I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Cinema is the true Wayback Machine

MattLeave 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’s Six Damn Fine Degrees (by our fabulous film historian Julie) looks at one of the iconic stars of the 1960s and 1970s especially: Faye Dunaway, seen through the lens of the HBO documentary Faye by Laurent Bouzereau.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #96: Lost Summer – Gone too soon

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We’re concluding our summer series, Lost Summer, with an episode dedicated to the actors that died not in old age, looking back at a long, storied career, but that were gone too soon. From tragic silent film icon Rudolph Valentino, via River Phoenix, a teen idol promising to become one of Hollywood’s acting greats, to Philip Seymour Hoffman, a fearless actor who stood out even among amazing ensemble casts: how do we feel about their lives and their deaths? What is our relationship to these people that we largely know from playing fictional characters? Why can it feel like a deeper genuine loss when one of the actors we like dies? And is there a dark side to how fans mourn their idols, and how the movie industry uses its stars as commodities, even in death?

P.S.: Make sure to check out the other entries in our Lost Summer, running from June to September!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Buggin’ out

MattLeave 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.

Criterion does have some pretty fine looking films on offer, don’t they? This week, Matt hung out with some Japanese ghosts and goblins in Kwaidan. Hold on to your ears!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #249: Mommie Dearest!

samlinderLeave a comment

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 no other single film that has as consistently shown up in clips and reels in my social media feed as Mommie Dearest (1981), the now legendary adaptation of the tell-all book by Christina Crawford about her mother Joan, infamously starring Faye Dunaway in a practically career-(b)ending turn. The sensationalist account of an abusive Hollywood icon and the deep psychological scars it left on her daughter must have been immediately earmarked for a movie adaptation – and what an adaptation it became! Melanie’s piece about abusive mothers, fathers and their vindictive daughters in Chinese drama series The Glory last week finally gave me a shameless chance to expose myself to Mommie Dearest in full for the very first time!

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Criterion Corner: Kwaidan (#90)

MattLeave a comment

Ghosts, demons, spirits: who doesn’t like them and the ways they make life more interesting? Kwaidan is full of them, in various shapes: supernaturally-propelled hair taking revenge on a bad husband, an ice spirit taking on human shape and marrying a human woodcutter until he breaks a promise, nobility and soldiers killed in a long-ago war employing a blind monk for his storytelling skills, and ghostly visitors taking umbrage at being drunk by a samurai when they appear to him in a cup of tea.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Itsy bitsy spider women and giant policemen

MattLeave 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.

Vengeance is a dish best served over many episodes: in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Melanie writes about the rather dark familial goings-on in the Chinese historical drama The Glory.

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Is this the real life? Knit’s Island (2023)

MattLeave a comment

So many video games are about escapism – but this doesn’t mean that the worlds we escape into when we play are necessarily better worlds than the one we inhabit. No, when we pick up that controller, we often find ourselves in situations that are brutal, life-or-death: warfare, disaster, the apocalypse. It’s therefore not surprising that perhaps the most common player interaction in games is killing – or its flip side, dying. Obviously, though, that’s partly beside the point: in a virtual world, death means very little, whether you’re the one doing the dying or the one who’s killing. One Nazi, zombie, mutant less – or, if it’s the Nazi, zombie or mutant who won that particular fight, you reload and get another chance at killing rather than being killed. The worlds we escape to may not be better than ours, but they’re exciting, and the reversibility of death is obviously a plus.

But is this all these worlds can be: places where we either kill or die, over and over?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #248: Terrible fathers, vengeful daughters

MelanieLeave a comment

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 colour palette gives it away: This is Serious Drama

The Glory is a Chinese historical drama series from 2025 (not to be mistaken with the K-Drama school revenge story of the same name) whose descriptions are so innocuous they are completely misleading. For instance, MyDramaList explains: “Abandoned as a child, Zhuang Han Yan grows up in the southern countryside before returning to her family in the capital. She catches the eye of Fu Yun Xi, a deputy minister with a mysterious illness, who sees her as an ideal wife. As they navigate their relationship, they fall in love, and Han Yan reconnects with her mother while finding warmth and belonging with the Fu family.”

 I mean, OKAY. This is not technically wrong. But it completely misses the point in that The Glory is a revenge drama – specifically, the revenge of an adult daughter on her father. (And I am very sorry to pick this as my degree of connection with Alan’s musings who told such a great story of his own father taking him to see Gandhi!).

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: (template)

MattLeave 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.

In 1982, while England was whipped into a frenzy of nationalism by a wedding that, in hindsight, didn’t seem to benefit any of the parties involved, our Alan was taken to see Richard Attenborough’s Academy Award-winning Gandhi and got a glimpse of the ways that the British Empire wasn’t perhaps all it was cracked up to be.

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