C’mon and shoot a president: Death by Lightning (2025)

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In 1990, Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins came out, a biting musical about the men and women who felt called upon to kill a US president. Through a set of historical characters, from John Wilkes Booth via Lee Harvey Oswald to Sara Jane Moore and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (who both attempted, and failed, to kill Gerald Ford), Sondheim shows us his bleak version of the American Dream: “Everybody’s got the right to be happy” – and what better way to achieve happiness and fill the emptiness inside yourself than to kill yourself a POTUS?

All of these would-be and actual murderers are pathetic in their own particular ways. They are angry at the world and the ways in which it doesn’t conform to their wishes. They are attention seekers who wished to put their imprint on America, having little to offer the world apart from their own warped ideas of greatness and how to achieve it. And perhaps none of them are more pathetic than Charles Guiteau: a liar, a thief, a narcissistic failure.

Few people, other than Sondheim fans, know Guiteau’s name. Even fewer know the name of the man Guiteau killed: James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States of America.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto

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.

1933 has arrived – at least in Alan’s series One Best Picture After Another, which is dedicated to all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture in chronological order. What did our time-traveller think of Cavalcade? (And if you want to form your own opinion: here, in the absence of a trailer, is the full movie.)

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One Best Picture After Another #6: Cavalcade (1933)

Alan 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?

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.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Christmas… in June?!

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.

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.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: June 2026

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #291: Homer in the Age of TikTok

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!

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.

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They create worlds: Return to the Zone

MattLeave 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.

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.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Heads up

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.

Party like it’s 1932: this week, Alan’s series on the Academy Award Best Picture winners arrived at Grand Hotel. Who wouldn’t like a bit of Greta Garbo in their week?

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