TV – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

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

Jun 4, 2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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

May 29, 2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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

May 21, 2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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

May 14, 2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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

May 12, 2023May 12, 2023Matt1 Comment

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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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Some hate sand, some don’t

May 7, 2023May 7, 2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Let’s change our usual approach to Trailer Sundays and start with new trailers – because we’ve got one here that’s close to our hearts.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The quick and the dead

Apr 30, 2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees post, Matt argued that sometimes the past haunting us isn’t a Native American burial site under the floorboards of our suburban home, but just the first version we saw when we were young, to the point where, for us, it’s the ‘correct’ version: such as Blade Runner with the voiceover that Harrison Form famously hated, or Poltergeist without the scene where a terrified parapsychologist pulls off his face with his bare hands.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Fear itself

Apr 23, 2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

A number of us here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture like horror films, and this is reflected (see what we did there?) in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, with Mege’s thoughts on how horror reflects us back at ourselves. Lake Mungo, the film he mentions most prominently, is not as well known as the big names in the genre, but this little-known Australian gem is sad and terrifying, like many of the best ghost stories.