A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Frankly, my dear

20/09/2026MattLeave 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.

Not all of the films that Alan has written about in his chronology of Best Picture winners are much known these days – but it’s likely that every film fan has at least heard of the 1939 winner: Gone with the Wind.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: September 2026

19/09/202619/09/2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

In this month’s main podcast episode, we talked about the tactile fantasy movies of the 1980s. But what happened afterwards? The phase between Jurassic Park and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was probably the peak of a period where the traditional, tactile ways of doing visual effects and the new hotness of CGI overlapped. Then things very much went in the direction of mostly, or even exclusively, CGI – to a large extent at the expense of the tactility of effects work and a certain homogenisation of what visual effects looked like. But does this mean that special effects and visual effects are objectively worse than they were in the 1980s? Can effects still be spectacular and tactile in 2026? Join Alan and Matt as they take two effects-heavy films of the year – Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian and Grogu – to look at how these use effects, and how, in certain ways, they retain the spirit of late 20^th century special effects work. Where do VFX in the 21^st century fail, and why – and where are they just as magical as what our podcast baristas grew up with? What upcoming effects-driven films are they looking forward to? Join our September espresso for a conversation that goes from the stop-motion magic of Ray Harryhausen via James Cameron’s Avatar franchise to a certain nuclear lizard that likes to plague Tokyo!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #304: Erm… Misremembered Movies

18/09/202616/09/2026Alan 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!

Back in the mid-’90s I was living in a shared house, and one evening we decided to rent the Tony Scott movie True Romance. We enjoyed its mix of action, violence and Tarantino dialogue – all of which seemed to match the popular zeitgeist of the time. Then we got to the ending, when one of my housemates suddenly got incredibly animated.

“That’s NOT how it ends!”

We turned, slightly perplexed. I mean, we had just watched the thing. We had all seen the same ending, with the two leads driving into the sunset.

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One Best Picture After Another #12: Gone With The Wind (1939)

14/09/202613/09/2026Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a comment

Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

8/10

It speaks volumes about the vast cultural impact of Gone With The Wind that, when I was a kid, it still enjoyed some status as a reference point. We recognised the line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”, even if we didn’t really know where it came from. This was over forty years after its release and yet it still had a popular legacy.

Despite all this, I did not actually see the film for quite a long time. Even when I got older and got into watching classic films, I never quite felt the pull to make me want to get the VHS, or later the DVD, of this film. It took until the 21^st century, and a screening at London’s prestigious British Film Institute cinema for me to finally resolve to see it.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The End is the Beginning is the End

13/09/2026MattLeave a comment

A coming-of-age story… in the format of an indie pixel-art point-and-click adventure? Well, Perfect Tides did a great job of this, so why not check out its follow-up, Perfect Tides: Station to Station, which Matt liked a hell of a lot?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #303: Um, it was the Nineties?

11/09/202618/09/2026JulieLeave a comment

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They create worlds: Perfect Tides: Station to Station (2026)

09/09/202612/09/2026MattLeave a comment

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

Gamers love choice. They love games that let them make momentous decisions: killing a character or sparing them, siding with the rebels or the powers that be, blowing up the city of Megaton or disarming the nuclear bomb at its centre. The bigger the choice, the better, and it’s best if the choices change the plot of a game in fundamental ways. Gamers sneer when a choice seems purely cosmetic: being nice or nasty to a character, only to get a message that so-and-so will remember how you treated them? It’s not like that character won’t be eaten by zombies ten minutes later, so what does it matter?

Most gamers look at choice in binary terms, and choices only matter when they affect the plot of a game. As if the choices we make on a daily basis, the ones that aren’t life-or-death, weren’t the ones that defined us – perhaps not individually, but certainly in sum. It’s our many small decisions that shape us for when a big decision comes around.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Reach out and touch it

06/09/202606/09/2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Alan’s series on the Academy Award Best Picture winners through the ages has arrived in 1938 with its eleventh episode: Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #108: Summer of Genre – Tactile Fantasy

05/09/202605/09/2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Our Summer of Genre comes to an end: in this month’s podcast, Alan returns to a genre that was a favourite of his during his childhood. He is joined by Sam and Matt to discuss what they call ‘tactile fantasy’: those (largely) pre-CGI films that used physical special effects, miniatures, puppetry and stop-motion to bring the tactile to the screen, from evil, ravenous dragons to 18^th century fabulists flying on cannon balls. Starting with the 1981 dark fantasy Dragonslayer, continuing with Jim Henson’s 1982 cult classic The Dark Crystal and concluding with Terry Gilliam’s grand folly The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), our trio remembers a genre that has largely been supplanted by digital visual effects. What is the magic of tactile fantasy? How well do these films hold up in a post-Jurassic Park world, where bits and bytes can come together to create pretty much anything filmmakers can imagine? Was CGI the only reason why this era of cinema ended? And is tactile fantasy gone entirely from our screens in this day and age?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #302: This blew me away

04/09/202611/09/2026Melanie1 Comment

We’ve had a run of posts about movies and shows that have influenced us in the past. (Given the crowd here, they’ve mostly been creepy.) Which is timely: my kids, at 12 and 15, are just old enough that I can show them my favourite movies that live rent free in my brain. It’s great. They haven’t seen enough yet to be jaded by tropes. Everything is new and wonderful. The Sixth Sense, for instance, had them yelling “PLOT TWIST” and “no wayyyyy”. Back to the Future III, in which Doc falls in love in the Wild West but has a falling out with the lady, had my twelve year-old wail “My ship! They sunk my ship!”

It’s been educational for all of us.