Six Damn Fine Degrees #136: Some like it cult

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!

The classic series The Avengers has frequently popped up on my radar, and it’s usually mentioned in positive terms. And yet, I’ve never bothered to seek it out. Too much to watch already, too many things that come first on my TV bucket list – and that’s before I even get into the favourites I’d like to revisit – if the streaming services of my choice haven’t taken them off their catalogue and erased out of existence, that is. Same with, say, Miami Vice, or Absolutely Fabulous or (don’t tell Alan) Randall and Hopkins (Deceased). And, to be honest, one main reason is that people talked about them with a great sense of reverence – or they don’t talk about them at all. They’re cult TV – and that’s something that tends to make me hesitate.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The silent treatment

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.

Jean-Pierre Melville is mainly known for making films that could be described stylish gangster existentialism. Le silence de la mer however is very different from Le samouraï or The Red Circle – but no less compelling, provided you can get into its much more internalised drama about a different kind of resistance from what we’re used to at the movies, as Matt argued in his post.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #135: Amazing Avengers Associations

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!

Everything is connected: Just think of Emma Peel, Tracy Bond and Olena Tyrell, all played by Diana Rigg!

Reading Alan’s insightful observations about the Dark Phoenix saga from last week and his reference to British cult series The Avengers (1961-69; renewed in 1976/77, The Movie in 1999), I was reminded what these Six Degrees posts are really all about: connecting everything in the world of film, music and culture to everything else. And there is hardly another series that represents that principle of six degrees removed as well as The Avengers!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: “Confess, Communist!” Said the Sexy Priest

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 priest, a Communist and a (former) member of the Résistance walk into a confessional: while Matt’s currently enjoying a series of films by Jean-Pierre Melville, he especially enjoyed that Léon Morin, Priest was something of an odd one out, seeing how it focuses on a female protagonist.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Going places

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.

Everybody’s talkin’ about our post on Midnight Cowboy– okay, not really, but still, if you missed it, go and check our the lastest Criterion Corner, about John Schlesinger’s late ’60s classic.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: If you Press a Word long and hard enough…

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.

Most kids get a kick out of watching films that they are supposedly not old enough for – and sometimes it’s those films that shape our tastes for life. For this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Sam wrote about how he got to see both Once Upon a Time in the West and The Name of the Rose at an impressionable age… and what an impression they both left on him!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Hats, cats, rabbits

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.

After two Six Damn Fine Degrees about Billy Wilder’s Fedora, there was really only one way we could go, wasn’t there? And we did do exactly that, with Matt’s memories of the loops he had to jump through before he could finally watch Raiders of the Lost Ark.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: It’s the pictures that got small

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.

For every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction – and for every attempt to rehabilitate Fedora, we get a counterpoint: in this case, Alan’s post expressing his issues with Billy Wilder’s late-career flop, drawing a direct line to his iconic Sunset Boulevard.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Big Fish

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 had a busy Friday this week, with not just one post but two – including Sam’s look at one of the rarely mentioned (and even more rarely appreciated) films in Billy Wilder’s filmography: Fedora.

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It’s already gone: revisiting Six Feet Under

Around the time that my father received his cancer diagnosis in 2021, I started rewatching HBO’s Six Feet Under, a five-season series about the lives of the Fisher family who run a funeral home in Los Angeles. I’d watched the entire series before, twice, the last time finishing in 2008. At the time, I wasn’t married yet (though I was already living with my now-wife), and my parents were both still alive, as were my partner’s. My mother was the first of our parents who died, in 2009. On this day a year ago, my dad died, not of the cancer he’d been diagnosed with but of complications in connection with the illness or the treatment or perhaps simply his age, and this morning I watched “Everyone’s Waiting”, Six Feet Under‘s final episode.

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