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!
Spoiler warning: I will discuss plot points and revelations from all of Stranger Things‘ seasons, so be warned, or the mind flayer will get you.
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 this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees post, Julie wrote about the photographer Peter Lindbergh and what his work meant to her. So, instead of a trailer, here’s a tribute video that was made when he died in 2019.
Thinking back to television when I was a kid – that is, the early 1980s in Switzerland -, I mainly remember these: German entertainment shows featuring all the beige in the world, the cheesy US series of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the likes of Simon & Simon and Knight Rider, and the Japanese anime adaptations of (mostly) European children’s literature, from Heidi to Pinocchio. Just as much as the daily and weekly fare, though, I remember the ‘prestige television’ of the time: the big miniseries that featured impressive casts and that by and large were concerned with more mature themes. I remember these being something of a family event that we’d gather in front of the TV to watch: Roots, Fatal Vision (starring Karl Malden, that big-nosed embodiment of integrity), the German Das Boot (which I’ll always think of as a miniseries, since I don’t think I ever saw the original cinema edit). To pre-teen me, these felt excitingly like grown-up television, and while I would probably not have put it like that at the time, they felt so much less generic and more ambitious than the ongoing series I was otherwise watching at the time.
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.
“This should be the responsibility of photographers today: to free women, and finally everyone, from the terror of youth and perfection.” ~Peter Lindbergh
Continue readingJoin 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 this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Sam wrote about the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyère, an incongruous celebration of Giger’s sex-and-biomechanics aesthetic in a cosy mountain towns in Switzerland – and since everyone defaults to Alien when it comes to Giger, let’s for once feature two trailers to films that the Swiss artist contributed to that are perhaps a tad less celebrated.
Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s Still Walking was the second or third film by the Japanese director that I watched, after After Life and probably Nobody Knows. In some ways, I now recognise it as a more typical film for Kore-eda than After Life, in terms of its themes and character constellations. Where the earlier film undoubtedly has the feel and emotional heft that I’ve come to recognise as typical of a Kore-eda film, it is much more high-concept in terms of its premise and plot. More than that, though, when I think of Kore-eda, it‘s his families, both biological and found, that come to mind, and where family isn‘t as obviously a theme of After Life, Still Walking is very much about this: the families we find ourselves saddled with, the ones we make for ourselves.
But family isn‘t just about the people we have in our lives, it is also about those we have lost. Still Walking is focused on a theme that is central to many of the director‘s films: considering the kindness and warmth that are perhaps the most apparent characteristic of Kore-eda‘s films at a first glance, it is striking how many of them are in no small part about death.
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.
Inspired by Alan’s Scavengers Reign review in last week’s post, and his observation that the series looks as if Swiss Alien designer HR Giger had joined Studio Ghibli in the 1980s, I decided to follow the trail that Giger left behind since his untimely death ten years ago in his and my home country. It quickly turned out that the mothership of his creations these days is, fittingly, a museum in eerie Medieval castle St. Germain high on top of Gruyères, home of one of Switzerland’s most famous cheeses.
Continue readingJoin 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.
Isn’t it typical? A good new animated series is cancelled after only one season. At least in the case of Scavengers Reign (which Alan wrote about in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees) the series was picked up by Netflix… even though they’re only showing it in select countries. Isn’t it typical?
Our June espresso is a special one: differently from the vast majority of our podcast episodes, this one had Alan and Matt recording in the same room, talking into one mic – and the topic of their conversation is the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Matt’s local cinema, the REX Bern, recently showed a series of Kore-eda’s films, from his first feature Marobosi to his latest, Monster, and Matt’s been wanting to do a Kore-eda episode for a long time, so the two took this opportunity to finally fulfil that wish. Join them as they discuss what makes a Kore-eda film, which ones they like best, and (obviously) what they would choose, After Life-style, as the sole memory to be filmed and taken into the beyond.
For more on Hirokazu Kore-eda, make sure to check out these blog posts:
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 last week’s column Matt wrote about the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that “You’re put in a world that is likely to eat you alive in many, many ways – but you’re also reliant on that world…“, and the moment I read those words I knew I had to abandon any plans I had to talk about another video game, or Tarkovsky, or even return to the actual Chernobyl. Because it made me want to write about my favourite TV show right now, Scavengers Reign.
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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 