Six Damn Fine Degrees #309: The Day The Alien Universe Changed

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a comment

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!

Alien is one of my favourite films ever. Every aspect of the production seems to come together in a perfectly judged piece of engrossing world creation – while also evoking a uniquely unsettling atmosphere. The cast is also wonderful: many films have tried to imitate this roughneck spaceship crew, but not one has ever got close. And finally, and obviously, there’s the alien herself – a masterpiece of chilling design. Here is a threat from outer space unlike any other.

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They create worlds: City life, Cyberpunk-style

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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.

My first few visits to Night City weren’t auspicious: this place was too loud, too shiny, too neon. The people were annoying, the traffic lethal, and wherever you looked, there’d be advertisements, more often than not featuring so much sexual innuendo or outright T&A that you’d almost forget there could be any other body parts. And, obviously, the ads wouldn’t be silent, because that would have meant that you could ignore them, so from every other speaker you’d get the sound of moaning interspersed with someone trying to sell you something. They do say that sex sells, but what these ads were selling me on was, first, noise-cancelling headphones and, secondly, a quick flight out of Night City.

Except I couldn’t: I was a cyber-enhanced mercenary with a biochip in my head. A biochip containing the engram of legendary rock star/terrorist Johnny Silverhand – and, slowly but surely, Johnny’s consciousness was overwriting mine. So, sure, I could leave Night City and live the quiet life for a few weeks – until my own mind would be completely erased and, to all intents and purposes, I’d be dead. Or I could stay in Night City, tolerate the noise, and try to find a solution to my predicament… or die trying.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Lazy Sunday, wake up in the late afternoon

The 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.

When people think of John Ford, they mostly think Monument Valley and the like – but, in the case of one film that is perhaps unfairly remembered most for beating Citizen Kane to the Best Picture Award at the 14th Academy Awards, Ford told a story set in a Welsh mining town. Check out Alan’s entry on How Green Was My Valley in his One Best Picture After Another series.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: October 2026

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

For our main October podcast episode, we focused on films featuring ghosts that, contrary to tradition, aren’t supposed to be scary – except, perhaps, to the kind of side characters you get in 1930s screwball comedies or to estate agents worried they’ll never manage to get rid of that haunted seaside cottage. But where does that leave us for Halloween, without a single genuine scare to curdle our blood? Thus, Sam and Matt get together for this month’s espresso podcast to remedy this and talk about two movies about ghostly goings-on that are clearly designed to frighten their viewers. First of these is The Changeling (1980), directed by Peter Medak, in which George C. Scott faces up against a haunted mansion and the kind of crime that tends to raise the spirits of the dead to bring about justice, or, barring that, vengeance. How well do its very traditional scares hold up almost 50 years later? Then, changing both century and continent, Sam and Matt talk about Pulse (2001, also known as Kairo) by expert frightener Kiyoshi Kurosawa, in which the dead begin to spill out into our world through the conduit of a still relatively new technology: the internet. Is this the kind of ghostly horror to dedicate your bandwidth to this Halloween? And, in general, what makes for an effective ghost story, and what tends to dampen the spirits in more ways than one?

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #308: Mars Attacks!

JulieLeave a comment

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!

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One Best Picture After Another #14: How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a comment

Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

6/10

One thing I am aiming to do with One Best Picture After Another is to try and review these films without dwelling on the other contenders that year, or to make the inevitable comparisons to films that lost that year that are now seen as superior. This seems especially relevant for How Green Was My Valley, a film that probably most gets mentioned these days – if it gets mentioned at all – as the film that beat Citizen Kane to the Best Picture Oscar. How can any film stand up against that perennial critics’ favourite?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Let them eat cake (and watch trailers)

MattLeave 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.

After having had Yi Yi on his shelf for years, Matt finally got around to watching not only his first Edward Yang film, but his second (A Brighter Summer Day) and third (Yang’s episode in the anthology film In Our Time) as well. He writes about two of these in his recent Criterion Corner entry.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #307: How bad is bad?

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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!

I have a strong personal belief when it comes to criticism of art of any kind: critics have to make a distinction between disliking the thing they’re criticising, whether that’s a film or a book, a game or an album, and that thing actually being bad. This doesn’t mean that they have to put every criticism down as a personal dislike: a good critic should be free to think, and state, that this movie or that novel is actually bad. But any critic, or indeed anyone uttering criticism, that seems to think that if they dislike a work it must obviously be bad? They can go take a long walk while I unfollow them and remove their sites from my bookmarks.

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Criterion Corner: Yi Yi (#339) and A Brighter Summer Day (#804)

MattLeave a comment

There are some filmmakers that pop up on your radar again and again – but it takes you a very long time to get around to watching any of their films. There are just too many interesting filmmakers and too many films to check out – and if you’ve got a great local repertory cinema with a well-curated programme, you may even think, “Hey, sooner or later they’ll get around to something by this director on their programme.” Or, indeed, Criterion releases some of the director’s films, so you order them, and once they’ve arrived you put them on your shelf, next to the other Criterion films you’ve not yet got around to watching.

And then years pass, because in the meantime there are so many other films to watch, other directors to check out, other Criterion releases to get excited about and other cinema programmes featuring yet more films and filmmakers to keep you busy.

Until, in this case, your favourite local repertory cinema puts on a series of films from the Taiwanese New Wave, and you finally get to see two films by Edward Yang (well, actually three, though one of these was one episode in the anthology film In Our Time) for the first time – not on TV, played from a Criterion disk, but on a movie screen, as the God of Cinema intended. So this is a bit of a cheat in terms of being a Criterion Corner entry – but I assure you, Yi Yi (2000) has been sitting on my shelf for a long time, and A Brighter Summer Day (1991) is on its way as I write this. And I am already looking forward to revisiting both films in their Criterion releases.

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Would you say BOO to a goose?

The 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.

It’s been a busy week at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, starting with Alan going to Manderley again, in the latest instalment of One Best Picture After Another. Just how well does Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) hold up?

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