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.
Julie For those of you who love mob-stories like Gomorrah, it looks like Gangs of London might be for you. “I am not interested in peace” says Joe ‘Peaky Blinders‘ Cole in the trailer. From director Gareth Evans who brought us The Raid (2011) and its sequel, Gangs of London brings us international crime in the streets of London. And it looks fierce.
Matt: The Black Mirrorification of modern storytelling continues with Vivarium. It recalls a number of similar stories, but at the same time it looks originally enough in terms of tone and story. Here’s hoping that Vivarium will prove a stylish little number and an oppressive slice of strange fiction with just the right amount of deadpan attitude.
Mege: Based on a true story. So what? Whether you get your inspiration from an insipid news item or the Tales of Genji, it only matters what you do with it – how you tell what you have to tell. It’s also known as style. So if the story is true – that is a matter for journalists or academics. Bad Tales (or Favolacce, as it’s called originally) is by the D’Innocenzo brothers, the ones who brought us Dogman. And the trailer is a very nice spin on true stories and false ones.
Eric: We’ve been experiencing Alex Garland’s brand of stark, pessimistic-yet-hopeful science fiction for a while now, and let’s just say he’s got the ‘humans are inherently fascinated by their own self-destruction’ market cornered. First with movies (28 Days Later, Sunshine, Ex Machina, Annihilation, etc.), then with games (Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and, er, DmC: Devil may Cry), and now with a full on TV show in the era of peak TV. Tackling the age-old philosophical chestnut of free will by smacking it in the pellicle with determinism, quantum computing, and a sadly Lagavulin-less Nick Offerman, Devs is ripe with promises of conspiracy and headfuckery and the potential for none of us to be able to separate one from the other.
Would you have it any other way? Devs argues you don’t really have a choice. Forget peak TV, we might have just hit peak Alex Garland.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 