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!
Note: as this is a revisit of the 2008 film Bronson there will be many spoilers below.
Continue readingJoin 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, Alan took our Six Damn Fine Degrees feature on a trip to the 1980s, to the Pet Shop Boys’ feature film It Couldn’t Happen Here – a feature film dressed up as a music video, vice versa, or both at once?
It’s been a while since we’ve been excited about the Marvel Cinematic Universe here at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture – so when Thunderbolts*, the 36th movie in the franchise was released to largely positive reviews, we were curious: had the curse of middling, directionless Marvel movies been broken? Join Alan and Matt (for once recording in the very same room!) to find out their take on the super- (or should that be anti-?) hero extravaganza starring Florence Pugh leading a team of characters from a range of other films and TV shows in the series, from Ant-Man and the Wasp to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. What did Thunderbolts* get right? Where did it step wrong? And what does it mean for the future of the MCU – which is set to continue with this year’s Fantastic Four: First Steps and next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, a film certain to attain the superhero casting singularity, seeing how it will feature pretty much every actor who has ever even heard the word “marvel” uttered?
Continue readingWelcome 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!
At the height of their international success, the Pet Shop Boys made a movie. But following the collapse of their record label EMI, the production entered into a Rights Limbo. In other words, nobody quite knew who owned what when it came to the production, meaning no one could screen the film or release it on DVD or Blu-ray. It wasn’t clear whose permission they would need to seek and who they would need to pay to do it.
Continue readingJoin 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.
What are our portals to the past? It could be our parents’ attic, or our boxes of music and video tapes (for which we might not even have any devices to play them on any more), or any other collection or archive. To find out more about Sam’s portals to the past, check out his Six Damn Fine Degrees post. And, since Vertigo represents one of Sam’s most-used such portals, here’s the original trailer for Hitchcock’s classic.
And there we are: the final film on Criterion’s Essential Fellini box set, Intervista. It’s not Fellini’s final film: the director would go on to make The Voice of the Moon, released in 1990 and starring Marmitey Italian comedian Roberto Benigni, but even if the decision not to include that one was down to rights issues, Intervista feels like the right end point, seeing how it is about filmmaking, memory and finding that decades have passed and all of a sudden you’re an old man.
Also, quite literally and more than any other film by the director, Intervista is about the man himself: Federico Fellini.
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!
Continue reading
ELSTER
And she wanders. God knows where she wanders. I followed her one day.
SCOTTIE
Where'd she go?
Elster almost ignores the question as he looks back to the day.
ELSTER
Watched her come out of the apartment, someone I didn't know... walking in a different way... holding her head in a way I didn't know; and get into her car, and drive out to...
(He smiles grimly)
Golden Gate Park. Five miles. She sat on a bench at the edge of the lake and stared across the water to the old pillars that stand an the far shore, the Portals of the Past.
Sat there a long time, not moving... and I had to leave, to got to the office. That evening, when I came home, I asked what she'd done all day. She said she'd driven to Golden Gate Park and sat by the lake. That's all.
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.
It can’t all be films: in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Matt wrote about his happiest childhood memories, which are largely of the times he spent at the library or reading books he got from the library. And what better trailer to feature with respect to cool libraries than this one?
Does a killer title make for a killer movie? When Philip Kaufman adapted Milan Kundera’s early-’80s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being for the big screen, it made a huge splash at its release in 1988, drawing audience numbers that, at this point in time, are almost unthinkable for a drama focusing on the lives of three characters in communist Czechoslovakia – even if that drama is as erotic and adult as Kaufman’s film was. And how well does it hold up in 2025, both for those who’d seen it at the time and those who are only just seeing it for the first time? Join Sam, Julie and Matt as they discuss the film, its young stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin, the mirrors and bowler hats, and the Bourgeois dreadfulness of late 1960s, early 1970s Switzerland. What made The Unbearable Lightness of Being such a success at the time? Why is it barely talked about almost 40 years later?
Continue readingWelcome 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!
Differently from some of my co-baristas here at A Damn Fine Cup, I don’t have any kids, which means that I can neither share all the books, films and series that I loved as a kid with them nor can they show me their weird and wonderful discoveries in pop culture. Which, in some ways, is perhaps what I would enjoy most about being a parent: telling them about the stories close to my heart and being there to see them discover those stories. Though I guess there’s also the flipside: I’m not sure I would be very happy to find out that a kid of mine read, say, The Neverending Story and didn’t care for it.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 