star wars – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Spreading happiness, one preview at a time

Jul 27, 2025Jul 27, 2025MattLeave 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.

When life gives you lemons, yadda yadda yadda. What, though, when your movie calls for Lemmon – but he’s not available? In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Alan writes about the result: Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me, Stupid.

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A long time ago is now: Andor (2022-2025)

Jul 26, 2025Jul 26, 2025MattLeave a comment

If anyone had told me a few years ago that not only would a Star Wars story open itself up to comparisons with the likes of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, it would bear up to these comparisons, I would have dismissed it as hyperbolic fanboy self-importance. Star Wars is Star Wars, a pop-culture blend of samurai film, westerns, war movies and sci-fi serials. Does it need to make itself look important? Relevant? Is that the measure of its worth?

Now, after Andor has run its course, I’m a convert. Not only can Star Wars be about something: it can do so while remaining essentially Star Wars.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: No S*#!, lots of Sherlocks

Apr 6, 2025Apr 5, 2025MattLeave a comment

This week, we released the latest Six Damn Fine Degrees post by Melanie – which veers away from her more recent takes on South Korean television and takes us all the way to Tarkovsky’s Zone. Stalker is a classic – but not everyone is a huge fan of his particular brand of damp, elliptic existentialism.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #152: Movies as rollercoaster rides

Oct 20, 2023Oct 12, 2024samlinder2 Comments

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!

Among the many ways popular American blockbusters have been commercialised and marketed, the theme park ride at locations such as Disneyworld, Universal or Warner Studios literally made rollercoaster rides out of movies designed to shake and thrill their audiences at cinemas to begin with. Jaws (1975), considered by most to be the first true summer blockbuster, still has its legendary spot in Universal Studio City, which I was able to witness this summer going back to L.A.: somewhere along the studio tour and just after passing the original Bates Motel does one drive by remnants of Amity Island, mostly small houses and a pond, in which a scuba diver gets suddenly and unceremoniously eaten in front of visitors’ eyes, just before ‘Bruce’ the shark himself unexpectedly pokes up his mouth out of the water for a quick but intense fright.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: War (What is it good for?)

Jul 23, 2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

This week began at A Damn Fine Cup with a guest post, courtesy of Henrik Hermans, on the filmography of the Man in Black himself: Johnny Cash. Make sure to check out Henke’s thoughts on films such as A Gunfight, Murder in Coweta County (featuring Andy “Griffith” Matlock in a rare villainous part) and the wonderfully named Ridin’ the Rails – The Great American Train Story!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The Two Nicks

Jan 8, 2023Jan 8, 2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Time flies yet again: we’re already at the second trailer post of 2023 – and it begins with the classic Bong Joon-ho joint Memories of Murder, which Matt wrote about earlier this week.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #64: No movies!

Jan 7, 2023Jan 6, 2023The Barista Collective2 Comments

For most of our podcasts, and many of our posts, A Damn Fine Cup of Culture talks about films – which makes sense, because we love cinema, but there is so much more to culture. Why is it that the conversation usually defaults to movies? And why don’t we talk about other media more often? In our first episode of 2023, Julie, Matt and Sam decide to amend this and to talk about the other damn fine cups of culture they’ve enjoyed recently that didn’t show on a big screen. Sam’s brought along three books – And the Band Played On (1987) by Randy Shilts and When We Rise (2016) by Cleve Jones, two non-fiction books about the the LGBT activism of the 1970s and 1980s and the AIDS epidemic in the US, and Swiss Book Prize winner Blutbuch (2022) by Kim de l’Horizon (which is currently only out in German, but is set to come out in English in 2023). Matt talks about two streaming series he very much enjoyed in 2022, namely Severance (Apple TV+) and Star Wars: Andor (Disney+). And yes, even when we talk about media that aren’t cinema, we don’t fully get away from the movies: Julie recommends the podcasts You Must Remember This (by Karina Longworth) and The Secret History of Hollywood (by Adam Roche) about the real stories of classic Hollywood. The book she mentions is Watergate, a New History by Garrett M. Graff.

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That was the year that was: 2022

Dec 31, 2022Dec 28, 2022Matt2 Comments

The last two years did a number on everyone, and I’m definitely including myself in that: my sense of time and chronology, and especially my memory, the pandemic and the series of crises of all shapes and sizes, these have all left their traces. I have to admit: I’d find it difficult without consulting my notes to say much about what damn fine cups of culture I enjoyed most in 2022. Even with the notes I’ve made in the draft version of this post, I find it difficult to say with much confidence that I remember these things most about the year.

Nonetheless, enjoy them I did – a lot, in fact, and these are some of the things that helped me through some of the harder times in 2022.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The name’s Welles. Orson Welles.

Sep 11, 2022The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

This week, our Summer of Welles (Editor’s note: Not a real thing.) continued with Sam’s post about Welles in Portugal and Spain. What better opportunity to take Sam’s mention of the dreadful 1967 Casino Royale and post this trailer for it, a great indication of just how dreadful the film is?