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.
Alan’s series on the Academy Award Best Picture winners through the ages has arrived in 1938 with its eleventh episode: Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With 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.
Is Wes Anderson basically making the same film over and over again, with minor variations in plot, while the style, tone, cast and crew stay the same? Matt confessed this week that he sometimes thinks this is true when watching the trailers for new films by the director – but once he’s watching the actual films, it’s obvious that there is much more to Anderson than a highly recognisable style.
Sometimes they come back: in late 2024, Robert Eggers broke with his series of films titled “The” followed by a proper noun with the release of his remake of Nosferatu. Following F.W. Murnau’s 1922 version, a rip-off of Dracula so good that it took on a life (or should that be undeath?) of its own, and the 1979 remake by living legend Werner Herzog, Eggers’ Nosferatu calls back to the earlier versions while putting its own spin on the material. Join Alan and Matt for their discussion of the film: What does Eggers’ Nosferatu bring to the table? How does it compare to other versions of Nosferatu and of Dracula? What are the film’s greatest strengths, and where does it perhaps falter? And where do Matt and Alan stand on big bushy moustaches?
For more talk of the undead, make sure to check out our episode “Three Draculas” from October 2023, in which Julie, Sam and Matt talk about Murnau’s Nosferatu as well as the 1958 and 1992 versions of Dracula.
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.
This week saw the first Six Damn Fine Degrees post by a new contributor: Doctor John Smith (now why does that name ring a bell?) wrote about movie vampires and their ties to the aristocracy and to capitalism. After all, they do like to bleed us dry, don’t they?
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!
I’ve been thinking a lot about vampires recently.
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.
Halloween is still a few weeks away, but October’s a good month for scary films. Are long-running franchises that basically repeat the same basic story over and over again really scary, though? Matt has some doubts in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees.
Aside from Frankenstein’s creature perhaps, is there another movie monster as iconic as that most famous of vampires: Dracula? At the same time, has familiarity turned Dracula into something less than a monster? Is the famous count with the two pointy teeth still capable of instilling fear, or has he become too much of a cliché, even a cartoon? For our spooky October episode, Sam, Julie and Matt have packed their stakes, crucifixes and garlands of garlic and are heading to deepest Transilvania to look in on three versions of the Count, ironically starting with the one who isn’t even called Dracula: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), in which the wonderfully named Max Schreck played the famous vampire with the serial numbers filed off. Then there’s Christopher Lee, the tall, dark stranger, in Terence Fisher’s 1958 film Dracula (or Horror of Dracula, as it was called in the US); and finally, we check out Francis Ford Coppola’s self-proclaimed return to the original novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), in which Gary Oldman chews scenery at least as much as he nibbles on the necks of nubile Victorian ladies. How do these three films succeed at bringing the famous vampire to life (or should that be undeath)?
Continue readingEach Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!
I am entirely the wrong person to write this entry. It should be Julie. It should be anyone other than me, really. Because I’ve tried, I really have. I went and got the Universal Monster Box set of Blu-rays. I don’t have any problems with black and white. I don’t mind melodrama or cheese. Horror doesn’t have to be gory for me. Vampires haven’t altogether lost their glitter, as far as I’m concerned.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 