TV and Streaming

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Oh, the shark, the cat and the chimp have such teeth, dear

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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.

We look back at the week that straddles two years, which for us here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture began with Matt’s retrospective of 2024, bookended by Hirokazu Kore-eda’s wonderful Monster and the wondrous Flow.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #215: Revenge Means Taking out the Trash

Melanie3 Comments

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!

Have you ever thought about what vengeance means to you? Who would you revenge yourself on? The coworker who stole your promotion, the jerk who cut you off in traffic, the kid who made your life hell in middle school? Someone closer to you? And what would it look like, to actually, really, finally get your own back?

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That was the year that was: 2024

Matt2 Comments

Ever since the pandemic, time feels like it’s been broken. Looking back at the films and TV series I’ve watched this year, the games I’ve played, and whatever else I did over the last 12 months, my most frequent reaction is “That happened this year?!” The temporal shape of things has been out of whack for a while, and it sometimes feels like this is getting worse – like we’re all stuck in one of the trippier episodes of Star Trek. Though I think it’s time to be honest about this: in part that’s also because I am approaching the big Five-Oh (and no, I’m not talking about Hawaii). This is my last New Year’s post before finishing my half-century, and that is a pretty freaky thought.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a kaiju?

MattLeave 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.

Only a few more days until Christmas – but until the big Yuletide onslaught begins in earnest, let’s revisit what we did this week at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture… starting with Sam’s revisiting of two pastiches of classic crime stories, Clue and Murder by Death.

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

The Barista CollectiveLeave 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.

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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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Let it snow!

MattLeave 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.

This week, Matt swerved our weekly Six Damn Fine Degrees feature away from vampires towards the book that was his favourite when he was a child, and that still is among his favourites: Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. Unfortunately, this means that we won’t get around posting the trailer for the film adaptation, which Matt has never seen and most likely will never see.

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

The Barista CollectiveLeave 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.

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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Six Damn Fine Degrees #210: The Little Vampire (1985)

samlinder3 Comments

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 wonder whether director Jim Jarmusch was aware of TV’s The Little Vampire, which I watched ferociously growing up in the mid-’80s. Weren’t the slim-hipped goth vampires in his Only Lovers Left Alive (whom Julie described so well in last week’s piece) potentially inspired by this definitely goth-rock take on vampirism in the present-day world? It would be too interesting to ask and find out!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Sometimes they come back

MattLeave 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.

Last week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees took us into the (under)world of vampires, and this week’s instalment stayed there, focusing on a particularly attractive pair of bloodsuckers.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: I call this one Bitey!

MattLeave 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.

This week saw the first Six Damn Fine Degrees post by a new contributor: Doctor John Smith (now why does that name ring a bell?) wrote about movie vampires and their ties to the aristocracy and to capitalism. After all, they do like to bleed us dry, don’t they?

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