the mandalorian – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The name’s Welles. Orson Welles.

Sep 11, 2022The Barista CollectiveLeave 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, our Summer of Welles (Editor’s note: Not a real thing.) continued with Sam’s post about Welles in Portugal and Spain. What better opportunity to take Sam’s mention of the dreadful 1967 Casino Royale and post this trailer for it, a great indication of just how dreadful the film is?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: I hate sand

Mar 13, 2022Mar 13, 2022The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

This week has been course, and rough, and irritating, and it got everywhere… Okay, not quite, but you probably see what we’re getting at: without us even planning for it, this has been something of a Tatooine week, starting with Matt’s disappointment at The Book of Boba Fett, a Star Wars story that first and foremost raises the question of why it exists.

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Lost on Tatooine: The Book of Boba Fett (2021)

Mar 8, 2022Mar 8, 2022Matt1 Comment

Imagine a series, a spin-off, whose protagonist is a character that originated in a film more than 40 years ago. He is a fan favourite because he has a certain mystique and, let’s face it, he looks cool. Imagine that series stripping this protagonist of his mystique (and, for much of the running time, his iconic outfit) by taking away pretty much every characteristic they had. And now imagine the series dumping its protagonist halfway through in favour of another character from another series that himself was clearly inspired by the original character.

Yes, I know how that sounds. Convoluted and nonsensical barely begins to cover it. Still, that’s pretty much what happened with The Book of Boba Fett, the most recent addition to the Star Wars canon. What’s going on here? Were they playing with our expectations? Was the series supposed to be subversive? Was COVID-19 to blame for this mess?

Or did The Book of Boba Fett simply turn out to be one of the most inept instances of storytelling in the franchise – rivalling the manifold issues that The Rise of Skywalker suffered from?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: WE DIG THESE TRAILERS, BY A LOT!

Nov 8, 2020The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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The Corona Diaries: It’s the pictures that got small

Mar 26, 2020Mar 26, 2020MattLeave a comment

Matt here, waving at you wearily from that little country in the centre-left of Europe. So, for what will soon have been two weeks – but what feels like at least twice that – Switzerland will have been on partial lockdown. We’re still allowed to leave the house, though if we congregate in groups of more than five people, the Corona police will descend on us and… cough on us, perhaps? I’m not quite sure, because I’m being a good little boy, which means I’m practicing social distance with the best of them. My wife and I still go out to catch some sun and fresh air every day, but we stay at least two metres away from others, eyeing them cautiously.

It helps that we’re not exactly the biggest extroverts in the world. Our idea of a fun evening out rarely involves other people, at least not actively. Sure, before the Coronavirus epidemic we’d often be found in groups of dozens, sometimes even hundreds – but that’s what you get when you go to the cinema several times a week.

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How to recognise Star Wars from quite a long way away

Jan 9, 2020MattLeave a comment

This may sound a tad hypocritical after my critique of Rise of Skywalker a few days ago, but I don’t envy J.J. Abrams. In fact, I don’t envy anyone engaged in delivering new Star Wars content to a 2020 audience, a task that I imagine to be very similar to feeding the hungry inhabitants of a lion pit while dangling from a slender, fraying rope. The problem is this: what is Star Wars, what constitutes proper Star Wars? These are questions that a vast number of fans with different levels of zealotry and entitlement will answer very differently – but when George Lucas released his prequels to, let’s say, mixed results, the megaphone/Death Star combo that is Twitter didn’t yet exist. These days, creating, or even just acting in, a Star Wars thing that some people dislike can pretty much result in this: