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!
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!
I have a strong personal belief when it comes to criticism of art of any kind: critics have to make a distinction between disliking the thing they’re criticising, whether that’s a film or a book, a game or an album, and that thing actually being bad. This doesn’t mean that they have to put every criticism down as a personal dislike: a good critic should be free to think, and state, that this movie or that novel is actually bad. But any critic, or indeed anyone uttering criticism, that seems to think that if they dislike a work it must obviously be bad? They can go take a long walk while I unfollow them and remove their sites from my bookmarks.
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’m a little jealous of all of you who misremember scenes in movies, because I have a hard time remembering detailed scenes of anything. It’s gotten particularly bad the older I turn. There are books I’ve enjoyed where, four months later, I can’t recollect whether I actually read them or was just planning to.
Apart from, you know, becoming decrepit, this is probably a function of how differently I approach reading. These days, I use books to complement and enhance how I feel. I read whodunnits* because I explicitly want to surround myself with mystery and light humour. I read sci-fi to be wowed by the infinite expanses of the universe. I read ‘found family’ stories to satisfy my craving for connection and so on. I regulate my mood with fiction, and I am very picky about what I choose. I’m no longer reading in order to be surprised.
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!
Just like Alan described in last week’s post, there are movies I first saw long ago that I could swear turn out differently than on recent rewatches. At times, no matter how much research you do, the misremembered version cannot be unearthed: no Director’s Cut has since been released, nor have deleted scenes been found, nor is there footage of such scenes to be found in any image galleries. Nevertheless, I’m certain I’ve seen the scene. Or was it just in my head after all?
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!
Back in the mid-’90s I was living in a shared house, and one evening we decided to rent the Tony Scott movie True Romance. We enjoyed its mix of action, violence and Tarantino dialogue – all of which seemed to match the popular zeitgeist of the time. Then we got to the ending, when one of my housemates suddenly got incredibly animated.
“That’s NOT how it ends!”
We turned, slightly perplexed. I mean, we had just watched the thing. We had all seen the same ending, with the two leads driving into the sunset.
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!
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!
We’ve had a run of posts about movies and shows that have influenced us in the past. (Given the crowd here, they’ve mostly been creepy.) Which is timely: my kids, at 12 and 15, are just old enough that I can show them my favourite movies that live rent free in my brain. It’s great. They haven’t seen enough yet to be jaded by tropes. Everything is new and wonderful. The Sixth Sense, for instance, had them yelling “PLOT TWIST” and “no wayyyyy”. Back to the Future III, in which Doc falls in love in the Wild West but has a falling out with the lady, had my twelve year-old wail “My ship! They sunk my ship!”
It’s been educational for all of us.
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 can vividly recall a number of recurring dreams I had as a child that terrified me. One involved a burning photo, with the person in the image seemingly aware they were on fire. Another involved discovering that people, when hugged, would crumble into nothing. But worst of all would be to be unsettled by a man with his back to me. Only for him to turn around and reveal that he did not have a face.
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!
At a time when Matt would geek out with his fellow uni pals over ’90s TV series on a regular basis, I was still stuck in a positively rural Swiss middle school just getting into taping films and shows and sharing them with people in my class. It was actually my very tech-savvy grandfather who was the innovator in our family and had not only bought the first computer (a Commodore Amiga) but more recently a double-decker video cassette recorder. Which meant that we were finally getting his hand-me-down, our first family VHS player/recorder! So at the tender age of twelve, I finally got my hands on anything from Star Wars, Star Trek, Alfred Hitchcock and, of course, James Bond. Many of these recordings were missing bits at the beginning or at the end, were shown in questionably censored pan-and-scan versions and were of course dubbed in German. Nonetheless, the good ones got through to us and – unequipped with cell phones or social media – the schoolyard became the arena in which we would review, pan or marvel at the latest tapes making the rounds.
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!
I had the best start at Uni that any mid-’90s geek could have wished for: on my first day as a university student, I was introduced to another student who’d already been studying for a couple of years and who was a fellow geek, so before I’d even started signing up for seminars and lectures, I found that the place where I would be spending much of the next ten years or so (yes, I did hang around at Uni for a fairly long time), there was a bunch of likeminded people who were just as much into the geeky fare of the time as me. Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and especially the still relatively new hotness that was The X-Files: differently from school or from home, where I was pretty much the only one who was into these series, people here were just as excited as I was about Captain Picard, Data, Commander Sisko, Major Kira, Odo, Agents Mulder and Scully, Assistant Director Skinner, The Cigarette Smoking Man, and all the other heroes, villains, monsters and freaks.
