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 1990, Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins came out, a biting musical about the men and women who felt called upon to kill a US president. Through a set of historical characters, from John Wilkes Booth via Lee Harvey Oswald to Sara Jane Moore and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (who both attempted, and failed, to kill Gerald Ford), Sondheim shows us his bleak version of the American Dream: “Everybody’s got the right to be happy” – and what better way to achieve happiness and fill the emptiness inside yourself than to kill yourself a POTUS?
All of these would-be and actual murderers are pathetic in their own particular ways. They are angry at the world and the ways in which it doesn’t conform to their wishes. They are attention seekers who wished to put their imprint on America, having little to offer the world apart from their own warped ideas of greatness and how to achieve it. And perhaps none of them are more pathetic than Charles Guiteau: a liar, a thief, a narcissistic failure.
Few people, other than Sondheim fans, know Guiteau’s name. Even fewer know the name of the man Guiteau killed: James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States of America.
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.
This week, Matt returned to the Zone. No, not the Brothers Strugatsky’s Zone, nor Tarkovsky’s, and not even the Zone of the original Stalker trilogy of video games. No, this time it’s the Zone of Stalker 2 – and it’s an even more inhospitable place than it used to be… though it may just be the most beautiful take on this particular post-apocalypse.
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.
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.
Two days ago, we learnt of the tragic death of Marjane Satrapi, French-Iranian writer and filmmaker, perhaps most famous for her graphic novel Persepolis and its later adaptation into a film, also by Satrapi. If you haven’t yet seen (or read) Persepolis, make sure to seek it out – it is a story that is timely not only because of its author’s untimely death.
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.
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.
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!
Oh boy, do I have opinions on actors and the right age to cast them. One of them being: You can’t fake age. An old actor, no matter how brilliant, can’t believably inhabit the role of a young man, or the other way round. The body doesn’t play along. It’s too stiff, or not stiff enough. The voice is too rough. The mind doesn’t play along. It’s too careful, or too reckless in how it launches the body forward to claim space. The really good actors who try, have a sort of uncanny valley effect on me, an unsettling nimbus of “not quite right”. This is what made Dorian Gray so compelling: he found a magical loophole to fake his own youth.
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.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 