fire walk with me

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Grab a slice and enjoy

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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.

In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees: more books (Melanie wrote about making her way through Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga), so even less of an opportunity to post a fitting trailer! So, if it’s not too much of an insult to fans of the saga, here’s a trailer for the third season of a different sci-fi saga: Apple TV’s adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Obviously we need more adaptations of long-form sci-fi!

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A Damn Fine Espresso: June 2025

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Our recent podcast episode on David Lynch, marking the start of our 2025 series Lost Summer, prompted us to pick up where that episode left of: for two of the films we discussed earlier this month, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, there are extensive sets of deleted scenes that, if they had not ended up on the cutting room floor, would have made both films into something very different. Sam and Matt watched these scenes – 51 minutes for Blue Velvet, a whopping 91 minutes for Fire Walk With Me – and talk about these and the notion of deleted scenes in general. Would Fire Walk With Me have been a better film if it had included all that material about the town of Twin Peaks, as fans and critics had hoped for when it was released? What can deleted scenes say about the virtues of leaving some things out? How do fan edits, a practice which has become highly accomplished in many cases, figure into this, and into the question of which version of a film is the real deal?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: No hay pelicula! It is… an illusion.

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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.

This year, we lost some of the greats – such as Gene Hackman, who starred in so many memorable films. One of the lesser known but equally deserving Hackman movies is the 1975 neo-noir Night Moves – a film all the more notable for how long it keeps its thriller plot on the back-burner, lulling its protagonist as much as its audience into a false sense of safety. Check out Matt’s thoughts on Night Moves here.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #93: Lost Summer – David Lynch

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This month’s podcast kicks off our summer series for 2025: the Lost Summer is all about what we’ve lost – directors, actors, films – and what this means to us. We’re starting with one that is very close to our heart at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture: in January, David Lynch died at the age of 78, so we’re taking this opportunity to talk about some of the films of his that meant the most to us. Join Alan, Sam and Matt as they talk about neo-noir mystery Blue Velvet (1986), much-reviled prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and L.A. nightmare Mulholland Drive (2001). How did we discover Lynch’s work and these films in particular? What do they mean to us, and why? How do they fit into Lynch’s oeuvre? And what is the legacy that Lynch has left behind?

For more podcasts on David Lynch and Twin Peaks in particular, check out these classic episodes:

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that

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.

Other than David Lynch himself, the person who perhaps left most of a fingerprint on Lynch’s work is the composer Angelo Badalamenti, who died a week ago. Matt shared his thoughts and memories of Badalamenti’s work, in particular on the various incarnations of Twin Peaks (which we’ve written and podcasted about, the latter more than once).

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Welcome to Twin Peaks… again!

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Today a big parcel arrived from Amazon.de. Of course I had a fairly clear idea of what I’d find inside, but I was still excited when I opened it. (Amazon – the 21st century replacement for Father Christmas…)

Dum (ba bing, bing), dum dum (ba bing, bing)…

It’s been a while since I watched any Twin Peaks, but one of my fondest memories from my student days is a weekend of watching the series with a couple of friends, a coffee percolator (no fish – sorry, Pete), cherry pies and, yes, donuts.

Undoubtedly, much of Twin Peaks after Laura Palmer’s murder has been solved isn’t nearly as good as what went before it, and the final episode is pretty much David Lynch’s cryptic “!uoy kcuF” to the audience (to be said by a little guy in a red suit dancing to some slow jazzy tune). But I’m still looking forward to getting back to that foggy, creepy, underbelly of Mom’s apple pie-y place. And, of course, Albert Rosenfield.

And that intro sequence…