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 like Charlie Kaufman has opened yet another door in his mind and found… well, Toni Colette, still with the last shivers of her angst from Hereditary trailing around her. And David Thewlis has proven that he can play a creep in Fargo. And Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons, with their names so similar – aren’t they perfectly wrong for each other? I’m Thinking of Ending Things is on Netflix as of September 4. Based on the novel by Iain Reid, adapted and directed by Kaufman.
Julie: Small Axe, by Steve McQueen, is a series of stories about the civil rights struggle between 1969 and 1982. This trailer, Mangrove, is the story of the Mangrove 9. These protesters were tried in 1970, for protesting the closure of the Mangrove Restaurant in Notting Hill. The trial, significantly, ended with the observation that racial hatred permeated the police, and so this story – on the anniversary of the protests – could not be more current or necessary. One to watch.
Eric: The thing about nostalgia is that the moments you remember are almost never the moments that were. Mafia is fondly remembered by many who played it back in 2002, when it brought a sense of maturity to video game crime drama that hadn’t really been seen before. If you revisit it today, however, you might be more inclined to note how deeply unoriginal its plot is, and how infuriatingly unfun the rest is. Yet there are parts of it that still sing – the unexpected twists to a seemingly straightforward mission, the desperate hard-scrabble edge to its combat, the little bits of period detail, and of course, the soundtrack. The other thing you’re bound to notice in 2020 is that it’s about as good looking as a repeatedly run over chipmunk. Fortunately, there’s a remake coming up to address that, and it looks the business. Fingers crossed, then, that after the dully repetitive grind of Mafia 3, this one has all the kick and fire of a freshly reloaded Tommy Gun.
Matt: I have to admit, my first impression of this trailer was that it looked like cheap, straight-to-video trash… and then I realised that, no, the film is going for something different, something other than Generic Biopic #371. Certainly, that in and of itself won’t make Tesla a good film yet, but there’s something intriguingly strange about the trailer that at the very least makes me look up and take notice. And for a Hollywood biopic, that’s already a lot. I haven’t seen a film by Michael Almereyda since his 2000 adaptation of Hamlet, incidentally also starring Ethan Hawke, so perhaps it’s time to see another.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 