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.
Some love them… but Matt’s more ambivalent about cult TV and cult movies. Check out this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees to find out why – or you can also just stay here and watch this trailer for the cult classic The Prisoner. Because, after all, you are not a number, right?
After the inaugural episode of our Summer of Collaborations (starting with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn), we’ve arrived at the second instalment of our summer series, this time focusing on a collaboration that gave us iconic performances and classic films across a range of genres – though the one that perhaps comes to mind first is that of Jidaigeki (Japanese period drama), and more specifically, the samurai film. We are, of course, talking about the films resulting from the collaboration between Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. Join Alan, Julie and Matt as they discuss Rashomon (1950), a film that mixes genre to such an extent that Wikipedia describes it, inadequately, as a “Jidaigeki psychological thriller-crime film”; Yojimbo (1961), the action-packed samurai film that Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars stole from liberally; and High and Low (1963), a police procedural crime drama about a botched kidnapping. What made the collaboration between Kurosawa and Mifune work so well? How does it develop over these three films? And just how does Mifune manage to look so damn cool wearing a threadbare kimono and stroking his chin?
For last year’s summer series of podcasts, check this link:
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.
I wasn’t sure what to expect of The Last Duel, Ridley Scott’s medieval drama about justice and gender. The trailer looked interesting (once I accepted that some of the hairstyles in the film took some getting used to, to say the least), I liked the actors, and Scott knows how to do a good-looking movie. At the same time, the director has been rather hit and miss for me, in particular in the last ten, fifteen years or so. Obviously Alien and Blade Runner are stone cold classics, and I’ve enjoyed quite a few of his later films, but while the likes of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant looked gorgeous, they were saddled with scripts that were uneven at best and weak at worst, which in turn wasted the usually solid, at times even great acting in these films. Scott and his collaborators have often been better at the cinematic craft than at picking material deserving of the craftsmanship.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 