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 it’s the diamonds in the rough of any medium that prove to be the most memorable – or so Matt argues in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees.
One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.
Like most people who’ve been playing video games for a long, long time, I like a good first-person shooter. I still remember the excitement of playing Wolfenstein 3D, and then later Doom and Quake. There were 3D environments before these, but they popularised them, while also driving the hardware evolution that, some 30-odd years later, would see graphics cards that do real-time raytracing. (If you have no idea what any of this means, don’t worry: it’s not what the post will be about.)
But while it’s fun to run around a 3D environment wielding a gun and shooting baddies, those aren’t my favourite first-person games. Give me a choice between running around, guns blazing, enemies falling left, right and centre, and sneaking around in shadows and biding my time, and it’s usually the latter that appeals most.
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.
There is certainly joy in encountering anything perfectly crafted. Whether we’re talking about films or books or songs or games, there are examples that are exactly what they set out to be and you can’t see a single thing you’d change. Such craftsmanship is exceedingly rare, but to see it is always amazing.
And yet: sometimes it’s the imperfection of something that makes it especially memorable.
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.
From the invaluable supporting actors to the hidden gems of cinema and TV: sometimes it isn’t the main events, the Brad Pitts and Jennifer Lawrences, the Oppenheimers and the Barbies, that we gravitate to. In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Mege pinpointed some of those gems that take some looking for – including the fascinating Finnish historical horror film, Sauna.
It’s that time of the year again: A Damn Fine Cup of Culture is dedicating its next four main episodes to a single theme. After 2022’s Summer of Directors and last year’s Summer of Collaborations, this year’s hot months are dedicated to remakes. And yes, remakes tend to get a bad rap from film fans, but there’s enough there that is interesting, fascinating and worth watching – and, yes, in many cases worth criticising. We think we’ve picked an interesting bunch of films and remakes, and we’re starting with a special case of one of the greats of Hollywood cinema remaking one of his own films: Alfred Hitchcock and The Man Who Knew Too Much. First in 1934, in one of his British films, and then again in 1956, Hitchcock told the same overall story of a couple whose child is kidnapped because of a secret plot they’ve uncovered by accident – but while a lot is the same, from the basic setup to the climax at the Royal Albert Hall, these are still two very different flavours of Hitchcock. Join Sam and his co-baristas Julie and Matt as they discuss multiple men who knew too much. What does each version bring to the table? Which did we prefer? If we had to choose, what would we go for: Peter Lorre’s pitch-perfect baddie or Doris Day belting “Que Sera, Sera”?
For further listening on Alfred Hitchcock, make sure to check out our earlier episodes, “The Good, the Bad and Alfred Hitchcock” (#33) and last month’s “Swan Song” (#80), in which Alan and Sam talked about the final films of Hitchcock and Billy Wilder.
Continue readingWelcome 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’ve got nothing against a good blockbuster – some time ago, I sang the praises of Mad Max: Fury Road, and so I am itching to go see Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. And I have seen almost everything there is to see in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including the Basel exhibition, thanks to my favorite daughter. But there are some unsung gems out there that only I and three or four others know about. I think I’ve written about Lake Mungo more than once, so that one is no longer an obscure indie film since it crops up on many 12 horror gems you’ve never seen before! lists.
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.
Remember those perennial supporting actors? Those faces that you’d see in many, many films, and that would always make you take notice when they turned up? Sam certainly does! And, seeing how he mentions The Tamarind Seed, a film that many of our readers are unlikely to have heard of, here’s a trailer for this 1974 movie by Blake Edwards.
If you look at Mathieu Kassovitz’ 1995 modern classic La Haine with a dispassionate eye, it’s easy to criticise the film. It is obnoxious in the way it demands our attention, not too dissimilar from some of its protagonists and their look-at-me-fuck-you-too way of life. It can be accused, and fairly so, of being derivative, in terms of its style and its story: there’s more than a little Mean Streets and Do the Right Thing to the the film. And it’s not exactly subtle – when given the choice between going loud and going nuanced, nine out of ten times it will choose the former.
But, bloody hell, if La Haine isn’t still tremendously effective – and timely.
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.
Reading Matt’s latest piece on discovering film stars in their early performances before their eventual breakthrough, I was wondering how many actors actually never really got to that point yet still remain so easily recognisable. You know the ones I’m talking about: the instantly familiar faces that are hard to place but that you’ve seen repeatedly in films or on television; the staple supporting cast of many well-known directors from Alfred Hitchcock to Blake Edwards or Mel Brooks to the Quentin Tarantino; the returning characters in any franchise from Bond to Marvel and long-running series like The Avengers or Sex Education.
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.
Remember those instances when you first became aware of an actor? Matt definitely remember the first time he became aware of Jennifer Connelly – and seeing Labyrinth as a kid may also have made him uncomfortably aware of just how tight those tights were that David Bowie wore.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 