Still raining: Sátántangó (1994)

MattLeave a comment

How do you begin with a film like Sátántangó? If you commit to its seven hours and 19 minutes, how much can you trust your own impressions at the end, and how much is the combination of Stockholm Syndrome and Sunk Cost Fallacy talking? There are films where I would say I liked them, possibly a lot – but would I recommend them to anyone else?

What I can say for certain is this: if this film is showing anywhere near you, if you have the time to go and see it, and if you are the least bit curious – go and see it. There are few experiences I am aware of in cinema that are like it, and that includes the other Béla Tarr films I’ve seen. (We were lucky – if that’s what you want to call it, seeing how the occasion was the recent death of the director – to catch Sátántangó as well as The Werckmeister Harmonies and The Turin Horse at the best local cinema over a couple of weeks.) If your experience is anything like mine, the length is the least of your worries. Worry more about the extended scene in which a child tortures and finally kills a cat. I will absolutely defend the scene… and I hope not to see it, or anything like it, in a long, long time.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #277: The Gates Of Europe… and other Origin Stories

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a comment

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!

What are the origins of modern nations? Where does national identity come from, and how has it been shaped to fit modern political structures? Going by a lot of the recent books I have read, this definitely seems to be a subject I’m interested in right now.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Murder Death Kill

MattLeave 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.

What does our reading, and especially the way what we read changes over time, say about us? In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, that’s exactly what Melanie writes about. And (thankfully (ed.)) she brings up Murderbot in the process, so here’s a nice little trailer for the Apple TV adaptation.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #102: Three Christies

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It’s been hinted at once or twice on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture: we do like a good whodunnit, and we especially like a good cosy – or sometimes less cosy – crime. So it’s high time we assemble all the suspects in the drawing room and pay our respects to the Queen of Crime: Agatha Christie. In keeping with our semi-regular series of episodes on noteworthy trios, our chief investigators Alan, Sam and Julie have rounded up three adaptations of Christie’s stories for the screen: Murder She Said (1961), starring the formidable Margaret Rutherford; Evil Under the Sun (1982), which not only features Peter Ustinov as Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, but a delightful cast that includes Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith; and the episode “Five Little Pigs” (2003) from ITV’s long-running Agatha Christie’s Poirot, in which David Suchet dons Poirot’s iconic moustache. Why do these stories have lasting appeal? How do Christie’s plots survive the adaptation into a different medium? And why exactly do they let Kenneth Branagh do those ghastly modern adaptations? (Now that is the real crime.)

P.S.: For more on iconic trios, make sure to check out these past episodes:

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #276: I read, therefore I am

MelanieLeave a comment

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!

Did you know? Your reading diet casts quite an accurate picture of who you are. Or, more precisely, of those aspects of yourself that you’re focusing on, perhaps even obsessing about. You do know it. Of course.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The Hole Truth

MattLeave 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.

Last week was the end of February, which means that Wednesday was Shortcuts day, featuring quick takes by the gang about what they’ve been watching, reading and listening to recently.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #275: Two visions of one city

Matt1 Comment

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!

As a teenager, I read a lot of genre fiction – but, perhaps more importantly, I read a lot of bad genre fiction. Not only: I loved the likes of Lord of the Rings or the iconic novels of Arthur C. Clarke (mind you, his prose wasn’t always brilliant and his characters often paper-thin, but the ideas were fascinating), but I’d read whatever I could find at the library that had spaceships and aliens, or dungeons and dragons. I think that, even at the time, I was aware that much of what I read in the realms of fantasy and sci-fi was generic and derivative at best, pulp designed to be mass-produced and sold to kids like me who wanted their reading matter to transport them to other worlds. But, hey, those books did transport me to other worlds, even if those worlds seemed a lot like Middle-Earth or a galaxy far, far away, just with the serial numbers scratched off.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Every time a bell rings…

The 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.

There are cities that were practically created to be on film: think London, think Paris, think New York. And definitely think Berlin, as Sam convincingly argues in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: February 2026

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The show must go on: our recent podcast episode on Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead got Sam and Matt thinking. While there’s a long-standing link between the stage and the screen, theatre and cinema are nonetheless different forms of art. What makes theatre tick differently from film? What translates well from one format to the other, and what is lost in the process? Where could a lot of cinema perhaps learn from the stage? What films are there based on stage plays that survived the transition from one medium to another – and perhaps even benefited? And what movies escape the conventions of cinema and bring a dollop of theatrical magic onto the screen?

P.S.: For more theatre talk at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, make sure to check out last year’s March espresso, in which Sam talks to Julie about putting Clare Boothe Luce’s Broadway play The Women – famously made into a film by George Cukor in 1939 – on the stage. And for a discussion of Miloš Forman’s brilliant film adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, may we recommend A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #53: Exactly the right number of notes – Amadeus (1984)?

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