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?
Cavalcade has a lot in common with previous winner Cimmaron. Just like that film, the story here stretches over decades, focusing on a few characters as they change and develop over time. It also references major events over that period, as we watch them impact on the ordinary lives we are following. Both films belong on the list of Oscar winners that have truly been forgotten by the passage of time.
It also shares the quality that it is utterly mystifying to me how such an incredibly awful film won the Best Picture Award.
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.
This week, Matt returned to the Zone. No, not the Brothers Strugatsky’s Zone, nor Tarkovsky’s, and not even the Zone of the original Stalker trilogy of video games. No, this time it’s the Zone of Stalker 2 – and it’s an even more inhospitable place than it used to be… though it may just be the most beautiful take on this particular post-apocalypse.
As anyone who listened to our March episode on three film adaptations of Agatha Christie’s whodunits can tell: no one at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture is a big fan of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot. The erstwhile Shakespeare wunderkind tried his hand at the Belgian super-sleuth three times, with Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Death on the Nile (2022) and A Haunting in Venice (2003). Admittedly, we’re not the first ones to say an emphatic non to Branagh’s Poirot – but, having just recently taken a closer look at the Knives Out films, which feature a different modern movie detective that nonetheless takes more than a few cues from Agatha Christie, and from Monsieur Poirot himself, Sam and Alan nonetheless felt it was high time to give Branagh’s trio of period thrillers another chance.
Do they improve when approached with tempered expectations? Can they be salvaged, or do they remain not just second-best versions of these stories but downright failures of adaptation? How do the ensemble casts compare to those put together by Sidney Lumet in the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express and John Guillermin in 1978’s Death on the Nile? And just what is up with that moustache?
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!
I admit that I needed the help of the next generation in writing this post. This is because there are only two experts on Epic: The Musical in the house and neither of them is me. The fifteen-year-old is currently studying for her biology exam, but the twelve-year-old was kind enough to assist.
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.
Way back in 2007, the Ukrainian video game developer GSC Game World released Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, a game that some would describe as a diamond in the rough, while others called it masochistic Eurojank. The first Stalker game, based on the Strugatsky brothers’ classic sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic and influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky’s loose film adaptation Stalker, was soon followed by Stalker: Clear Sky and Stalker: Call of Pripyat. All three games were janky and brutal, offering not conventional power fantasies so much as gruelling expeditions into the Chernobyl exclusion zone surrounding the power plant at the centre of the 1986 disaster. They weren’t fun games – but they were unique, atmospheric, and different from pretty much all shooters at the time.
GSC Game World’s games weren’t for everyone, but they found a community of fans. A sequel was announced, then cancelled, until, in 2018, Stalker 2 resurfaced. The game was scheduled for release in 2022 – a schedule that proved impossible to uphold when Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. In spite of setbacks, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl finally came out in November 2024. Two years later, I got around to returning to GSC’s new version of the Zone: from the Strugatskys’ region pockmarked by objects left behind by mysterious aliens, via Tarkovsky’s wet, verdant purgatory, to the surroundings of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a region populated by warring factions and mutant creatures, and strewn with reality-bending artefacts.
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.
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!
Jason fights the Hydra (courtesy of Ray Harryhausen) in 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts (Video source: Movieclips.com).
Matt was right of course in his latest instalment: the fact that this series of articles, amazingly, is close to reaching its 300th iteration comes down to the fact that our handful of writers and podcasters just simply can’t stop coming up with free (and often wild) associations for the upcoming week: from John Garfield to Garfield the cat, from camp cinema to Bill Camp, or from Christopher Lee to Metallica. Every entry almost immediately begets a next one, sometimes going down completely unexpected avenues and joining personal favourites with life-long trauma, latest reviews with childhood memories or quasi-philosophical reflections with pulp explorations. Every post-recording conversation spawns the stuff for three more episodes and two new series on average. Our team of baristas has really become the Hydra on film, popping up with a new head each time one thinks the topic at hand has been exhausted.
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?
In 1930 a play called Grand Hotel opened on Broadway and was an instant success. Such a triumph led to a film adaptation, packed full of some of the biggest stars of the day, that struck box office gold, critical acclaim and eventually won the Academy Award. None of this was an accident: all of it was masterminded by MGM’s super producer Irving Thalberg.
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.
Two days ago, we learnt of the tragic death of Marjane Satrapi, French-Iranian writer and filmmaker, perhaps most famous for her graphic novel Persepolis and its later adaptation into a film, also by Satrapi. If you haven’t yet seen (or read) Persepolis, make sure to seek it out – it is a story that is timely not only because of its author’s untimely death.
We’ve arrived at June, which can only mean one thing – it’s once again time for a Damn Fine tradition: our summer series. This year, we bring you the Summer of Genre: four episodes, from June until September, each dedicated to a genre that is close to our hearts. And we’re launching our Summer of Genre with one of Julie’s favourites – the whodunit. But not just any whodunit: Julie, Alan and Sam have got together to discuss Rian Johnson’s Knives Out mysteries, from 2019’s inaugural murder mystery via 2022’s Glass Onion to last year’s Wake Up Dead Man. Since our part-time sleuths, part-time cultural baristas are big fans of the classical whodunit (for key evidence in this particular case, make sure to check out this March’s podcast episode, Three Christies, featuring the same star-studded cast), Johnson’s modern-day riffs on the clasical format are the logical next step. But will our intrepid trio exonerate Johnson and his private detective Benoit Blanc, or will they reveal their unquestionable guilt once and for all?
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 