the private life of sherlock holmes – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

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

Apr 6, 2025Apr 5, 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.

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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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #91: Three Sherlocks

Apr 5, 2025Apr 5, 2025The Barista Collective1 Comment

To many fans of detective fiction, he’s the greatest sleuth of them all: Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. He’s figured in many stories, novels, films, TV series and video games, to mention just a few of Mr Holmes’ exploits. He survived death by Reichenbach Falls, he appeared in the Victorian era and beyond, including adaptations in present-day England and America. And yet: to date, the greatest detective has only appeared on this site very, very rarely. Well, in the podcast episode we’re releasing today, this will be remedied, as Julie, Sam and Alan share their deductions about three cinematic takes on Sherlock Holmes: the 1939 film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes starring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce and Ida Lupino; Billy Wilder’s 1970 classic The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, in which Robert Stephens and Colin Lively play the iconic Holmes and Watson; and the 1976 made-for-TV film Sherlock Holmes in New York, which has Roger Moore don the inauthentic yet iconic deerstalker – and John Huston take on the role of Holmes’ nemesis Moriarty. Which of these do justice to Sherlock Holmes? Which are worth watching, and which are better given a miss? Make sure to join our trio of pop culture baristas as they get out their magnifying glasses and investigate the case of Three Sherlocks. The game’s afoot!

And if you’d like to hear more about less-than-successful takes on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective or indeed other iconic trios, make sure to check out these past episodes:

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Christmas Special 2017, in which Damn Fine O.G.s Matt and Mege share their dismay at the final episode (to date) of BBC’s modern-day Sherlock (warning: this was our first attempt at podcasting, so the audio quality is… Victorian, one might say)
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #73: Three Draculas, in which Julie, Sam and Matt talk about three takes on another classic figure of Victorian literature, though one more likely to drain your blood than solve your murder

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: out with the old, in with the new

Dec 29, 2024Dec 29, 2024Matt1 Comment

It’s the last trailer post of the year, and we feel… apprehensive? Not so much about the trailers but definitely about the year to come – but until then, let’s enjoy some trailers, shall we? And we’ll begin with a collection of trailers coming out of this year’s Christmas Special podcast episode, ranging from Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock to Billy Wilder and Mary Harron. Enjoy!

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast Christmas Special 2024

Dec 24, 2024The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

It is that time of the year again: snow, carol singing, and Bruce Willis crawling through air vents muttering to himself before he delivers the presents. Which also means: it’s time for our Christmas Special! This year, we’re taking the topic of the summer series as the starting point, remakes – but as everyone knows, these can be naughty or nice, so we’ve asked our guests as well as our regulars to talk about their dream remakes, the ones they would like to see made, or the nightmare remakes which they wouldn’t even wish on the people at CinemaSins. From train-bound screwball comedy to sexy ’60s spies, from dodgy demons to festive skeletons, from one serial killer to a different serial killer altogether: these are the films we would love, or hate, to see remade.

A great big thank you goes out to our guests of 2024 who have contributed to the Christmas Special: film critic Alan Mattli (of Maximum Cinema, Swissinfo and Facing the Bitter Truth), filmmaker and podcaster Daniel Thron (of Martini Giant) and film historian and cultural critic Marcy Goldberg – and obviously to all of you out there who have been following our work at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture. The Damn Fine Cup of Culture crew wishes everyone happy holidays, filled with good films, series, books, games and music!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: You say ‘Sunday’, I say ‘Monday

Jan 23, 2023The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

It had to happen sometime – it was Sunday evening, we were tired… and we entirely forgot that trailer posts don’t post themselves. At least not yet, though I’m sure that GPT-3 or whatever AIs are currently being created in dark IT labs by mad computer scientists will be more than up to the task. When Skynet stages its coup, we’ll recognise the terminators because they’ll have too many fingers and too many teeth.

And talking about too many teeth: Matt found himself liking Top Gun Maverick a surprising amount, while finding Avatar: The Way of Water dull and unengaging. And there’s something surprisingly poignant about Tom Cruise finally starting to show his age. What if Tom’s just one of us?

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A Damn Fine Espresso: January 2023

Jan 21, 2023Jan 20, 2023The Barista Collective1 Comment

For our first espresso episode of 2023, Julie and Sam got together to once again share their love of good film soundtracks and to talk about soundtrack concerts. What is the experience of watching a film while a live orchestra is playing the soundtrack? What’s the overall state of film music and movie concerts? What are some of the duo’s favourite movie soundtracks? And how do Sam and Julie end up talking about some of the lesser-known Billy Wilder movies?

If you enjoy our conversation about film soundtracks, make sure also to listen to our podcast episode #49, “The Music Makers”, about some of our favourite soundtrack composers and films where the music is central to the experience.

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