Six Damn Fine Degrees #169: Don’t mock the mockumentary

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.

Werner Herzog must be one of the most frequently parodied filmmakers in the world. I have no evidence of this other than my own gut feeling, but is there anyone else that’s been caricatured as often as him? And good old Werner gets in on the fun too: he’s voiced versions of himself on The Simpsons, The Boondocks and American Dad – and it’s likely there’s an element of self-parody in him voicing a character described as “Old Reptile” in an episode of Rick and Morty.

Criterion Corner: Targets (#1179)

It’s the kind of meta filmmaking that’s catnip for critics and academics: screen legend Boris Karloff, firmly at the tail end of his career as a horror movie actor, plays the equally legendary Byron Orlok, a man firmly at the tail end of his career as a horror movie actor. Orlok announces his retirement from cinema, because he’s a has-been and his brand of cinematic horror is no longer scary, it’s camp. Meanwhile, a thoroughly modern kind of bogeyman stalks Los Angeles County: a young, blandly all-American insurance agent with an unsettlingly large gun collection, takes aim at random targets. Slowly but surely the two storylines converge, until they intersect – in a drive-in cinema, where Orlok is set to make his final public appearance. It’s cinema all the way down.

Forever Fellini: Nights of Cabiria (1957)

Just like Fellini used to be a big gap in my filmography – something this series, with a little help from Criterion, is supposed to address -, I’ve not seen all that many films by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The ones I have seen are an eclectic bunch: Mamma Roma (starring a magnificent Anna Magnani), The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and the Greek tragedies: Oedipus Rex and Medea. Based on having watched these, it’s difficult for me to get much of a grip of who Pasolini was as a filmmaker – but tonally he definitely seems to be a fairly different, much more overtly political storyteller from Federico Fellini.

Which makes Nights of Cabiria, on which Fellini collaborated with Pasolini, an interesting blend of the two men’s styles and preoccupations. The role of Pasolini, who was one of altogether four co-writers, was to help with the dialogue of the 1950s Roman demimonde of pimps, prostitutes and their tricks, giving it more authenticity. The world of Nights of Cabiria doesn’t actually seem all that far removed from that of Mamma Roma, who, like Cabiria, is a sex worker dreaming of a different life. However, while the director and his writers evoke a believable world that is earthy, that lives and breathes, this world isn’t what defines the film the most, instead providing a background to the central performance. As in La Strada before it, the star of the show is undoubtedly Giulietta Masina – who may be even better as Cabiria than she was as Gelsomina.

Six Damn Fine Degrees #166: Love in the Time of Volcanic Events

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.

It’s a story made for the movies, isn’t it? Two oddballs meet and fall in love with each other – and with volcanoes. They become documentary filmmakers and travel the world, capturing the awe-inspiring power and beauty of volcanoes on camera… until, twenty years later, they die together in an eruption. Perhaps not the happiest ending to a love story, but one so fitting it could have been penned by a screenwriter.

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The Quick and the Undead

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.

Sam wouldn’t be Sam without his deep, abiding love for all things James Bond – so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his first Six Damn Fine Degrees entry of 2024 would focus on the special agent with a license to kill, and Roald Dahl’s connection to Bond.

Criterion Corner: A Matter of Life and Death (#939)

Of all the tropes in romantic stories that I’m not a big fan of, two people falling instantly in love is probably the most common. I can buy immediate attraction, especially of a sexual kind, and I am also okay with an almost instant sense of sympathy, a sort of mutual resonance that develops into something further – but when we’re supposed to believe in love at first sight, that there is deep, abiding love between two people the moment they meet, I roll my eyes, and they keep rolling if this instant romantic attachment is given a significance that is practically metaphysical. I am no fan of the notion in romances that someone is ‘the one’, that destiny has preordained certain couplings. In fact, I don’t find the idea particularly romantic to begin with.

There is perhaps one film where I buy into such almost instant love, and not just begrudgingly but entirely, 100%. That film is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s wonderful A Matter of Life and Death (1946).

That was the year that was: 2023 (2)

Having written about the films I liked best in 2023 (and there were others I admired, though perhaps more ambivalently, such as Hayao Miyazaki’s possible swan song The Boy and the Heron), what other cups of culture kept me awake and well caffeinated this year?

That was the year that was: 2023 (1)

And once again, the year just keels over and ends. At least that’s how it feels: ever since history decided that we can’t complete a single orbit around the sun without some major upheaval or crisis, it’s continued in that vein. Or has it always been that way, and I’ve just been too Euro- or phallo- or whatevercentric to notice that that’s just what history is: one kind of crisis after another?

The sound of wings: The Boy and the Heron (2023)

Apart from the ’70s anime version of Heidi (which I, like so many kids growing up in Switzerland in the 1980s, watched much more of than any more ‘native’ versions of the story), for which Hayao Miyazaki worked on scene design, layout and screenplay, my first proper encounter with the director and his work that I was aware of was Princess Mononoke (1997). Japanese animation didn’t often make it into Swiss cinemas at the time, at least other than the occasional showing of a classic of the form such as Akira or Ghost in the Shell, so I had to travel to another city to catch the film at the cinema.

It was absolutely worth the journey: seeing Princess Mononoke was a breathtaking experience. The film felt archaic and epic and strange, though at the same time intimate and very personal. It grappled with big moral questions, but without reducing these to good vs evil simplicity. (Ian Danskin’s video essay “Lady Eboshi is Wrong” on the topic is well worth watching.) Even just on an aesthetic level, Princess Mononoke was visually stunning, and its score, easily one of Joe Hisaishi’s best, complemented the visuals perfectly. Miyazaki’s films deserve to be seen on a big screen – and yet, since seeing Princess Mononoke at a cinema, I only managed to do the same with Spirited Away. All of Miyazaki’s other films (and everything that Isao Takahata did) I only ever saw on my TV.

Six Damn Fine Degrees #161: Hollywood A-Listers Assemble!

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.