Author: The Barista Collective

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #88: Century

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Welcome to 2025! We’re taking the new year as an opportunity to look both forward and into the past – and to do something we’ve never done before: for the very first time (no, Robin Beck, we don’t mean you!) we’ve recorded a conversation featuring all four of the damn fine core podcasters: Alan, Julie, Matt and Sam. In the first episode of the year, we’re having a look at the cups of culture (mostly film) that came out in 1925, 1950, 1975 and 2000, from Marion Davies and Zander the Great via the wonderfully meta double bill All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard and ’70s greats such as Jaws and Chinatown to the still futuristic-sounding year 2000, which brought us films as different as Gladiator, Memento and In the Mood for Love. We cap off our conversation about a century of cinema with a look at the year to come and the films we’re anticipating the most. Wishing everyone a damn fine year, or indeed century!

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast Christmas Special 2024

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It is that time of the year again: snow, carol singing, and Bruce Willis crawling through air vents muttering to himself before he delivers the presents. Which also means: it’s time for our Christmas Special! This year, we’re taking the topic of the summer series as the starting point, remakes – but as everyone knows, these can be naughty or nice, so we’ve asked our guests as well as our regulars to talk about their dream remakes, the ones they would like to see made, or the nightmare remakes which they wouldn’t even wish on the people at CinemaSins. From train-bound screwball comedy to sexy ’60s spies, from dodgy demons to festive skeletons, from one serial killer to a different serial killer altogether: these are the films we would love, or hate, to see remade.

A great big thank you goes out to our guests of 2024 who have contributed to the Christmas Special: film critic Alan Mattli (of Maximum Cinema, Swissinfo and Facing the Bitter Truth), filmmaker and podcaster Daniel Thron (of Martini Giant) and film historian and cultural critic Marcy Goldberg – and obviously to all of you out there who have been following our work at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture. The Damn Fine Cup of Culture crew wishes everyone happy holidays, filled with good films, series, books, games and music!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: People. It’s what’s for dinner.

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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 a first: a new Six Damn Fine Degrees post by our new contributor, Melanie. Taking last week’s lead on The Neverending Story, she wrote about fictions in which people run around mindscapes created by their own brains, focusing on the Chinese series The Spirealm. Make sure to check out Melanie’s inaugural contribution!

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #87: Snowpisode!

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It’s December – which means, it’s time for snow! And since the actual white stuff falling from the sky is becoming rarer and rarer in many places, your cultural baristas at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture are talking about the cinematic version: snow in films. Join Julie, Sam and Matt as they talk about films in which snow is central, focusing on the following three movies: James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933), starring a young Claude Rains, Where Eagles Dare (1968), Brian G. Hutton’s WW2 adventure featuring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood, and finally an enduring favourite of several of us at A Damn Fine Cup: the Coen Brothers’ modern classic Fargo (1996). What role does snow play in these films – and which of them is the ultimate snow movie, in which the white stuff isn’t just an aesthetic choice or a means to an end but much, much more?

(By the way, due to technical difficulties, Matt’s audio in this episode unfortunately sounds like he recorded his audio with his mic in one room and himself in another. We hope that you’ll still enjoy the conversation – and if necessary, we’ll send him and his mic out into the snow until he’s promised to do better next time!)

P.S.: If you’re interested in more talk about the Coens, make sure to check out our podcast from summer 2023:

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Leave the right ones outside

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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 this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Sam took us back to one of his childhood favourites: The Little Vampire, which he discovered first as a TV series and then as a series of children’s books. But, sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a trailer for that one, so here’s a trailer for a very different vampire child.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: November 2024

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We’ve covered remakes extensively this summer, but what about their often derided sibling, the sequel? We’re taking the recent release of two high-profile sequels, Joker: Folie à deux and Gladiator 2, as an opportunity to talk about sequels. Are they all creatively bankrupt exercises in IP masturbation, or is there potential in sequels? Is the only good sequel one that gives us more of what we enjoyed the first time around, or should a sequel break with what has gone before and surprise us? Where are Joker 2 and Gladiator 2 on the continuum from more-of-the-same sequels to throw-everything-out-the-window sequels? Is Folie à deux as much of a waste of talent and money as most people said? Is Gladiator 2 a worthwhile return to Rome and to the arena that gets our thumbs-up?

For more thoughts on sequels with a bonus link to Ridley Scott, you may want to check out the following:

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #86: Stealth remakes

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For this year’s summer series, A Damn Fine Cup of Culture focused on remakes, from men who knew too much and trucks bearing explosive goods to planets that create their own remakes and finally to stars being born and dying. But these are the obvious remakes (whatever their directors might say, depending on which day of the week it is): what about iconic films – that almost no one knows to be remakes? In this episode, Julie and Alan get together to talk about two films that are infinitely more famous than the originals that preceded them: Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Maltese Falcon (1941). Why do these films escape the frequent criticism of remakes: that originality is dead and that Hollywood only knows how to repeat itself? How do the originals compare to the more iconic later films? And what’s the key to making a remake that will eclipse the film(s) that came before?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: We have everything, from witnesses to werewolfs!

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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.

Every now and then our weekly Six Damn Fine Degrees series starts circling a certain topic for several weeks, and right now the focus is on Agatha Christie, her stories and the ways these were adapted. This week, Julie wrote one of her usual wonderful deep dives, this time on Billy Wilder’s film version of Witness for the Prosecution. Make sure to check it out!

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A Damn Fine Espresso: October 2024

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On the podcast, we’ve talked about festivals before, both about specific festivals (such as Queersicht, the annual LGBTIAQ+ film festival held in Bern, Switzerland) and about the experience of going to cultural festivals of any kind. Autumn is festival season, and Alan and Sam talk about film festivals they’ve been to, from Switzerland’s festivals in Locarno and Zürich via San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain (which Sam recently visited) to the London Film Festival, where Alan regularly catches some of the more off-the-radar small films. What’s it like to attend these festivals? What is the experience like? How good are they for celebrity-spotting? And would they recommend the festivals to film fans, or are they reserved more for filmmakers and journalists?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Got milk?

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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.

Many of Criterion’s releases are the classics of Hollywood and world cinema that all film geeks have heard of: Fellini, Bergman, Varda. Or then it’s cult classics such as the original Godzilla films. Some of their releases are less known, though, such as Diamonds of the Night, which Matt discovered recently.

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