the bird with the crystal plumage

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: You’ll never get that out of the carpet!

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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.

Remember 1994, when Peter Jackson became known to an audience much larger than aficionados of shlocky horror and bad taste (or indeed Bad Taste)? Julie certainly does, and her latest Six Damn Fine Degrees post takes us back to Heavenly Creatures and to the murder case that the film is based on.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #57: Summer of Directors – Dario Argento

The Barista Collective3 Comments

And our Summer of Directors continues: after celebrating the tactility of Jane Campion’s films last month, we continue with a very different kind of physicality, with the variform violence done to bodies and minds in the phantasmagoric cinema of Italian filmmaker Dario Argento. Join Sam, Julie and Alan as they dissect a trio of Argento’s films, from giallo classic The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) via Deep Red (1975) – a film called by some the best giallo ever made – to perhaps the most famous film by Argento, the supernatural horror film Suspiria (1977). What makes these films potent to this day? How important is plot to an Argento film? How much of a successor was the director to Alfred Hitchcock? Just what is “impure cinema”? And just how does our gang draw a direct line from classic movie musicals to Dario Argento’s films?

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