the sting

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: There’s no place like home

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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.

Casting is a tricky business – and sometimes you get exactly the right person… a few decades too late, as Alan argued in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, using Christopher Lee’s Saruman and Jack Nicholson’s Joker as examples.

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Butch & Johnny & Sundance & Henry: a duo of duos

MattLeave a comment

It’s Hollywood arithmetic at its finest, really: first, take one movie star with enough sex appeal and charisma to power the Eastern Seaboard, give him a lead role, and rake in the dough. Now, take two movie stars with sex appeal and charisma: 1 + 1 = 2. Two times the success and the dough. Or it may even be exponential, so you get the amount of dough squared.

And if this has worked once, what are you going to do? How about making another film with that duo of stars that has worked so well previously? You could even get back the director who helped make the first film a hit. What worked once is certain to work a second time.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #119: Eleven Iconic Heist Themes

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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!

While reading Matt’s musings about the heist movie genre and Steven Soderbergh’s knack for it, my head was inevitably raided by musical themes: jazzy and cool, funky and bold, sneaky and witty they were – and all wonderfully descriptive of the act of boldly scheming, meticulously planning and sneakily (or spectacularly) executing! Is it a coincidence that a large majority of the most popular heist movies are associated with scores that often remained the most memorable aspect about the films? Maybe the indelible combination of suspense, anticipation and audacity is among the most fruitful contexts for a composer to create dynamic and energetic themes.

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