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.
How better to celebrate a Sunday than with an acting legend? We already featured Albert Finney last week, in the trailer for Two for the Road – but seeing how the first post of the week was Sam’s Six Damn Fine Degrees entry on Mr Finney, we can’t really end the week without another treat for all the Finney fans out there, can we? So here’s a trailer for his breakout hit, Tony Richardson’s 1963 adaptation of Henry Fielding’s classic novel, Tom Jones.
Talking of acting legends, why not Swede it up a little bit? On Saturday, Matt continued his journey through Ingmar Bergman’s filmography with The Virgin Spring. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a good trailer available for Bergman’s medieval classic – okay, his other medieval classic -, so instead here’s a scene provided by the good people at Criterion in which Max von Sydow’s character, the grieving father Töre, prepares to exact revenge on his daughter’s killers, and how better to do this than by having a good shvitz?
But, as always, Sundays aren’t just for trailers – or trailer-adjacent videos – relating to the week’s blog posts. Here’s some more trailerage to feast your eyes on!
Sam: Following up on my string of movies coping in new ways with the legacy of the horrific European wars of the 20th century, I came across Still Life in Lodz. Tracing one painting’s connections to a century of Jewish life from the Polish city of Lodz, it offers another interesting connection between war, art, restitution and painful memory. There have been all kinds of documentary and feature films dealing with each of those subjects, yet Slavomir Grunberg’s entry seems to connect these in fresh and fascinating ways. Moving backwards through the conflicts of the last one hundred, from Bosnia to Serbia and now Poland, some of the imagery is disturbingly similar – a spider’s web of tragedy, loss and injustice – as if the 20th century had weaved together one horrible cinematic and historical quilt.
Matt: When I heard that a new Edgar Wright film was coming out this year, I thought they were talking about Last Night in Soho – but instead the trailer I came upon looked much stranger. I have to confess that I wasn’t really aware of Sparks until I saw this one, but now I’m definitely intrigued!
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 