Six Damn Fine Degrees #299: VHS tapes, space stations and vampire slayers

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 had the best start at Uni that any mid-’90s geek could have wished for: on my first day as a university student, I was introduced to another student who’d already been studying for a couple of years and who was a fellow geek, so before I’d even started signing up for seminars and lectures, I found that the place where I would be spending much of the next ten years or so (yes, I did hang around at Uni for a fairly long time), there was a bunch of likeminded people who were just as much into the geeky fare of the time as me. Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and especially the still relatively new hotness that was The X-Files: differently from school or from home, where I was pretty much the only one who was into these series, people here were just as excited as I was about Captain Picard, Data, Commander Sisko, Major Kira, Odo, Agents Mulder and Scully, Assistant Director Skinner, The Cigarette Smoking Man, and all the other heroes, villains, monsters and freaks.

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Criterion Corner: Berlin Alexanderplatz (#411)

Is there any other period in German history that feels as unsettlingly familiar in 2026 as the Weimar Republic? It’s become something of a cliché, but it’s frighteningly easy to tell a story about Germany after the First World War and before Hitler seized control of the country that also speaks to the present day: you don’t have to squint hard to see the Weimar Republic as a time akin to ours in many ways. In the years culminating in the Great Depression, authoritarianism and totalitarianism seem more and more attractive to all too many, while others put their heads in the sand and ignore the warning signs. (Stop me if this sounds familiar.) And the time lends itself to telling stories that appeal to audiences: the big-budget neo-noir series Babylon Berlin tells exactly that story, even if it may be too enamoured with its own aesthetic, making something of a fetish out of the period, and there’s Cabaret, the musical (and later film adaptation), based on Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin, which has been revived recently on the stage, attracting big stars.

During the era itself, too, you’ll find iconic films that are suffused with the anxieties of the day, such as Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), which film geeks will certainly be familiar with. Maybe less familiar, at least to those who didn’t go to school in a German-speaking country, is the 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, one of the classics of modernist German literature – which Rainer Werner Fassbinder, enfant terrible of New German Cinema, adapted for television in 1980.

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Why, Chantal, why? A Couch in New York (1996)

Oh boy. Do you know the feeling when you hear about a film, it’s got an interesting director whose other films you’ve liked, as well as actors that you’ve enjoyed watching in the past. Not only that, but the film sounds really interesting for one reason or another: say, it’s in an unexpected genre for the filmmakers involved. It’s risky. It could backfire. But hey, it’s always worth the risk, isn’t it?

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Wiseman’s world

If you had told me earlier in the year that one of my favourite cinema experiences this year would be a set of long-form documentaries about subjects ranging from political institutions through bureaucracies to libraries, galleries and fine dining, and that I’d not only go and see several such documentaries three or four hours (and sometimes more) in length, after finishing one I’d want to see the next one pretty much right after? I would have laughed in disbelief.

Well, call me a convert: a one-month curated programme of documentaries by Frederick Wiseman, who died last February, turned me from someone who had heard of Wiseman into a card-carrying believer.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #294: Make mine digital

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!

Most of the films running at my best local cinema are shown in digital format – but occasionally, after the ads and the trailers, there will be a slide saying something to the effect of: the following feature will be shown in an analog, 35mm version. Whenever that happens, I imagine that I hear a contented sigh from all the real cineastes in the audience. 35mm. None of those new-fangled bits, bytes and pixels. Real film: warm, grainy, as God intended.

Now, I consider myself a pretentious film geek with the best of them. But, honestly? I can’t remember a single such announcement that we’re about to see a film on, well, film rather than only a digital facsimile that didn’t make me think: couldn’t we have the digital version instead?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Therwulf!

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 year, the United States of America are celebrating their 250th birthday. What better time to watch Netflix’s Death by Lightning, about the murder of President James A. Garfield by a delusional weasel of a man?

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C’mon and shoot a president: Death by Lightning (2025)

In 1990, Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins came out, a biting musical about the men and women who felt called upon to kill a US president. Through a set of historical characters, from John Wilkes Booth via Lee Harvey Oswald to Sara Jane Moore and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (who both attempted, and failed, to kill Gerald Ford), Sondheim shows us his bleak version of the American Dream: “Everybody’s got the right to be happy” – and what better way to achieve happiness and fill the emptiness inside yourself than to kill yourself a POTUS?

All of these would-be and actual murderers are pathetic in their own particular ways. They are angry at the world and the ways in which it doesn’t conform to their wishes. They are attention seekers who wished to put their imprint on America, having little to offer the world apart from their own warped ideas of greatness and how to achieve it. And perhaps none of them are more pathetic than Charles Guiteau: a liar, a thief, a narcissistic failure.

Few people, other than Sondheim fans, know Guiteau’s name. Even fewer know the name of the man Guiteau killed: James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States of America.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto

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.

1933 has arrived – at least in Alan’s series One Best Picture After Another, which is dedicated to all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture in chronological order. What did our time-traveller think of Cavalcade? (And if you want to form your own opinion: here, in the absence of a trailer, is the full movie.)

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Christmas… in June?!

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, Matt returned to the Zone. No, not the Brothers Strugatsky’s Zone, nor Tarkovsky’s, and not even the Zone of the original Stalker trilogy of video games. No, this time it’s the Zone of Stalker 2 – and it’s an even more inhospitable place than it used to be… though it may just be the most beautiful take on this particular post-apocalypse.

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They create worlds: Return to the Zone

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.

Way back in 2007, the Ukrainian video game developer GSC Game World released Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, a game that some would describe as a diamond in the rough, while others called it masochistic Eurojank. The first Stalker game, based on the Strugatsky brothers’ classic sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic and influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky’s loose film adaptation Stalker, was soon followed by Stalker: Clear Sky and Stalker: Call of Pripyat. All three games were janky and brutal, offering not conventional power fantasies so much as gruelling expeditions into the Chernobyl exclusion zone surrounding the power plant at the centre of the 1986 disaster. They weren’t fun games – but they were unique, atmospheric, and different from pretty much all shooters at the time.

GSC Game World’s games weren’t for everyone, but they found a community of fans. A sequel was announced, then cancelled, until, in 2018, Stalker 2 resurfaced. The game was scheduled for release in 2022 – a schedule that proved impossible to uphold when Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. In spite of setbacks, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl finally came out in November 2024. Two years later, I got around to returning to GSC’s new version of the Zone: from the Strugatskys’ region pockmarked by objects left behind by mysterious aliens, via Tarkovsky’s wet, verdant purgatory, to the surroundings of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a region populated by warring factions and mutant creatures, and strewn with reality-bending artefacts.

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