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.
In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Matt revisited some of the time loop stories he’s enjoyed most.
Heads. Heads. Heads. If you have a moment, why not join us as we flip coins and somehow always end up with the same result? In our February podcast, Julie, Sam and Matt remember the late, great Tom Stoppard, in particular his seminal play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and especially Stoppard’s 1990 film adaptation of the same title, which starred Gary Oldman, Tim Roth and Richard Dreyfuss. How does Rosencrantz and Guildenstern land only a couple of months after Stoppard’s death on 29 November 2025? How does this quintessential piece of metatheatre translate onto the screen? Is it better to be alive or dead in a box? Can we give you love and rhetoric without the blood? And was there a moment, at the beginning, when they could have said no?
P.S.: For more on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (both the play and the film), and on why Roger Ebert was wrong about the screen adaptation, check out Julie’s Six Damn Fine Degrees #176 from way back in April 2024.
Continue readingWelcome 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!
Time loop narratives are almost always power fantasies. Sure, there’s a comical element about them, but that’s part of the fantasy: the protagonists of time loop stories are caught in an existentialist Looney Tunes short, but whenever they step on a rake or have a bomb blow up in their faces, they go back to start with added knowledge: if they cut this wire instead of that one, if they push this button rather than pulling that lever, if they jump to the right two seconds after they hear the car horn, they’ll survive. And thus, step by step, they master their situation.
In that sense, time loop narratives are the kind of power fantasies that are typical for video games.
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, we launched our new monthly feature: Shortcuts. Once a month, we will post quick write-ups about what the gang at A Damn Fine Cup has been watching, reading, listening to or playing. Our first Shortcuts took us from the poetic Silent Friend to the “chemistry and crass jokes up the wazoo” of goofball superhero game Dispatch.
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!
Last week, Mege hit us with “I didn’t like Oppenheimer. That’s largely because I didn’t understand the second half of the movie.” In its bluntness, this is one of my favourite Six Degrees posts so far, and Mege is spot on. The funniest thing (to me) is that he went right back to watch it again and still didn’t get it, and now he’s apparently seriously contemplating watching it a third time. Noooooo. Cut your losses, Mege!
Continue readingConsidering how much we watch, read, listen to and play in any given month, it’s almost a bit sad that we only write about a fraction of these. So, starting this month, we’re trying a new monthly format: on the last Wednesday of each month, we will release a few shortcuts: quick impressions of films, series, books, albums, games, or any other damn fine cups of culture that we’ve enjoyed this month, whether they are new or we only just got around to them now.
So, with no further ado, here are our first Shortcuts. Enjoy!
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.
Even a couple of years after its release, not everyone has seen Oppenheimer – and some who are now remedying this aren’t necessarily enjoying it as much as most have. Check out Mege’s Six Damn Fine Degrees for an instance of this.
There was a point in my mid-40s where I realised: I have so many games purchased on Steam, I will not live to play all of them, at least not unless I start going through them one by one… and not unless I stop buying a single additional game.
And, looking at my collection of films on physical media? The same may be true. I have a bit more of a fighting chance: my library of games on Steam is in part so large because once a game I’m even just mildly interested in is on sale for US$10 or less, I tend to buy it. Films still cost more, especially those highly addictive Criterion releases I can’t seem to do without. Still: I buy films at a higher rate than I watch the films I’ve bought. The same is definitely true for books.
And, frankly: when I realised the extent to which my backlog would survive me? I felt an unsettling sense of vertigo. (And, embarrassingly, I briefly hoped that by the time I’m old, there’d be a way to upload my consciousness into the cloud, where I would then spend eternity working off my backlog.)
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 didn’t like Oppenheimer. That’s largely because I didn’t understand the second half of the movie, wherein, somehow, Oppenheimer gets the upper hand over Strauss. I didn’t understand what was there for the getting, nor did I understand what the bone of contention was. To the very small extent that I got the situation between them, I didn’t much care. As I understood it, it took a smallish statement by the Rami Malek character during the hearing to push Strauss off his pedestal. And that was it. What had just happened?
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.
In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Sam wrote about Netflix’ adaptation of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper books – and the importance of normalising LGBTQI+ romance that doesn’t need to adhere to limiting tropes and clichés. You’d think that we’d be further in 2026, but, sadly…
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 