Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest installment 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.
Matt: All too often, nostalgia seems to be a marketing strategy, but every now and then you get something that doesn’t just try to sell you a thing because you remember it from when you were younger, happier and weighed less. The trailer for VHYES doesn’t necessarily work for me, but I like that it seems to have some thoughts about the weirder edges of nostalgia and memory – the things that you half remember, but your brain keeps telling you that they can’t have been the way you remember them, because that would be seriously strange, wouldn’t it?
Julie: The Gentlemen is to be a new movie by Guy Ritchie featuring some Big Names. Judging from the trailer, it’ll be a Guy Ritchie kind of Guy Ritchie movie (yay!), with lots of guns and humour. Interestingly the characters each have their own Tartan. Why? I do not know. But the idea of this film has me caught, lock, stock and two smoking barrels.
Mege: After seeing The Duke of Burgundy and Berberian Sound Studio, no-one will ever accuse Peter Strickland of lack of originality, but doesn’t this trailer remind you of the psychological pact at the end of Phantom Thread? There also seems to be a generous helping of David Lynch and Suspiria in there somewhere.
Eric: Armando Iannucci, the director of The Personal History of David Copperfield (and The Thick of It and The Death of Stalin, two of the finest satires in living memory), feels that Dickens “is the finest comedian [Britain] has ever produced.” And he’s not wrong, if you think about it. Here is a trailer that shows the comic timing all of us had in our heads whilst reading the venerable author’s works — but with a frenetic pace and diversity that marks it as both a period piece and something of our own time. Dev Patel as Croplin Trosserfield? Why not. A tonic, perhaps, for our socially anxious times.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 