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.
What do our baristas do when they’re not podcasting or writing blog posts about Korean series, animated favourites, or their addiction to the Criterion Collection? In Sam’s case, he teaches at a Swiss grammar school – and he regularly stages plays at the school where he teaches. This spring, he directed a production of Clare Boothe Luce’s 1930s Broadway play The Women, which was famously turned into a 1939 film by George Cukor, and rather less famously a remake in 2008, starring Meg Ryan and Annette Benning. Join Sam and Julie as they talk about the play and the production. How does a play that is almost 90 years old hold up when staged in 2025? How does a Broadway comedy of manners work when performed by students in a Swiss town? Does The Women in a staging that keeps its 1930s context speak to modern audiences? And, perhaps most importantly: if he had the opportunity, who would Sam himself portray in this all-women play?
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
When I was a child, I remember there being a certain Hollywood magic to films that seemed to have simply everyone in them. I’m not talking about your average ensemble cast (or the kind of ensembles that Robert Altman worked with, which were very much their own thing), but the kind of cast where every name that is dropped in the credits makes you go, “Ooh, wasn’t he in… And didn’t we see her in…? And wasn’t he great as…?” In my head, the archetypes of this kind of film are the 1970s Agatha Christie adaptations featuring Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express, in which you’d get Lauren Bacall on the table next to Ingrid Bergman and Jacqueline Bisset, looking across the aisle at Richard Widmark, Michael York, Sean Connery and John Gielgud, or Death on the Nile, whose cast ranged from Bette Davis via Angela Lansbury to Mia Farrow, and from David Niven to Jack Warden, and that’s not mentioning the Maggie Smiths, Jon Finches and Peter Ustinovs. Then there’s the grimmer but equally star-studded A Bridge Too Far, again with Sean Connery, but also Gene Hackman, Dirk Bogarde, Edward Fox, Michael Caine, and many, many others.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 