I don’t know if I like it, but it sure sounds dramatic: music and The Crown

Matt4 Comments

C’est le ton qui fait la musique.
— French saying

For the longest time, I avoided Netflix’s The Crown, even though I’d mostly heard good things. I knew that they had a strong cast and that the creative team had been involved in films and series I’d liked (though not exclusively – I enjoyed Peter Morgan’s work on, say, The Damned United, but I was decidedly less keen on Bohemian Rhapsody, even if he was responsible for the story rather than the script). My main problem was this: my interest in the Royal Family is, let’s say, minuscule, and I’m no big fan of the British monarchy and the culture it’s a part of. There’s simply not much appeal there for me, especially if part of the attraction seems to lie in enjoying the aesthetics and the iconography, the sheer nobility of it all.

Then this little pandemic happened, my wife and me started spending much more time at home, and there are only so many good HBO series to enjoy, so I guess we started watching The Crown. Personally, I blame Olivia Colman. How could I not be more interested, knowing that she’d be in it before long?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Meet the new trailer post, (not quite) same as the old trailer post

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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.

Starting this week, we’re changing the format of the trailer posts slightly. Don’t worry, you’ll still get your Sunday dose of trailers, but we’ll also take these posts as an opportunity to highlight some of the things we’ve talked about during the week.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #13: The Lavender Hill Mob

Alan Kuhl Graham3 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.

There’s a moment in 1951’s The Lavender Hill Mob that captures an important truth about the best of the Ealing comedies: our two genial leads, having nearly successfully executed the gold heist of the century, suddenly realise their plans are in trouble. They need to swiftly descend the steps of the Eiffel Tower or evidence of their crime might fall into the wrong hands.

The two men start awkwardly racing down the spiral staircase. As their speed increases, and their need to reach the ground fast overcomes their vertigo they both start laughing. At this tense moment in a heist film, with all their schemes about to awry, two middle-aged men beginlaughing and hollering with giddy abandon.

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Howl, howl, howl! Wolfwalkers (2020)

Matt2 Comments

This will come as no surprise to those who have seen The Secret of Kells (2009), Song of the Sea (2014) and The Breadwinner (2017) by the Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon: their latest, Wolfwalkers, is gorgeous to look at. More than that, their films all have very specific visual styles derived from what they’re about, even if they’re recognisably Cartoon Saloon. I like it when animation creates an aesthetic that is emphatically not realistic, for instance the way that Pixar’s Soul did in its metaphysical spaces – and Cartoon Saloon has been great at using and combining visual styles taking inspiration from sources such as illuminated medieval manuscripts and Afghan miniature painting. In Wolfwalkers, the designers and animators evoke two different worlds by means of very different aesthetics: 17th century Kilkenny has the flattened, right-angled quasi-perspective of woodcut prints of the time, creating vistas and compositions that use depth to striking, even unsettling effect not too dissimilar from deep focus, yet always grounded in the historical style it imitates. In contrast, the woods not far from the town are depicted in a more free-flowing, rounded style, giving these places a distinctly different feel, at once more naturalistic than the stylised streets of Kilkenny and more mystical. Visually and narratively, nature in Wolfwalkers is imbued with a life and spirituality that reveals Wolfwalkers – and Cartoon Saloon’s films in general – to be kindred to the worlds of Studio Ghibli, in particular the films of Hayao Miyazaki.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: What’s ‘femme fatale’ in Japanese?

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.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #12: A Fish Called Wanda

Eric1 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.

One of the ironies of life is that John Cleese, responsible for some of the most (in)famously absurd sketches in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, is more renowned for his work on comparatively unadventurous, straight comedies, two of them being Fawlty Towers and A Fish Called Wanda. And yet, it’s no accident that both are revered: they’re deliciously funny and incredibly mean-spirited, yet brimming with an inimitable charm nonetheless.

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The Compleat Ingmar #20: The Silence (1963)

Matt2 Comments

I was not prepared for the extent to which Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre would embrace the uncanny. He may not be a David Lynch, but where Lynch’s nightmares are often emphatically surreal, Bergman’s use of the dreamlike is more subtle, more psychological, and probably more Freudian – though not in the overly literal way that pop-Freudians tends to go for. Unless we’re talking about Hour of the Wolf, which indeed feels like proto-Lynch in its final third, Bergman’s onereic sequences – when they are not explicitly dreams, as for instance in Wild Strawberries – always leave it up to the viewer whether what they are seeing is really happening or not, and to what extent it is filtered through, or even distorted by, a character whose perception is less than reliable.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Tools, weapons, and Nicholas Cage

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.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #11: Martin Landau

samlinder1 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.

Would you have guessed who the young and apparently artistically gifted man in the image below is? Well, reading about him in the last Six Damn Fine Degrees post by Julie, I was reminded of how often this enormously talented actor has been a saving grace and the secret star of so many movies and TV shows I love. And therefore I decided to dedicate this eleventh post to him!

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The Corona Diaries: “Backlog” is just another word for great films you can still look forward to

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It’s been a while since we posted one of these. In the meantime, 2020 is history, but 2021 is aiming to show its elder that it can be just as much of a pest. (As someone said: 2021 is shaping up to be the mutated version of 2020.) Will the vaccine help? Perhaps, at least I hope so, but for now we’re left to wait and see. While we were lucky in Switzerland that cinemas were open for half the year, they’ve now been closed since October, and the day on which they can open again seems to be moving further and further into the distance. In the spring of 2020, Mege posted this photo of one of the local cinemas:

Back then, this seemed like an optimistic act of defiance. These days, when I pass the building, it still says the same, but that “Coming soon” sounds like a feeble act of denial.

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