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: Phyllis Schlafly was a right-wing conservative, who defended traditional gender roles in a time when feminists like Gloria Steinem were advocating for equal rights. (Schlafly also opposed the concept of marital rape, on the grounds that if you consented to marriage, as a woman, you automatically consented to sex.) Not, as you may imagine, a person who automatically has my sympathies. But Blanchett plays her with plenty of venom in this trailer: and the subject is rich enough to warrant my interest. A maybe: but definitely intriguing.
Mege: The Eddy is about a Parisian jazz club that serves as the hub of Damien Chazelle’s version of Treme. The owner of the Eddy is played by André Holland, but it also features Amandla Stenberg, Leïla Bekhti, Tahar Rahim, and a tour-bus load of musicians that you have never heard of, but will leave their mark onstage – well, hang on, you should remember Joanna Kulig as the jazz singer from Cold War. The music is said to have been played live and recorded on set. Starts on May 8 on Netflix.
Matt: So, you may be asking yourself: why this trailer? Why Capone? It’s not because I’m interested in the film, even if it does seem to have a couple of things going for it. No, it’s mostly because I cannot help but watch this and think that it may serve as a cautionary tale: if you try your hand at something that recalls the gangster greats of Coppola, Scorsese and De Palma, you’d better be damned good. Uncannily good even. I wouldn’t trust either Coppola or De Palma to pull this kind of thing off these days, and with Scorsese, you know there’s always more going on than gangster tropes. This, however, suggests that perhaps Trank lucked out with his first feature film Chronicle, and that Fantastic Four was more indicative of his abilities, because going by the trailer, Capone looks like what you’d get if you asked a deep-learning algorithm to process gangster classics and come up with its own version of the form. And I don’t think that algorithm will be accepting any Best Director, Best Writing or Best Picture awards any time soon.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 