A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #88: Century

Welcome to 2025! We’re taking the new year as an opportunity to look both forward and into the past – and to do something we’ve never done before: for the very first time (no, Robin Beck, we don’t mean you!) we’ve recorded a conversation featuring all four of the damn fine core podcasters: Alan, Julie, Matt and Sam. In the first episode of the year, we’re having a look at the cups of culture (mostly film) that came out in 1925, 1950, 1975 and 2000, from Marion Davies and Zander the Great via the wonderfully meta double bill All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard and ’70s greats such as Jaws and Chinatown to the still futuristic-sounding year 2000, which brought us films as different as Gladiator, Memento and In the Mood for Love. We cap off our conversation about a century of cinema with a look at the year to come and the films we’re anticipating the most. Wishing everyone a damn fine year, or indeed century!

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #42: Embracing darkness: Richard Harris

Harris in the studio recording an LP in 1971 (Image: Jack Kay / Daily Express / Getty Images)

“There, I gave you the stuff about Harry Potter”, Richard Harris pointedly remarks to his interviewer at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2001, just before the world would change. “But try to use the rest of what I said as well. Because, you see, I don’t just want to be remembered for being in those bloody films, and I’m afraid that’s what’s going to happen to me.”

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‘Twas the bear that done it: discussing The Revenant

12 Oscar nominations, a budget of $135 million and one very angry bear: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant is the revenge flick that’s likely to continue being the talk of this award season. Reason enough to discuss the film one-on-one, like a better behaved Leonardo di Caprio and Tom Hardy, though with less grunting and accents that are easier to comprehend.

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