paul thomas anderson – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Hello, Mr Anderson

Mar 30, 2025MattLeave 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 saw the first post of new contributor Alastair Bickley: in last Friday’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, he wrote about the first three minutes of the Sherlock Holmes mystery “The Priory School”, as adapted for ITV, starring Jeremy Brett. Once again, there’s no trailer – but the entire episode is on YouTube, so here’s that particular treat for all the Sherlock-heads out there!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #155: Best fiends and purely professional relationships

Nov 10, 2023Oct 12, 2024Matt2 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!

So, apparently Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t a huge fan of Ivor Novello? One wonders what Novello thought of Hitchcock. It’s not exactly a secret that Hitch wasn’t always the easiest director to work with. He famously said that all actors should be treated like cattle, and when he said that he was correcting an allegation that he’d supposedly said that actors are cattle. Arguably, his correction didn’t exactly do much to make him look any better. Of course, being treated like cattle might still have been the better deal compared to other ways in which Hitchcock behaved towards his actors – and particularly his actresses. (It’s no accident that one of the sections in the Wikipedia entry on Tippi Hedren’s is titled “Allegations of sexual harrassment”.)

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Rubberband… love? Licorice Pizza (2021)

Jan 24, 2022Jan 24, 2022Mege1 Comment

Acolytes of PTA beware: there be spoilers.

There is a barely hidden secret at the heart of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, and it’s just behind the fig-leaf of that tender coming-of-age love story, as whacky as it may be, that we are supposed to take as the main story. It’s that both Alana Kane (Alana Haim) and Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffmann) know pretty well what they want to do with their lives. That might come to us as a surprise, and to them as well, and their next few months are not without pitfalls and mayor changes, but for all their uncertainty, they have their plans and ideas. And if that includes their gravitating towards each other, then yay, all the better.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #8: Jason Robards

Dec 25, 2020Oct 11, 2024Matt1 Comment

It is a fact universally acknowledged that sometimes very bad films can have a surprisingly good cast. Take Chernobyl: The Final Warning, for instance, which I would have been blissfully unaware of if it hadn’t been for last week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees entry by Alan. Sure, Jon Voight has been in films that should have been delivered to the nearest trash compactor before ever seeing the light of day, but he’s also been in some stone cold classics. (No, Baby Geniuses and the Mystery of the Crown Jewels isn’t such a classic. Sorry.) Speaking of trash compactors, Chernobyl: The Final Warning also features the Death Star MVPs Ian McDiarmid and Sebastian Shaw, who memorably co-starred in Return of the Jedi as the wacky duo Emperor Palpatine and Anakin “NOOOOOOOO!” Skywalker, at least before Shaw fell foul of the original Jedi Purge and was digitally replaced by a bald, scarred, Humpty Dumpty-looking Hayden Christensen. Then there’s Annette Crosby, who played Victor Meldrew long-suffering wife for eleven years before later taking on the famous Dickensian role of “Mr. F’s Aunt” in the BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit. Seriously, though, Crosby’s no slouch, as is evidenced by her OBE for services to Drama. The cherry on top of this particular radioactive sundae, though, is Jason Robards.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #29: There Will Be Blood

Dec 14, 2019Dec 13, 2019MattLeave a comment

d1ad56da-abce-4afe-9f45-79294aede9e3 Prepare to have your milkshake drunk right across the internet: your cultural baristas once again return to the Paul Thomas Anderson well, this time to talk about his grim, disorienting epic There Will Be Blood that still confounds after multiple viewings. We also briefly touch upon family horror story Hereditary (which Mege talked about in this post), the surreal comic treat Legion (which we discussed in podcast #9) and and the celluloid nightmare that is The Lighthouse.

