twin peaks – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Mean, green, and from Outer Space

Nov 16, 2025Nov 16, 2025The Barista CollectiveLeave 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.

In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Melanie found joy in introducing a group of teens to the Frank Oz-directed musical Little Shop of Horrors for Halloween. Definitely one to revisit as well!

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A Damn Fine Espresso: November 2025

Nov 15, 2025Nov 14, 2025The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Over the year, we’ve dedicated a number of episodes to the sadly departed David Lynch, his films, and his iconic TV series Twin Peaks. For our November espresso, Alan and Sam return to 2017 and to the third season of Twin Peaks that Lynch and his collaborator Mark Frost sprung on the world 26 years after we first tasted that cherry pie. For Sam, this was the first time he watched these 18 episodes, while for Alan it was an opportunity to revisit the entire series in one go. What are their thoughts on one of David Lynch’s last great works? How does it feel to return to Twin Peaks, Washington, the site of Laura Palmer’s murder, the focus of supernatural and surreal goings-on, after our loss of the man himself?

For more Lynch listening, don’t forget to check out these podcast episodes and posts:

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #93: Lost Summer – David Lynch
A Damn Fine Espresso: September 2025 (on Sam’s first viewing of the original two seasons of Twin Peaks)
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #12: Twin Peaks – The Return (when Mege and Matt first talked about the third season back in 2018)
Twin Peaks: A Postscript (in which Matt summarised his thoughts on the series shortly after the release of our podcast episode #12)

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Love, Sex, Religion, Trailers

Sep 21, 2025Sep 21, 2025MattLeave a comment

If there’s Hitchcock talk to be had, Sam can’t be far away – and that’s also true of this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, in which Sam wrote about Hitch’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith (no, not the Brangelina vehicle from 2005, but the one starring Carole Lombard).

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A Damn Fine Espresso: September 2025

Sep 20, 2025Sep 19, 2025The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Wow, Bob, wow: Twin Peaks forms part of the DNA of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture – if our name and logo didn’t already make that obvious. And yet, some of us have come very late to David Lynch‘s seminal series: while Sam had seen a couple of episodes, he had never watched the entire (original) series when we recorded the first episode of our Lost Summer on the late, great director and purveyor of surreal unease. So, what better opportunity than this summer (which included espresso episodes on Wild at Heart and Lost Highway) to remedy this over some cherry pie and damn fine coffee? Join Sam and Matt in the Red Room as they talk about Twin Peaks and how it holds up for someone who, for decades has heard about the series but not watched it. (You’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve adjusted the audio so that no one is speaking backwards.)

And if you’re in a Twin Peaks mood after listening to our September espresso, you may want to check out our fourth ever podcast episode, in which O.G. baristas Mege and Matt talk about the fantastic, and harrowing, Twin Peaks episode “Lonely Souls”.

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

Jun 22, 2025Jun 22, 2025Matt3 Comments

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

Jun 21, 2025Jul 5, 2025The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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.

Jun 9, 2025MattLeave a comment

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

Jun 7, 2025Jul 5, 2025The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

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: Fix your hearts or die

Jan 19, 2025Jan 19, 2025MattLeave a comment

Somehow, losing David Lynch hits harder, not only because of his art, which is often beautiful and disturbing in equal measure, but also because of who Lynch seems to have been: a kind, strange, generous soul, as an artist and as a human being. As anyone looking at our front page and at the name of our site will be able to tell: Lynch had an impact on us, and his absence will be felt.

We’ll dedicate most of this week’s trailer post to the weird, frightening, wonderful worlds of David Lynch, but first, let’s have a look at what we did this week.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #136: Some like it cult

Jun 30, 2023Oct 12, 2024Matt3 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!

The classic series The Avengers has frequently popped up on my radar, and it’s usually mentioned in positive terms. And yet, I’ve never bothered to seek it out. Too much to watch already, too many things that come first on my TV bucket list – and that’s before I even get into the favourites I’d like to revisit – if the streaming services of my choice haven’t taken them off their catalogue and erased out of existence, that is. Same with, say, Miami Vice, or Absolutely Fabulous or (don’t tell Alan) Randall and Hopkins (Deceased). And, to be honest, one main reason is that people talked about them with a great sense of reverence – or they don’t talk about them at all. They’re cult TV – and that’s something that tends to make me hesitate.