A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Six Damn Fine Degrees #305: Movie scenes only existing in my head (I think..)

25/09/202625/09/2026samlinderLeave 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!

*The previous scene that never was: I must have dreamt that just before Bond (Roger Moore) discovers his contact (Maud Adams) is already dead, I had seen the story of her demise at the hands of* The Man With The Golden Gun.

Just like Alan described in last week’s post, there are movies I first saw long ago that I could swear turn out differently than on recent rewatches. At times, no matter how much research you do, the misremembered version cannot be unearthed: no Director’s Cut has since been released, nor have deleted scenes been found, nor is there footage of such scenes to be found in any image galleries. Nevertheless, I’m certain I’ve seen the scene. Or was it just in my head after all?

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Criterion Corner: Hud (#1319)

24/09/202624/09/2026MattLeave a comment

There is a certain thrill to seeing a movie star of tremendous charisma, a leading-man type we’re drawn to, play a character that is offputting. Certain stars we got to know as villains: Willem Dafoe, for instance, or Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman or Mads Mikkelsen. The beloved Gary Oldman arguably rose to stardom playing mostly bad guys, even if some of them were tortured and romantic. But there’s a difference when a leading man with leading-man looks appears on the screen – and does something horrible. Remember Henry Fonda’s introduction in Once Upon a Time in the West? Part of what makes that scene so effective is that the sadistic man we see murder a boy in cold blood is portrayed by the actor who played iconic paragons of integrity such as My Darling Clementine‘s Wyatt Earp or 12 Angry Men‘s Juror #8.

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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

18/09/202625/09/2026Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a comment

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.