I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: You say ‘Sunday’, I say ‘Monday

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.

It had to happen sometime – it was Sunday evening, we were tired… and we entirely forgot that trailer posts don’t post themselves. At least not yet, though I’m sure that GPT-3 or whatever AIs are currently being created in dark IT labs by mad computer scientists will be more than up to the task. When Skynet stages its coup, we’ll recognise the terminators because they’ll have too many fingers and too many teeth.

And talking about too many teeth: Matt found himself liking Top Gun Maverick a surprising amount, while finding Avatar: The Way of Water dull and unengaging. And there’s something surprisingly poignant about Tom Cruise finally starting to show his age. What if Tom’s just one of us?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #113, Metropolis: Félix-Didier and the Raiders of the Lost Reels

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!

On Tuesday, July 1st 2008, Paula Félix-Didier, museum director in Argentina, traveled to Berlin from Buenas Aires with something extraordinary in her luggage. Disembarking on a hot summer’s day, temperatures rising to up to 30 degrees, she was to meet with three experts, there to review what she had brought. She had previously confided in an editor of German newspaper Die Zeit, Karen Naundorf, as she thought Germany would be the perfect place to publicise her spectacular piece of news: she may have just uncovered missing footage, long presumed lost, from the 1927 Fritz Lang tour de force Metropolis. Any reconstructions of the film before that time, still offered the sad little insert: “More than a quarter of the film is believed to be lost forever.”

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #31: Mind the gaps

d1ad56da-abce-4afe-9f45-79294aede9e3We’re back after a three-month break – and right in the middle of a pandemic. What better time than this to listen to some new podcast goodness, though? And what better time to look at the gaps we’ve all got in our film-watching track record?

This month, Julie and Matt talk about the huge swathes of cinema that we’ve missed so far – the genres, eras and countries we’re barely aware of, the directors that everyone loves but we bounced off of, the films we’ve got on an ever-growing pile on a bookshelf that we keep telling ourselves we should finally watch. Grab a hot, fresh cup and join us for episode 31 of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture! Continue reading

d1ad56da-abce-4afe-9f45-79294aede9e3We’re back after a three-month break – and right in the middle of a pandemic. What better time than this to listen to some new podcast goodness, though? And what better time to look at the gaps we’ve all got in our film-watching track record?

This month, Julie and Matt talk about the huge swathes of cinema that we’ve missed so far – the genres, eras and countries we’re barely aware of, the directors that everyone loves but we bounced off of, the films we’ve got on an ever-growing pile on a bookshelf that we keep telling ourselves we should finally watch. Grab a hot, fresh cup and join us for episode 31 of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture! Continue reading