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!
Before the eponymous alien of Ridley Scott’s film was turned from a biomechanical, psychosexual horror into a murderous bug, it was something much more potent. Even if functionally it’s basically not much different from the bogeymen of slasher movies, for which the original Halloween‘s Michael Myers is certainly the platonic ideal, it is also something more. I don’t like to use the term ‘cosmic horror’, mainly because it seems too flabby and loose a definition to be particularly meaningful, but the antagonist of Alien was more than just a monster or a killer in a rubber suit. When Ash, reduced to a head on a table, calls it the “perfect organism” and praises its “structural perfection” and its “purity… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality”, he’s reinforcing what’s already there in H.R. Giger’s design: the alien (I still don’t like calling it a xenomorph, the kind of term beloved of people who prefer leaden lorecraft over imagination) is, well, alien. Even when you know it’s a guy in a rubber suit, it doesn’t feel like it. That head, the extendable jaw, the acidic blood, and its uncanny ability to blend into the shadows so that every piece of industrial engineering aboard the Nostromo seems like it’s alive and out to get you: the alien is a living, walking nightmare.
But while this is true, functionally the alien isn’t particularly, well, alien. It can be understood. It functions, on a naturalistic level, like a predator (no, not that kind of Predator! that’s a diffferent movie!), and on a structural level, like the aforementioned bad guy from a slasher movie. Truly alien aliens are exceedingly rare in so much storytelling, especially visual storytelling.
At least for many of us here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, the days have become much shorter and the nights colder and darker – which means it’s a perfect time to get stuck in new series, books or films. What have we been watching, listening to or reading lately?
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?
7/10
When I was first thinking about embarking on One Best Picture After Another, I had a look at all the films that had won Best Picture. It’s an odd collection: you have your bone fide classics, your populist barnstormers, also there’s quite good films that probably didn’t deserve the prize, the absolutely WTF, what were they thinking?! winners – and then a final category: the What? winners. Films I didn’t recognise, had never seen and hadn’t even heard of. The likes of Cavalcade, The Life Of Emile Zolaand Cimarron.
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!
Alien is one of my favourite films ever. Every aspect of the production seems to come together in a perfectly judged piece of engrossing world creation – while also evoking a uniquely unsettling atmosphere. The cast is also wonderful: many films have tried to imitate this roughneck spaceship crew, but not one has ever got close. And finally, and obviously, there’s the alien herself – a masterpiece of chilling design. Here isa threat from outer space unlike any other.
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.
My first few visits to Night City weren’t auspicious: this place was too loud, too shiny, too neon. The people were annoying, the traffic lethal, and wherever you looked, there’d be advertisements, more often than not featuring so much sexual innuendo or outright T&A that you’d almost forget there could be any other body parts. And, obviously, the ads wouldn’t be silent, because that would have meant that you could ignore them, so from every other speaker you’d get the sound of moaning interspersed with someone trying to sell you something. They do say that sex sells, but what these ads were selling me on was, first, noise-cancelling headphones and, secondly, a quick flight out of Night City.
Except I couldn’t: I was a cyber-enhanced mercenary with a biochip in my head. A biochip containing the engram of legendary rock star/terrorist Johnny Silverhand – and, slowly but surely, Johnny’s consciousness was overwriting mine. So, sure, I could leave Night City and live the quiet life for a few weeks – until my own mind would be completely erased and, to all intents and purposes, I’d be dead. Or I could stay in Night City, tolerate the noise, and try to find a solution to my predicament… or die trying.
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.
For our main October podcast episode, we focused on films featuring ghosts that, contrary to tradition, aren’t supposed to be scary – except, perhaps, to the kind of side characters you get in 1930s screwball comedies or to estate agents worried they’ll never manage to get rid of that haunted seaside cottage. But where does that leave us for Halloween, without a single genuine scare to curdle our blood? Thus, Sam and Matt get together for this month’s espresso podcast to remedy this and talk about two movies about ghostly goings-on that are clearly designed to frighten their viewers. First of these is The Changeling (1980), directed by Peter Medak, in which George C. Scott faces up against a haunted mansion and the kind of crime that tends to raise the spirits of the dead to bring about justice, or, barring that, vengeance. How well do its very traditional scares hold up almost 50 years later? Then, changing both century and continent, Sam and Matt talk about Pulse (2001, also known as Kairo) by expert frightener Kiyoshi Kurosawa, in which the dead begin to spill out into our world through the conduit of a still relatively new technology: the internet. Is this the kind of ghostly horror to dedicate your bandwidth to this Halloween? And, in general, what makes for an effective ghost story, and what tends to dampen the spirits in more ways than one?
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!
