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.
We all love a good Agatha Christie yarn here at A Damn Fine Cup – but they’re not all cosy and twee. There’s plenty of Christie beyond Death on the Nile and Murder, She Said, and in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Matt writes about the darker sides of cosy crime.
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 don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Agatha Christie, her stories and her characters. Somehow, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot have always been around, much like modern mythology. Settings such as the manor house, scenes where a sleuth has assembled all the suspects and lays out all the clues, feckless local law enforcement: I knew all of these – without ever having read a single one of Christie’s novels or short stories or having seen any of the numerous adaptations. Again, I was aware of Margaret Rutherford in black-and-white movies and of Peter Ustinov in glamorous locales, sporting a silly moustache and a sillier accent. But the actual thing passed me by for the longest time.
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.
Every now and then our weekly Six Damn Fine Degrees series starts circling a certain topic for several weeks, and right now the focus is on Agatha Christie, her stories and the ways these were adapted. This week, Julie wrote one of her usual wonderful deep dives, this time on Billy Wilder’s film version of Witness for the Prosecution. Make sure to check it out!
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.
Sometimes our Six Damn Fine Degrees posts get caught on a certain topic: a few months ago, we had several posts in a row focusing on the films of Werner Herzog, and recently they’ve entered an Agatha Christie phase. This week, Sam remembered the great Maggie Smith, writing about two of her appearances in adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories: Death on the Nile and Evil under the Sun, both of which Smith featured in, albeit in different parts.
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.
Many of Criterion’s releases are the classics of Hollywood and world cinema that all film geeks have heard of: Fellini, Bergman, Varda. Or then it’s cult classics such as the original Godzilla films. Some of their releases are less known, though, such as Diamonds of the Night, which Matt discovered recently.
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 2002 the UK TV Channel ITV announced that it was to begin producing an all new adaptation of Agatha Christie‘s Miss Marple novels. These would be big-budget, high-production-value affairs, with an eye on the global TV market.
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!
A ’70s-inflected theme starts up: raspy, excitable horns, tense vibrato strings. On a burgundy background, a slim image appears across the width of the screen, a pair of eyes opening and looking at the audience, looking with intent. The eyes disappear and the background changes to a dark blue; the eyes pop up again, this time at the bottom of the screen, looking to the left. Again they disappear, the blue becomes darker, and the pair of eyes, familiar by now, comes up centre-screen, peeking right at first but then again focusing on us, the audience. White lines appear from the sides of the screen, one horizontal, one vertical, crossing over the eye on the right, then five concentric circles, going from large to small, all centred on where the lines cross – forming crosshairs, taking aim. The innermost circle turns into an O – and the title is revealed: TATORT.
The title sequence continues at this point, the theme becoming even more ’70s, if that is even possible, with a slapping bassline that’s probably more familiar to TV audiences across Germany (and Austria and Switzerland) than the German national anthem. It’s Sunday evening, 8.15pm. It’s Tatort time.
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.
Our Summer of Remakes podcast series ended at the beginning of the month, but Sam – whose idea the series theme was – had some thoughts looking back. So let’s start this week’s trailer -out not with a trailer but with what appears to be the first remake ever: Georges Méliès’ “Playing Cards”.
