia Arquette (with blond hair) abound. Add music by Nine Inch Nails, the Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein, plus a killer track by David Bowie, and you have a David Lynch film that, more than all his other work, very much is marked by the decade it was made, so much so that at times it feels like a feature-length video shown on MTV’s Alternative Nation. But does this make Lost Highway dated, or does this neo-Hitchcockian slice of jealousy and paranoia hold up in 2025? There’s only one way to find out: listen to us, because, as a matter of fact, we’re at your home right now.
For more Lost Summer listening about David Lynch, make sure to check out our June episode (dedicated to Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Mulholland Drive) and the July espresso (on Wild at Heart).
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!
In July 1981, my school went a bit mad. The heir to the British throne Prince Charles was getting married to Diana Spencer, someone the media genuinely referred to “a commoner”. Parts of the UK were getting insanely excited by the prospect, and this included my classroom. The Wedding, we were told, was a Big Event. For kids, this was an event that had everything. After all, there were Princes and Princesses, images of fancy soldiers and decorated palaces, alongside lots of maps smothered with pink. Union flags appeared in the school, and no trip to the shops was complete without seeing aisles of colourful tat with crowns on it.
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.
To what extent are our film and TV tastes determined by our parents and by what we watch growing up? In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Matt remembers the films and series he watched due to his mother: from Zulu via M*A*S*H to Bambi.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 