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Throwing down the gauntlet of 2018

Dec 31, 2018Jul 11, 2019MegeLeave a comment

It’s saying something if the first thing I remember about the movie year 2018 is not a movie, but a character. Thanos looms large – how could he not? With one fell swoop, Marvel solved its most prominent problem and made very, very sure that we wouldn’t forget their biggest, baddest baddie. He has depth – I believe him when he says that he fulfills his mission partly against his own will, and that it cost him everything. And he – goddamn it – is successful. Of course, my experience of Avengers: Infinity War was deeply colored by my favorite daughter sitting beside me who couldn’t believe that half her favorite MCU characters went up in ashes. Maybe this was this generation’s Bambi. Continue reading →

That Was The Year That Was: 2018

Dec 30, 2018Dec 30, 2018MattLeave a comment

In past years I always forgot about doing a look back at the year that was until my friend and co-blogger Mege did his own retrospective – and by that time it was too late. This year I come prepared and bearing not just one or two but eight awards. Enjoy!

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When has a stitch ever saved anyone?

Jan 31, 2018Jul 10, 2019Mege1 Comment

Phantom Thread one of the best-looking movies this season. Since it’s set in the 1950s British fashion scene, it’s certainly the best-dressed movie, without flaunting its lavishness. The dresses, often also the people and the atmosphere of the movie, have a kind of gorgeousness about them. The film feels like it was made decades ago, but it is far from dated. There is a love story at the core of the film, between a high-end middle-aged fashion designer called Reynolds Woodcock and a clumsy French-speaking waitress named Alma Elson. Reynolds is immediately smitten with Alma; while most other men would want to undress her, he is thinking about dressing her up, already sketching clothes for her in his mind. Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #2: Magnolia

Oct 7, 2017Oct 6, 2017Matt2 Comments

d1ad56da-abce-4afe-9f45-79294aede9e3 Tune in for episode 2 of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture podcast as Mege and Matt discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, with a quick chat about the chilling, murderous Lady Macbeth and the biopic Jackie by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín. Once again, mild spoilers are to be expected, and we may have some opinions on Tom Cruise – so respect the cup, sit down and listen.

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How did we get here?

Feb 16, 2015Jul 10, 2019Mege1 Comment

Inherent Vice isn’t really exactly the way you think a movie with a doper as its main character should be. Doc Sportello has a hard time about who knows what about which crime, and which suspect, and when and why and all of that. But neither can the audience. I think I lost the plot half an hour into the movie, and I think the same thing would happen to me if I read Thomas Pynchon’s novel it is based on. Inherent Vice might be about a P.I., but he is used as a character, not as a conduit for a whodunnit. Joaquin Phoenix plays him wonderfully. The notes he takes are the movie’s highlight.

What drives Doc to investigate is that the case is brought to him by the lost love of his life, a beauty named Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), a name that is repeated throughout the movie like a mantra. I am not entirely sure if she is really there some of the time. Other characters keep drifting in and out of focus. On the other hand, a character like Bigfoot Bjornsen, a hippie-hating crewcut copper, played by Josh Brolin, stakes his claim like a reality check. Just listen to him when he orders his pancakes at the diner. In a sense, Sportello and Bigfoot need each other: Bigfoot can heap his vitriol on hippie scum like Doc, and Doc has an excellent target for his bemused, woolly sarcasm.

The movie doesn’t use one single scene to put us in Doc’s state of mind: no lens flare, no colorful caleidoscopic nonsense, no floating choruses. If you think something is not quite real, then it might not be, but then again, it’s hard to tell. There are no clear indications about where we are – we’re in California, sure, and it’s 1970 or so, but it’s like reality and Doc’s plane of existence run on parallel lines, side by side. The Summer of Love is already two years in the past, and Altamont has put a dent in West Coast hippie lifestyle. You can feel that Doc is no longer entirely carefree. Something, somewhere, is past its high point.

Inherent Vice has a truckload of supporting roles and cameos: Benicio del Toro, Jena Malone, Reese Witherspoon, Eric Roberts, Martin Short, Michael K. Williams, Maya Rudolph, Martin Donovan, Serena Scott Thomas, Michelle Sinclair, Owen Wilson. And many more, but I can’t remember them all. Some might complain that the movie is too long, and they might be right – but why would you want to kill such a nice buzz? A doobie takes as long as a doobie takes.