evil under the sun

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Murder Death Kill

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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.

What does our reading, and especially the way what we read changes over time, say about us? In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, that’s exactly what Melanie writes about. And (thankfully (ed.)) she brings up Murderbot in the process, so here’s a nice little trailer for the Apple TV adaptation.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #102: Three Christies

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It’s been hinted at once or twice on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture: we do like a good whodunnit, and we especially like a good cosy – or sometimes less cosy – crime. So it’s high time we assemble all the suspects in the drawing room and pay our respects to the Queen of Crime: Agatha Christie. In keeping with our semi-regular series of episodes on noteworthy trios, our chief investigators Alan, Sam and Julie have rounded up three adaptations of Christie’s stories for the screen: Murder She Said (1961), starring the formidable Margaret Rutherford; Evil Under the Sun (1982), which not only features Peter Ustinov as Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, but a delightful cast that includes Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith; and the episode “Five Little Pigs” (2003) from ITV’s long-running Agatha Christie’s Poirot, in which David Suchet dons Poirot’s iconic moustache. Why do these stories have lasting appeal? How do Christie’s plots survive the adaptation into a different medium? And why exactly do they let Kenneth Branagh do those ghastly modern adaptations? (Now that is the real crime.)

P.S.: For more on iconic trios, make sure to check out these past episodes:

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The First Law of Robotics

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.

Sometimes our Six Damn Fine Degrees posts get caught on a certain topic: a few months ago, we had several posts in a row focusing on the films of Werner Herzog, and recently they’ve entered an Agatha Christie phase. This week, Sam remembered the great Maggie Smith, writing about two of her appearances in adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories: Death on the Nile and Evil under the Sun, both of which Smith featured in, albeit in different parts.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #204: The Best of Maggie Smith in two Christies

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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 passing of Dame Maggie Smith in late September has caused an outpouring of appreciation and love by film critics, movie buffs and the stage aficionados alike. Rarely has there been in the loss of an actress such a display of a wide-ranging fan base, from the Harry Potter kids to the Downton Abbey addicts and from silver-age Hollywood connoisseurs to the West End audiences and independent cinemagoers, everybody seems to have harboured a deep respect and admiration for her unique talent. Channels and feeds were crammed full of shorts and reels for days, with no real end in sight.

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