Six Damn Fine Degrees

Six Damn Fine Degrees #174: Walking into Game of Thrones in Croatia

samlinder3 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.

Just like Mege confessed in last week’s post, I also stopped watching Game of Thrones after few seasons, not because I hadn’t initially found it riveting and exciting, but because the rampant sex, violence and surprise deaths had taken away pretty much all the characters I cared for by just the end of season 3 (especially in the infamous ‘Red Wedding’ episodes). My nerve-rattling and character-investing had largely been in vain, and so my friends and I called it quits.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #173: Go build me a world to my liking

Mege3 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!

To me, The Lord of the Rings is unreadable. Not because the writing is bad; it’s not. And not because I am not into fantasy; while it’s not my favourite genre, I don’t run for the hills if someone suggests a good fantasy novel to me. I have not yet read a bad China Miéville novel, if that is anything to go on. I am also not afraid of super-long novels, either – behold, I am the guy who read Infinite Jest and loved it. It’s just that investing myself in a heavy brick of a novel, there is a point where the text has to convince me that it’s worth wading through it for the next couple of days or weeks.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #172: I do not like this guy at all!

Matt3 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.

As Alan talked about in his Six Damn Fine Degrees instalment last week, there are very good reasons to dislike some actors even when we enjoy their performances and the films they’re in. The same is true for directors, producers, writers, and so on. Hollywood has its fair share of bigots, racists, antisemites, homophobes, abusers, and various bastards of any shape or size. And the more we find out about what went on in yesteryear’s film industry, the more skeletons pop out from the closet. This may make our feelings about some of our favourite films more complicated, but I’d agree with Alan: all in all, it’s better to know.

However, sometimes we develop irrational dislikes of the faces we see on the silver screen. I started off hating Eddie Redmayne for no better reason than, well, literally disliking his face… and, yes, his acting style and often his choice of roles. Possibly his voice as well. But I’m mostly over it. Mostly.

But for a long, long time I nursed an irrational dislike of an actor who had done even less than poor Eddie to deserve my ire. Reader: I used to hate David Morse.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #171: Charles Coburn, Gentlemen Prefer Hate

Alan Kuhl Graham3 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.

Being a fan of the Golden Age of Hollywood comes with a price. As much as you can celebrate the writing, the glamour, the celebrity even the innovation of those times, it’s very hard to immerse yourself in that era without coming up against a sad truth. Maybe it will be a scene somewhere in the film that casually drops in racism. Or an offensive stereotype with but a few seconds of screen time. And sometimes it will be the appearance of someone who you have learnt was a horrible bigot.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #170: Whatever happened to Nastassja Kinski?

samlinder3 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.

These days, with director Werner Herzog still nourishing his infamously conflicted yet cinematically so fruitful relationship with Teutonic titan Klaus Kinski (even spoofed in Documentary Now!, as described in last week’s post by Matt), it is an almost forgotten fact that for a while, some forty years ago, a very different Kinski made her way into the audience’s consciousness: his daughter Nastassja.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #169: Don’t mock the mockumentary

Matt4 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.

Werner Herzog must be one of the most frequently parodied filmmakers in the world. I have no evidence of this other than my own gut feeling, but is there anyone else that’s been caricatured as often as him? And good old Werner gets in on the fun too: he’s voiced versions of himself on The Simpsons, The Boondocks and American Dad – and it’s likely there’s an element of self-parody in him voicing a character described as “Old Reptile” in an episode of Rick and Morty.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #168: My Best Fiend

Julie4 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.

Here’s a trivia question for you: which actor and director, who famously ended up working together, supposedly shared a boarding house in Munich?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #167: We likes quizzes

Mege6 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!

There is something intensely likeable about movie quizzes. If you know the answer, you feel really quite smug: Yes, I’ve seen the movie, and I know a whole lot about that film – it was even produced by someone you wouldn’t expect. You get that warm, fuzzy feeling in your stomach because you’ve scored a point, while a lot of the others didn’t, you can tell from their puzzled faces, and you are inching just a tiny bit closer to the top spot. And on the other hand, if you don’t know the answer, you go into instant detective mode: I should know the answer, now how can I deduce that from the other movie that very same director has made just before this one? Hmmm… You rack your brain about a name, and then, with your last ounce of with and memory, you may just come up with the right answer. Most of the time, anyway.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #166: Fitzcarraldo

Alan Kuhl Graham6 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.

One of the curiosities about the filmography of Werner Herzog is that it contains his own little two-film micro-genre – “fanatical madman played by Klaus Kinski goes up the Amazon to the music of Popol Vuh.” His first foray is 1972’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, which is quite possibly one of my favourite films of all times. So when I came to Fitzcarraldo, the other of the two films, I was both excited and filled with trepidation. Would it meet the earlier film’s dizzying heights?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #165: Love in the Time of Volcanic Events

Matt4 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.

It’s a story made for the movies, isn’t it? Two oddballs meet and fall in love with each other – and with volcanoes. They become documentary filmmakers and travel the world, capturing the awe-inspiring power and beauty of volcanoes on camera… until, twenty years later, they die together in an eruption. Perhaps not the happiest ending to a love story, but one so fitting it could have been penned by a screenwriter.

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