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!
One of Jack Lemmon’s most impressive skills as an actor is his ability to take the role of a slightly schlubby loser, a character prone to selfish and petty acts, and still make him likeable. You can really see this in his films with Billy Wilder, roles such as Jerry in Some Like It Hot, C.C. Baxter in The Apartment, Nestor Patou in Irma La Douce and Wendell Armbruster Jr in Avanti! But I think its perhaps best highlighted in his absence from another Wilder film – Kiss Me, Stupid.
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.
Straight from Little Rock, this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees has Julie talk about what she had instead of Disney princesses: Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei and Jane Russell’s Dorothy.
Our Lost Summer started with an episode in honour of David Lynch, the artist and director who’s been an inspiration to us here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture. After last month’s espresso episode, in which Sam and Matt talked about the extended deleted scenes that were released for Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, we’re now continuing our tribute to the man with a stealth Second Chances episode: Alan, a big fan of Lynch, has nonetheless bounced off the director’s Wild at Heart (1990), while Sam has been a fan from the beginning, so the two of them have revisited the film. Has time changed Alan’s assessment? Have Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and a fantastic supporting cast ranging from Diane Ladd and Willem Dafoe to Harry Dean Stanton and a bunch of familiar faces from Twin Peaks, WA won him over – or, indeed, Sam’s enthusiasm for this pulpy pop thriller that nods more than just once or twice in the direction of camp classic The Wizard of Oz?
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.
How do the films we watch as children affect our taste as adults? And what if we don’t really watch children’s films when we’re growing up, but instead our parents take us to see Amadeus or The Last Emperor? Matt has a thought or two on these questions.
One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.
There are a number of films that have been immensely influential on video games. Their thumbprints can be found all over gaming. An obvious example of this is Aliens; even beyond actual adaptations of the IP, you find the trope of space marines fighting insectoid xeno creepy-crawlies on hostile planets again and again – and sometimes, ironically, it’s the literal, licensed Aliens spin-offs that are among the games worst at replicating the Aliens playbook, more so than the games that are basically Aliens with the registration number filed off.
Another one of the clear inspirations for many games are the Indiana Jones films. It’s a perfect match, really: Indy makes for an appealing character type that gamers would want to play, there’s the appeal of mysterious legends and foreboding ruins, and the films are even structured in ways that lend themselves to being translated into the gaming medium: find artefact A, which opens door B, behind which there’s puzzle C, and so on, leading to legendary MacGuffin Z. Cue end credits.
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 a child, before the age of 7 or so, my parents took the family to the cinema once a year. Always on the second Sunday of Advent, we’d go and see whatever Disney movie was on – and it seems that there always was a Disney movie on at that time, sometimes a new one, sometimes a rerun. I don’t much remember the actual films: I have faint memories of seeing The Fox and the Hound, which would fit with the timeframe I’m talking about, and I think that Robin Hood and The Aristocats were also among the Disney films I saw when I was very young. I remember the tradition, though, which included us going to eat at an Italian restaurant after we left the cinema.
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.
Want something new in your streaming playlist? Once again, Melanie delivers a top-notch tip in her latest Six Damn Fine Degrees post, this time about Chinese historical drama Flourished Peony. (Make sure to switch on subtitles in the trailer below!)
Hundreds of films and TV series make it onto our screens each year – but just as many vanish, some before they ever make it in front of an audience. The second episode of our summer series, the Lost Summer, is dedicated to these: the films that are destroyed or vanish into some vault, the TV series that were never archived, or even the legendary scenes that are much talked about but never seen. Join Julie, Alan and Sam as they explore the romance and the frustration inherent in this vast library of lost film and TV. Why are we fascinated so much by what is lost? Why are the movie and television industries often so cavalier about preserving this cultural heritage? And which of the vanished would our cultural baristas most like to see found again?
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 