james cameron – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

A Damn Fine Espresso: August 2026

15/08/202615/08/2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

In the August instalment of our Summer of Genre, we talked about that most ’70s of genres: the disaster movie. But the genre didn’t vanish after its heyday following the release of Airport in 1970: especially in the 1990s, as CGI made it possible to put bigger, badder, more destructive disasters on the screen, we got tornadoes, volcanoes, asteroids, often in double, as with Dante’s Peak and Volcano or Deep Impact and Armageddon. The biggest, most successful disaster movie of the era, however, was James Cameron’s epic Titanic, which combined the historical disaster with a love story between teen heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who three years earlier had burst onto the scene with Heavenly Creatures and was well on her way to becoming a superstar. Titanic was at risk of becoming a disaster itself, but when it finally was released in late 1997, it became not just the highest-grossing film of the year but indeed the highest-grossing film of all time – until Cameron’s next film, Avatar. Join Sam and Julie for our August espresso as they sneak aboard that grand, doomed ocean liner. Did Titanic save the disaster movie genre, or did it sink it for good? And how well does Cameron’s blockbuster hold up almost thirty years after it originally came out?

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

12/04/202512/04/2025MattLeave 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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Let’s blow this thing and go home: Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) and Top Gun Maverick (2022)

17/01/202317/01/2023Matt2 Comments

I can’t really claim to have been particularly invested in either Avatar: The Way of Water or Top Gun Maverick. I watched Tom Cruise’s 1980s navy erotica as a teenager, off of a VHS copy, and I remember very little, other than snippets of Goose’s death. Meanwhile, I enjoyed watching the piece of Na’vi erotica that was the original Avatar when it came out, but it proved utterly forgettable, and when we recently rewatched it, I found its spectacle tacky and its white-saviour narrative too trite and bland even to be particularly offensive. When the reviews of the two decade(s)-late sequels started to come in, I was surprised to find almost universal praise for Maverick and some surprisingly positive takes on James Cameron’s return to Pandora, even if a lot of the reviews weren’t exactly enthusiastic – including some very complimentary reviews from critics who aren’t exactly fans of big CGI blockbusters.