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.
Mege: It’s interesting that big blockbuster movies move their release date to fall, while art-house flicks such as Andrea Staka’s Mare immediately switch to an online release. Maybe the world is no longer such a global village as it was said to be before Corona. We do not yet know how damaging the virus will have been to the local movie scene. My hometown has lost two theatres alone since lockdown. Big media outlets can afford to stall, whereas small production companies, dependant on two or three movies every year and so risking much more, might crash and burn.
Julie: The Rental is Dave Franco’s directorial debut, and already has horror fans divided. The film’s premise is simple. Two couples rent a vacation home for what is supposed to be a nice getaway, but it soon turns to concern, and then to terror. If the reviews are anything to go by, the key is in the acting, and the fraught bonds between the couples as fear strikes. It is also apparently not the standard slasher fare: but a cleverer example of the genre. If the trailer and reviews are anything to go by: this should be an interesting, if slightly different, destination for fans of the genre.
Eric: Amanita Design is one of gaming’s hidden gems, a studio that has consistently put out some of the most charmingly quirky and accomplished adventure puzzling experiences in the past 15+ years. Creaks continues a relatively more conventional line of design in their oeuvre while maintaining their classical surrealist streak: an everyday man in an everyday room finds a hidden passage in a wall that leads to a subterranean city peopled by helpful birdmen but also… darker things. All of this is illustrated with nary a spoken word, as is tradition for Amanita Design, but with hand-drawn visuals evoking baroque art styles more at home in the 18th or 19th century. An adventure that appears sumptuous, mysterious, and cleverly designed all at once, Creaks looks to be yet another satisfying experience from the masters of the form.
Matt: Jusqu’ici tout va bien. So far, so good… Not the thing anyone would use for 2020 – but one thing it’s doing for cinema that I definitely can’t take issue with is that knowing there will be a dearth of new material, cinemas are showing classics from all sorts of eras, of all shapes and sizes. I’ve not seen 1995’s La Haine on the big screen, but if the BFI kindly lends it to Swiss cinemas, I’ll be sure to check it out, because there are few films that can match it in terms of sheer fuck-off energy.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 