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.
Last week it finally happened: A Damn Fine Cup of Culture was deemed too raunchy by Facebook. Okay, that may not be quite accurate – truth be told, we will probably never know why Facebook suddenly decided that we’d violated their T&Cs with the name of our page. Was it the “damn”? Was it that we made claims to the extraordinary quality of our cups of culture? Or was it something else entirely, like the wrong number of capitals? Anyway, we are now back on Facebook, complete with what some people might consider naughty words in our name. Let’s see what Mark Z comes up with next, shall we?
All of this happened on the same day that Sam posted another wonderful instalment of Six Damn Fine Degrees, in honour of two of the Grande Dames of dubbing: Marni Nixon, who featured in many a film musical without getting the credit she deserved, and Nikki van der Zyl, the woman who gave a voice to so many Bond girls. We can hear a (sadly, very small) handful of her lines dubbing Ursula Andress in the trailer for the Bond film that started it all, Dr. No.
On Saturday, Matt followed up with a discussion another duet of women: Grace Marks from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (and, more specifically, the Netflix adaptation of the novel) and android Ava from Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, two characters that may be more similar than you’d think an artificially intelligent robot looking like Alicia Vikander and an Irish maid-possibly-turned-murderess in 19th century Canada might be.
But it’s not all modern Scheherazades and dubbing queens this Sunday: we also have other trailery goodness!
Sam: Among the favourites for this year’s unique post-Corona award season, Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah certainly looks riveting: The true story of Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), member of the Black Panther Party, who is hired and groomed to be an informant for the FBI and then becomes a true threat for Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), is bound to be a suspenseful and open-ended battle for O’Neil’s soul as his FBI contact Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) pushes him to go further in infiltrating and denunciating Hampton. Actors and song have already been lauded and won or were nominated for Oscars and Golden Globes and many critics agree that in a year of reckoning with race, a movie like this should be top of the list. We’ll see what history will have to say in some time from now!
Matt: And finally, in case you’d forgotten that there’s been this little global pandemic for the last year or so, here’s a little preview for the HBO documentary The Last Cruise, looking like a much needed reminder that while we’re all affected by this pandemic, some are more affected than others, and as so often, class and money are two of the major dividing lines.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 