Six Damn Fine Degrees

Six Damn Fine Degrees #70: Have you ever wanted to walk into a matte painting?

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!

Have you ever travelled to a place and seen the sights – and it was a real disappointment, because in your mind, everything was much bigger and better and more amazing? If so, did the movies or other damn fine cups of culture play a role in this disappointment?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #69: You’re not on Tatooine anymore!

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!

Coffeebreak for Ben Kenobi and Luke Skywalker in the Tunisian desert? They are certainly not on Tatooine anymore!

I must admit I get the trouble with sci-fi Mege so pointedly discussed in last week’s post: I was also never quite an ardent fan of the genre as such, finding some of the choices made for supposedly far away worlds oddly quaint and cheap and some of the rubbery prosthetic creatures designed so unbelievably comical that I was not at all convinced any future or outer world would ever look like that. Of course there were great exceptions along the way: the creatures in Alien are suitably scary and beautiful and its realist spaceship and crew utterly believable, Star Wars is identifiably a fairy tale in space rather than science-fiction, and Star Trek’s universally humanist message sugarcoated all the tech talk I didn’t quite understand.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #68: The trouble with Sci-Fi

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 quote Harrison Ford: it took me a long, long, long, long, LONG time to warm up to sci-fi.

You travel through space and time and end up with what is supposed to be an exciting new planet with an unknown species – played by clearly human actors standing around in what looks like – oh, I dunno, the Moroccan desert? Yes, I know, there is a limit to every budget, but sci-fi has such promise to dazzle me with something I have never ever seen before, only to disappoint me with the constraints of movie-making and its financial limits. If you want me to follow you to a place where no man has gone before, make sure the make-up department isn’t already there before us, setting up their trailer. Needless to say, I was never a Trekkie and never understood the exuberance of the operatic derring-do of something like Star Wars. To me, A New Hope looked like fun, but it was essentially a western set in space. It was all too familiar because most things and places and beings looked… too close to home. Not strange enough.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #67: Galaxy Quest 

Julie2 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!

In a galaxy far, far, far away, a peaceful and slightly naïve alien cephalopod community is under attack by a cruel imperialist army of crustaceous insect people. Their response is to utilise what they take to be documentary footage of a spaceship, peopled by a human crew, which can evidently protect its inhabitants and travel throughout the universe. From these “historical documents” they replicate this spaceship including all of its technology, regardless of whether they completely understand its exact use, and use it to flee their aggressors. When the threat becomes ever more extreme and their numbers dwindle, they decide on a radical plan. They will find the original crew of the human-populated spaceship from the actual historical documentation, and plead for their help.

Unfortunately, the “historical documents” turn out to be a cheesy TV show from planet earth called Galaxy Quest, its plywood spaceship peopled by actors rather than a bold crew of explorers.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #66: Kapitän Kirk 

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!

As someone who is always trying to improve their German, without actually doing the hard slog of sitting down with an exercise book and learning all the correct genders for nouns or what on Earth is going on with prepositions (seriously – what is going on there?), I have discovered a dubious easier alternative: popular culture.

Or more specifically, popular culture dubbed into German. If there’s a big movie coming out that looks not brilliant, just a bit meh – then I try to watch it first in German. Actual complicated drama series are beyond my talents. I won’t understand enough to follow the plot. But Godzilla: King of The Monsters? I’m there! (Ich bin dort?)

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #65: The Wrath of the Goalkeeper

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!

I swear I am not a language pedant, but there are some misspellings that bother me more than others. I’m not talking about the theres, they’res and theirs of the linguistic world, I’m not talking about incorrect apostrophes or the like. It’s silly, irrelevant things – such as when people write “rogue” as “rouge”, even though I absolutely understand why someone would write the former as if it was the latter. English pronunciation and spelling, those are some potently weird things. Nonetheless, spell the Dungeons & Dragons character archetype as if it was makeup you put on your cheeks to look less pale and I will roll my eyes. I kid you not. (Okay, perhaps I am a language pedant, just a very selective one.)

But perhaps the misspelling that bothers me most for some obscure reason?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #64: Madeline Kahn’s moments to shine

samlinder7 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 Alan (so charmingly revisited in last week’s post), one of my favourite comedies of all time is Peter Bogdanovic’s screwball delight What’s Up, Doc? (1972). Besides the great rapport between Barbara Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, the perfect sense for timing and the riotous chase up and down the streets of San Francisco, I was most in love with one supporting actress in particular, the lovely Madeline Kahn. Her role as O’Neal’s annoying fiancée Eunice could easily have been a thankless one as the target of our spite and schadenfreude. Kahn, however, infused it with so much comedic energy, her ear-piercing voice chasing after her soon-to-be lost fiancé “Howard!”, to the audience’s great enjoyment. She was not too fond of her role, however, caught in ugly frocks and atrocious wigs and constantly making a fool of herself, but she certainly left an impression on one man in particular: upcoming comedy director Mel Brooks.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #63: What’s Up Doc?

Alan Kuhl Graham1 Comment

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!

A lot is written about Hollywood’s tendency for remakes. And a lot of it seems needlessly negative in my opinion. There’s nothing wrong with having another spin at an old success, it’s a formula as old as Hollywood. Often it fails, but sometimes it’s worth the effort. I’ve not crunched the numbers but I’m pretty sure the ratio of few successes/mostly failures is probably the same as for brand new films.

But alongside the Hollywood remake there’s another interesting beast. The film that is so clearly inspired by another, which doesn’t so much wear the influence on its sleeves as don the exact same influence tuxedo. It’s not a remake because it doesn’t do anything so obvious as try to recreate the plot, or the characters but instead takes as the starting point what the film’s makers loved about the earlier film and tries to find ways to make that work in a brand new context.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #62: The Cat’s Meow

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!

Peter Bogdanovich is probably best known for his early films such as The Last Picture Show or Paper Moon, although to a modern audience his face might be most recognizable as Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, the psychiatrist’s psychiatrist in The Sopranos. For all his many accomplishments I am perhaps most fond of his interviews. Books such as Who the Devil Made It or Who the Hell’s in It. His epic three-hour interview with Orson Welles, or the wistful Directed by John Ford. Bogdanovich was not just a filmmaker, he was a lover of movie culture and – notably – of movie lore.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #61: Tony “Scheherazade” Soprano

Matt1 Comment

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 met my now-wife back in the previous millennium. It took a while for things to work out between the two of us – anywhere between nine and eleven years, depending on how you measure and what you take as the starting point of a relationship that developed over a fairly long time, and that is still developing and growing. But especially during the first few years, there were a few constants. From the first, we went to the cinema with each other a lot. And early on, we would start watching TV series together – and once you start with a TV series with someone else, you can’t just go off and watch it on your own, because that would be simply uncivilised. Over the years we’ve watched so many series together: great ones, good ones, a fair few mediocre ones and even a couple of series that were plain bad. (I’m looking at you, Hunted and Intruders!) From Battlestar Galactica to Veronica Mars, from Ultraviolet to Lost, from House of Cards (the BBC original) to Edge of Darkness (also the BBC original).

But somehow, I would say that our origin story, our relationship as first friends and then more than friends as facilitated by television, really began with a mobster who went to see a psychiatrist.

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