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 saw the start of a new series called One Best Picture After Another: Alan’s revisiting every single Best Picture Academy Award winner! Yes, you’ve read that right: over the coming months and even years, he will be watching, and writing about, each film that won the Oscar for Best Picture, and on Monday he started with the 1927 winner Wings. Sadly, this trailer isn’t the original – were there even trailers back then? -, but it’ll give a good idea of what Wings is all about.
While we do post articles about video games occasionally, the medium is pretty much underserved by A Damn Fine Cup of Culture’s podcasts – but we are hoping to remedy this at least somewhat with this espresso podcast: our guest for April is Johanna Pirker, computer scientist and educator at Graz University of Technology and the Technical University of Munich. In 2025, Johanna published her book The Game is On (currently only available in German, but there are plans for an English translation – and a Thai version is in the works!), in which she talks about the revolutionary potential of video games. Join Matt as he talks to Johanna about her work, her book, and about video games, from Johanna’s earliest memories of playing Prince of Persia on her father’s PC to more recent developments in the medium and art form.
For more from Johanna, make sure to check out her website and YouTube channel. Also, we’ve previously written about two of the games Johanna brings up in the podcast: Journeyand Dear Esther.
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 think many people remember the first time that they discovered music that really fired the imagination. Music that wasn’t just the signature to a tale, but an integral part of the experience. If you wanted to imagine the other worlds of a tale – just a few bars of a theme and your mind begins to inhabit a whole new universe.
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?
Many years ago a movie journalist gave me a very good insight into the type of films that win the Best Picture Oscar. The winner, they argued, will tend to be the film that best reflects the type of film Hollywood – at that time – wants to be making. Not necessarily the films that they know they need to make in order to bring in the money, nor the most technically adventurous or innovative. Nor even the most critically acclaimed. It’ll be the film that the Academy voters working in the industry look at and think: “Yes! That’s the type of film I wanted to make when I chose this career.”
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 One Best Picture After Another – our new fortnightly blog where Barista Alan will attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. Before it all begins in earnest tomorrow, here’s his explanation as to why he embarked on this madness.
When it comes to the Academy Award for Best Picture, there’s an adage that goes: “The right pictures get nominated, the wrong picture wins.” And while you could easily do a very long-running blog on all the amazing films that didn’t get close to even a nomination, I think there’s some truth in that. Especially when it comes to the great injustices of the Award’s history, it is almost always framed in terms of a nominated film that is now revered as a classic losing out to a film that is now almost unheard of.
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 past and the way it influences the present featured strongly in the last two instalments. Being from Vienna, I very much enjoyed and related to Matt’s dive into his trip to neighbouring Prague. I’m even a little sorry that I’ll now proceed to wrench this theme of past and present onto a completely different track.
Let me take you back to the year 2005 and a release that you probably missed because there was so much else going on.
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.
Virtual Reality is one of those technologies that sound tremendously cool – on paper. No longer are you just looking at a 2D representation of whatever world a game creates: you can be fully immersed in a real world! Except it’s not that easy. For one thing, not everyone has the necessary space at their disposal, so you can actually walk around in the virtual world. For another, not a few people simply get nauseous in VR. And then there’s the challenge of tactility: not just seeing but feeling and touching whatever you’re interacting in the virtual world. There is a not inconsiderable gap between the idea of VR and the actual practice – a gap that can be reduced by means of clever game design, but this kind of design doesn’t necessarily lend itself to what people expect from VR gaming.
Ten years after the release of Oculus Rift, VR isn’t the runaway success that some breathless PR people predicted, and as a result, less and less money is being put into the development of VR experiences and games. If your audience is relatively small, you can’t really afford to develop VR fare that has the kind of AAA production values you get in normal video games. And this generally means that big games, with large worlds, the kind of thing you find regularly in non-VR gaming, are a rarity when it comes to Virtual Reality. A lot of games developed for the tech are much smaller in scope, somewhere in between an escape room and a theme park ride, and they are generally as on-rails as the latter. With a modest budget, you may still be able to put together a handful of interconnected rooms that are reasonably detailed and nice to look at; a whole world, though, is an entirely different matter.
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.
Another year, another Second Chances episode: in this month’s podcast, Sam and Alan get together to revisit two historical pieces, though they couldn’t be much more different – one has decadence, deviance and Nazism, the other offers Hollywood mystery, Communists and dancing sailors. Yes, we’re taking a second look at Luchino Visconti’s 1969 film The Damned, the cause of something of a memorable, and traumatic, early movie memory of Sam’s, and at the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! (2016) (which we also wrote about here), generally one of the less-appreciated films of the writer-director siblings – but perhaps one that is unfairly maligned?
And if Alan and Sam’s chat about fascists, fixers, murders and musical numbers has got you in the mood, why not check out these earlier Second Chances episodes?
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