Matt – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Six Damn Fine Degrees #310: Where are the aliens that are truly alien?

30/10/202630/10/2026MattLeave a comment

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.

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They create worlds: City life, Cyberpunk-style

21/10/202620/10/2026MattLeave a comment

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.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Let them eat cake (and watch trailers)

12/10/2026MattLeave a comment

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.

After having had Yi Yi on his shelf for years, Matt finally got around to watching not only his first Edward Yang film, but his second (A Brighter Summer Day) and third (Yang’s episode in the anthology film In Our Time) as well. He writes about two of these in his recent Criterion Corner entry.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #307: How bad is bad?

09/10/202616/10/2026Matt1 Comment

I have a strong personal belief when it comes to criticism of art of any kind: critics have to make a distinction between disliking the thing they’re criticising, whether that’s a film or a book, a game or an album, and that thing actually being bad. This doesn’t mean that they have to put every criticism down as a personal dislike: a good critic should be free to think, and state, that this movie or that novel is actually bad. But any critic, or indeed anyone uttering criticism, that seems to think that if they dislike a work it must obviously be bad? They can go take a long walk while I unfollow them and remove their sites from my bookmarks.

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Criterion Corner: Yi Yi (#339) and A Brighter Summer Day (#804)

07/10/202607/10/2026MattLeave a comment

There are some filmmakers that pop up on your radar again and again – but it takes you a very long time to get around to watching any of their films. There are just too many interesting filmmakers and too many films to check out – and if you’ve got a great local repertory cinema with a well-curated programme, you may even think, “Hey, sooner or later they’ll get around to something by this director on their programme.” Or, indeed, Criterion releases some of the director’s films, so you order them, and once they’ve arrived you put them on your shelf, next to the other Criterion films you’ve not yet got around to watching.

And then years pass, because in the meantime there are so many other films to watch, other directors to check out, other Criterion releases to get excited about and other cinema programmes featuring yet more films and filmmakers to keep you busy.

Until, in this case, your favourite local repertory cinema puts on a series of films from the Taiwanese New Wave, and you finally get to see two films by Edward Yang (well, actually three, though one of these was one episode in the anthology film In Our Time) for the first time – not on TV, played from a Criterion disk, but on a movie screen, as the God of Cinema intended. So this is a bit of a cheat in terms of being a Criterion Corner entry – but I assure you, Yi Yi (2000) has been sitting on my shelf for a long time, and A Brighter Summer Day (1991) is on its way as I write this. And I am already looking forward to revisiting both films in their Criterion releases.

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Criterion Corner: Hud (#1319)

24/09/202624/09/2026MattLeave a comment

There is a certain thrill to seeing a movie star of tremendous charisma, a leading-man type we’re drawn to, play a character that is offputting. Certain stars we got to know as villains: Willem Dafoe, for instance, or Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman or Mads Mikkelsen. The beloved Gary Oldman arguably rose to stardom playing mostly bad guys, even if some of them were tortured and romantic. But there’s a difference when a leading man with leading-man looks appears on the screen – and does something horrible. Remember Henry Fonda’s introduction in Once Upon a Time in the West? Part of what makes that scene so effective is that the sadistic man we see murder a boy in cold blood is portrayed by the actor who played iconic paragons of integrity such as My Darling Clementine‘s Wyatt Earp or 12 Angry Men‘s Juror #8.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Frankly, my dear

20/09/2026MattLeave a comment

Not all of the films that Alan has written about in his chronology of Best Picture winners are much known these days – but it’s likely that every film fan has at least heard of the 1939 winner: Gone with the Wind.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The End is the Beginning is the End

13/09/2026MattLeave a comment

A coming-of-age story… in the format of an indie pixel-art point-and-click adventure? Well, Perfect Tides did a great job of this, so why not check out its follow-up, Perfect Tides: Station to Station, which Matt liked a hell of a lot?

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They create worlds: Perfect Tides: Station to Station (2026)

09/09/202612/09/2026MattLeave a comment

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.

Gamers love choice. They love games that let them make momentous decisions: killing a character or sparing them, siding with the rebels or the powers that be, blowing up the city of Megaton or disarming the nuclear bomb at its centre. The bigger the choice, the better, and it’s best if the choices change the plot of a game in fundamental ways. Gamers sneer when a choice seems purely cosmetic: being nice or nasty to a character, only to get a message that so-and-so will remember how you treated them? It’s not like that character won’t be eaten by zombies ten minutes later, so what does it matter?

Most gamers look at choice in binary terms, and choices only matter when they affect the plot of a game. As if the choices we make on a daily basis, the ones that aren’t life-or-death, weren’t the ones that defined us – perhaps not individually, but certainly in sum. It’s our many small decisions that shape us for when a big decision comes around.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: You wouldn’t pick a pocket

23/08/202623/08/2026MattLeave a comment

Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’: in his series on the Academy Awards Best Picture winners, Alan has arrived at 1937’s The Life of Emile Zola.