Six Damn Fine Degrees #197: The Umbrella Academy

Mege4 Comments

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!

Warning: There be spoilers.

I haven’t read the comics, but have every intention to do so, but I don’t know why I haven’t praised the many great aspects of The Umbrella Academy (2019-2024). I have insomnia these days (or nights, rather), and so it takes something stronger to keep me watching attentively during the small hours. That bunch of ever-bickering unrelated siblings is a treat with comedy, drama, weirdness, psychological depth and the fear of the end of the world (more than once, hehe).

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Women at the edge of getting lost on an Australian landmark

The 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.

This week, on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, Matt wrote about what happens when three girls vanish during a school outing, in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Continue reading →

Six Damn Fine Degrees #196: Thelma Ritter

Julie2 Comments

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!

“She could reveal to an audience the tragedy of the human condition and do it by being a supreme comedienne” ~ Paddy Chayefsky on Thelma Ritter.

The term ‘character actor’, when applied to women, too often only implies a woman of a certain age. The one who doesn’t get to be the lead, who doesn’t get her own movie romance. If, that is, there are even any parts for her at all. The one who is ‘just’ there for support. But these actors not only have to hold their own against the lead every moment they are on screen, they need to knock it out of the park on every single take. And Thelma Ritter is the real deal. Instantly recognisable with her looks, and the way she sounds: instead of having herself made over to be more palatable for the public, she embraced these things to great effect. Every scene she was in, even her uncredited early roles, however brief, are memorable.

Continue reading →

Criterion Corner: Picnic at Hanging Rock (#29)

Matt1 Comment

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: pupils from a girls’ school in Australia go on an outing to a nearby geological formation. Some of the girls go to explore the area – and disappear. One turns up later, with no memories of what happened. The others remain gone. No traces are found, no blood, no bodies. Nothing.

The mystery is never solved. And it is this, not knowing what happened, that begins to corrode the lives of those left behind.

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: If I could turn back the clock

The 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.

One of the filmmakers we, like so many cinephiles, keep circling back to is Alfred Hitchcock – most recently in our latest Six Damn Fine Degrees, in which Sam wrote about his love for Rear Window.

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Espresso: August 2024

The Barista Collective1 Comment

Imagine not only being a cinephile, and not only writing and talking about film – but doing this professionally: being a film critic is something many of us in the blogosphere dream of. Meet Alan Mattli: Alan is not only teaching and doing research into literature and film at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, he is also a reviewer for the German-language Swiss film and TV platform Maximum Cinema and (Swiss German) the Maximum Cinema podcast. While his reviews at Maximum Cinema and on his website Facing the Bitter Truth (which he launched in 2008, while still at school), and while much of his writing at these sites is in German, you can find his writing in English on Letterboxd. In our August espresso podcast, Matt talks to Alan about his way to becoming a film critic, whether he watches films differently as a critic, and how film criticism has changed in recent years.

P.S.: Here’s a list of Alan’s favourite current film critics:

Continue reading →

Six Damn Fine Degrees #195: Rear Window as my ultimate cinematic experience

samlinder3 Comments

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!

As Alan describes so well in last week’s post on seeing Memories of Murder as his perfect post-pandemic return to the cinema, the question about what we love most about movies can reveal itself within just one such film: a fantastically involving plot, equal levels of suspense and amusement, inspiring visuals and soundscapes, carefully fleshed-out characters and themes, as well as a totally satisfying ending. With a different film at hand, I just felt the same again with Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the film I always describe as probably the best cinematic experience ever made.

Continue reading →

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Memories of Disney murdering childhood memories

The 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.

This week on Six Damn Fine Degrees, Alan reminisced on Memories of Murder – though since we featured the trailer not too long ago, here’s something else instead: Tony Zhao’s “Every Frame a Painting” video essay on Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece.

Continue reading →

Forever Fellini: Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

Matt1 Comment

We’re back, several months after 8 1/2 (sorry!), with a film that I find frustrating and confounding – and yet I’m difficult to shake it off: Juliet of the Spirits. Two years after Fellini’s last film, and after two movies in which Marcello Mastroianni played variants (albeit more overtly attractive ones) of the director himself, Fellini cast his wife Giulietta Massina, for the first time in eight years (he’d last directed her in Nights of Cabiria) – and, in a twist on what he’d done with Mastroianni, Masina plays a character not dissimilar from herself: Giulietta Boldrini is an upper-class housewife, married to a philandering, self-centred husband, and while the details are vague but specific enough to show that the Boldrinis aren’t literally Fellini and Masina, the constellation of their marriage isn’t a hundred miles from that of the famous film-making couple.

Continue reading →

Six Damn Fine Degrees #194: Bong Joon-Ho’s “Memories Of Murder”

Alan Kuhl Graham4 Comments

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!

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the film Memories of Murder.

Towards the end of lockdown, when the cinema’s reopened, I have fond memories of my earliest trips to see movies. I mean, it wasn’t quite the same. At least half the seats in most cinemas had been removed to create gaps between punters. Masks were compulsory and the experience felt jarring. But there was still something about being able to see films again on the Big Screen – especially given concerns just a few months earlier that the cinemas might never reopen.

Continue reading →