Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment 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.
Starting this week, we’re changing the format of the trailer posts slightly. Don’t worry, you’ll still get your Sunday dose of trailers, but we’ll also take these posts as an opportunity to highlight some of the things we’ve talked about during the week.
To begin with, here’s one you may remember from when it was posted before: Wolfwalkers is Cartoon Saloon’s latest, another absolutely gorgeous slice of animation. Matt didn’t like it quite as much as Cartoon Saloon’s other films, but it’s still well worth checking out, not least for its wonderful, inventive and stylish visuals.
Also featured this week, in Alan’s great Six Damn Fine Degrees post, was the classic Ealing comedy, The Lavender Hill Mob. A good Ealing comedy, and a great performance by Alec Guinness – you could do a worse if you’re mostly stuck at home due to this ongoing pandemic.
But now on to our regular recommendations:
Sam: Picking up on my trailer recommendation from last week, the Bosnian feature film on the Srebrenica massacre, Quo Vadis, Aida?, it seems that the former Yugoslavian republics have moved their historical conflicts to teh cinema: Serbia has produced its own reckoning with wartime atrocities, choosing World War II as the background of Dara of Jasenovac. Jasenovac being, of course, the only extermination camp not run by Nazi Germany but by their Croatian fascist Ustasa collaborators and notoriously infamous for its horrifying kiling sprees (even SS reporting back to Berlin it “was getting too much”!). Just like in Quo Vadis, Aida?, the unimaginable is made accessible for audiences through the eyes of a female protagonist, making them helpless bystanders but also witnesses to what should never be forgotten, no matter what nationality or ethnicity or allegiance the perpetrators were claiming to defend.
Matt: I have to admit that Benedict Cumberbatch’s shine has worn off since those early days of the first two seasons of BBC’s Sherlock (yes, I would still defend most of them, even if the series got rapidly worse after that), but an atmospheric Cold War thriller featuring Jessie Buckley and Rachel Brosnahan? And this doesn’t seem to be the usual Cumberbatch role but a much more nebbish part, which could be interesting.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 