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.
… pation. Made you wait, huh?
Anyway, what’s been going on chez A Damn Fine Cup of Culture this week? Our schedule was a bit wobbly, due to a post that wasn’t scheduled properly, which means we had two posts going up on Saturday, starting with Matt’s Six Damn Fine Degrees about adaptations into different media, and the ways that film and TV adaptations don’t necessarily restrict our imagination. Case in point: the BBC’s Wolf Hall.
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’s Six Damn Fine Degrees saw Alan continue his own Lord of the Rings trilogy, which started in May, this time writing about the choices made in creating the 1981 BBC radio adaptation. Alan’s a big fan of this version of Tolkien’s epic tale, and his post may just convince you to seek out the BBC’s take on The Lord of the Rings. But as there are no trailers for ’80s radio series, or at least none we could find, here’s a trailer for Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings instead.
We’ve spent a lot of this year talking about the sadly departed David Lynch – but surrealist film doesn’t begin and end with Lynch, so we’re dedicating the October espresso podcast to one of the greats of experimental filmmaking: Maya Deren, who, aside from film, also was active as a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, writer and photographer. In particular, we’re focusing on her beautiful, enigmatic, eternally rewatchable “Meshes of the Afternoon”, a released in 1943, made by Deren and her husband Alexandr Hackenschmied (also known as Alexander Hammid). What makes this 14-minute short such an effective precursor to films ranging from Lynch’s Lost Highway and Inland Empire to more mainstream, genre cinema such as Inception and even arthouse video games?
It’s that time of year: the days are getting shorter, the shadows are getting darker, and the ghouls and ghosts are eager to come out and play. As is customary, we’re dedicating our October podcast to scary things – and this year we’re looking at the definite article in horror: The. No, that’s not a typo: for this year’s Halloween episode, we’ve selected three horror films whose title begins with “The”, namely Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), in which an American diplomat suspects that his newborn son has been replaced with the spawn of Satan; Spanish gothic The Orphanage (2007), in which the children are decidedly not all right; and John Carpenter classic The Thing (1982), which pits Kurt Russell against what may just be the gnarliest shapeshifting creature from outer space. What makes these three horror films ones that viewers can return to again and again? And what other recommendations do our Baristas of Fear have for the scary season?
Wow, Bob, wow: Twin Peaks forms part of the DNA of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture – if our name and logo didn’t already make that obvious. And yet, some of us have come very late to David Lynch‘s seminal series: while Sam had seen a couple of episodes, he had never watched the entire (original) series when we recorded the first episode of our Lost Summer on the late, great director and purveyor of surreal unease. So, what better opportunity than this summer (which included espresso episodes on Wild at Heartand Lost Highway) to remedy this over some cherry pie and damn fine coffee? Join Sam and Matt in the Red Room as they talk about Twin Peaks and how it holds up for someone who, for decades has heard about the series but not watched it. (You’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve adjusted the audio so that no one is speaking backwards.)
We’re concluding our summer series, Lost Summer, with an episode dedicated to the actors that died not in old age, looking back at a long, storied career, but that were gone too soon. From tragic silent film icon Rudolph Valentino, via River Phoenix, a teen idol promising to become one of Hollywood’s acting greats, to Philip Seymour Hoffman, a fearless actor who stood out even among amazing ensemble casts: how do we feel about their lives and their deaths? What is our relationship to these people that we largely know from playing fictional characters? Why can it feel like a deeper genuine loss when one of the actors we like dies? And is there a dark side to how fans mourn their idols, and how the movie industry uses its stars as commodities, even in death?
Our Lost Summer continues, quite fittingly, with another David Lynch film: in our August espresso, Alan and Sam talk about Lynch’s most ’90s nightmare, Lost Highway, in which murder, mobsters, Mystery Men, Patricia Arquette (with black hair) and Patricia Arquette (with blond hair) abound. Add music by Nine Inch Nails, the Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein, plus a killer track by David Bowie, and you have a David Lynch film that, more than all his other work, very much is marked by the decade it was made, so much so that at times it feels like a feature-length video shown on MTV’s Alternative Nation. But does this make Lost Highway dated, or does this neo-Hitchcockian slice of jealousy and paranoia hold up in 2025? There’s only one way to find out: listen to us, because, as a matter of fact, we’re at your home right now.
Some things are sadly lost: rolls of film crumble, TV programmes are never recorded, studios choose not to distribute a film. And then there are the cultural artefacts that come from a context so toxic, they are consigned to the poison cabinet, where people have to make an effort to seek them out. The films made during the Third Reich, under the control of Joseph Goebbels’ Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, are such artefacts. There are the famous propaganda films, such as those made by Leni Riefenstahl (if you get a chance, watch the 2024 documentary on her by Andres Veiel!), but there are many others that are barely known, except to film historians. In the third episode of our Lost Summer, and inspired by Rüdiger Suchsland’s 2017 documentary Hitler’s Hollywood, Sam, Julie and Matt look at two of those films: Wolfgang Liebeneier’s big city comedy Grossstadtmelodie (1943) and Opfergang (1944), a strange, lurid melodrama by Veit Harlan (often translated as The Great Sacrifice or Rite of Sacrifice) that was sometimes called the ‘Nazi Vertigo‘. Neither film may correspond entirely to what present-day viewers may imagine Nazi propaganda to look like – but both, made by directors loyal to Hitler’s regime, were very much made to convey propagandistic messages to their audience. What is it like to revisit these films 80 years later? What have they left behind? And should they, and other films of their kind, remain locked up in the poison cabinet, or is there an argument for making them available, fully knowing what they were made to do?
Our Lost Summer started with an episode in honour of David Lynch, the artist and director who’s been an inspiration to us here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture. After last month’s espresso episode, in which Sam and Matt talked about the extended deleted scenes that were released for Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, we’re now continuing our tribute to the man with a stealth Second Chances episode: Alan, a big fan of Lynch, has nonetheless bounced off the director’s Wild at Heart (1990), while Sam has been a fan from the beginning, so the two of them have revisited the film. Has time changed Alan’s assessment? Have Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and a fantastic supporting cast ranging from Diane Ladd and Willem Dafoe to Harry Dean Stanton and a bunch of familiar faces from Twin Peaks, WA won him over – or, indeed, Sam’s enthusiasm for this pulpy pop thriller that nods more than just once or twice in the direction of camp classic The Wizard of Oz?
Hundreds of films and TV series make it onto our screens each year – but just as many vanish, some before they ever make it in front of an audience. The second episode of our summer series, the Lost Summer, is dedicated to these: the films that are destroyed or vanish into some vault, the TV series that were never archived, or even the legendary scenes that are much talked about but never seen. Join Julie, Alan and Sam as they explore the romance and the frustration inherent in this vast library of lost film and TV. Why are we fascinated so much by what is lost? Why are the movie and television industries often so cavalier about preserving this cultural heritage? And which of the vanished would our cultural baristas most like to see found again?
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 