Six Damn Fine Degrees #232: Home is where the books are

MattLeave 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!

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.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: If Tom Cruise is 62 years old, how old does that make me?

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.

Being a parent isn’t just about introducing your kids to all the books, films and series you loved when you were their age: in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Melanie wrote about the weird and wonderful shows her (by now 14-year-old) daughter has introduced her.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #231: Things my daughter showed me because they’re really cool

MelanieLeave 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!

One of the best things about being a parent and a nerd is that you get to raise another little nerd. You get to shape their taste in series, movies, and books; to point out the amazing parts and the dubious ones. You get to say, “Come here, kid, I want to show you something, it’s really cool!”

And eventually, the moment arrives where they come running and say, “Mama, I want to show you something!”

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Galactus ate my baby!

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, Alan risked the wrath from villagers and… older powers in order to bring us a Six Damn Fine Degrees post about folk horror, touching on recent movies Starve Acre, Fréwaka and I Saw the TV Glow.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: April 2025

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Back in 2022, we did our first summer series: the Summer of Directors. The episode led by Alan focused on Robert Altman, the “grizzly-bear genius of American cinema”, as Ryan Gilbert put it in The Guardian. Back then, we discussed three of Altman’s most iconic ’70s films: satirical neo-noir The Long Goodbye, revisionist Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Nashville, a scathing satire of America through the lens of the country music industry. At the time, we gave a shout-out to one of Altman’s less well-known films, his uncanny psychological drama 3 Women, but we didn’t discuss it in detail. This month’s espresso podcast remedies this: join Alan and Matt as they talk about Altman’s most dreamlike film. 3 Women (1977), starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule, is enigmatic and borders on the surreal, echoing and prefiguring the identity-blurring nightmares of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. What did Matt and Alan make of this strange, eerie film, and how does it fit in with their idea of Robert Altman?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #230: Modern Folk Horror

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave 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!

A world away from the urban landscape and its City Lights lies the genre of Folk Horror. But what is “folk horror”? One of the trickiest aspects of a discussion about any film genre is to pin down a good definition. I do rather like what Wikipedia succinctly offers on this score at the start of their entry on the subject:

“Folk horror is a subgenre of horror film and horror fiction that uses elements of folklore to invoke fear and foreboding.”

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

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’s Six Damn Fine Degrees was the kind of post that wouldn’t even need a byline: it’s immediately clear that this post about Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights is one of Julie’s.

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They create worlds: Game over, man! Game over!

MattLeave 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.

In the 1980s and 1990s, video game adaptations of films and TV series were a staple of gaming – or, more precisely, they were a staple of bad gaming. Especially in the ’80s, a video game adaptation usually didn’t look, sound or play much like the movie it was adapting, other than a tinny, chiptune rendition of the main theme. (Sometimes we got lucky, as with Ghostbusters, which would shout a scratchy sampled “Ghostbusters!” and laugh maniacally at the player in the same scratchy voice.) And the gameplay? It’d just be a basic take on a genre that was easily imitated: the side-scrolling shoot’em up or the platformer. Those pixels looking faintly like a human being? They’re Arnold Schwarzenegger killing bad guys. That blocky car-looking thing? That’s your Ferrari Testarossa, you’re Sonny Crockett, and the other cars you’re pursuing in a crude top-down depiction of a city supposed to be Miami, they’re the drug dealers you’re trying to catch. ‘Drive’ your ‘car’ into their ‘cars’ and your score goes up. You’re living the life of a screen hero.

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