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.
Another pretty busy week for all of us, though not on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture – so please bear with us while activity isn’t exactly peaking. We’ll be back before long, promise!
Nonetheless, there was a post on Friday: Mege swerved the weekly Six Damn Fine Degrees feature in a surprising direction, giving the wonderful character actor Bill Camp his due. His rare but great appearances in The Leftovers are worth the price of admission, even if The Leftovers may be one of the most difficult series to recommend to others based on a first season that at times is gruelling and very hard to watch. (Which doesn’t change the fact that it is one of Matt’s favourites… or, some may ask, is that why he likes it so much?)
Anyway, here’s a trailer for The Night Of, which features a characteristically strong, memorable Bill Camp performance.
And with that we’re ready to move on to the regular weekly trailer revue, starting with some Danish debauchery:
Sam: My first time back at the cinema since Nolan’s certainly very visually grand but somehow unsatisfying Tenet last summer happened to be just after it had won the Best Foreign picture award at this year’s Oscars. And how well deserved that one is! Thomas Vinterberg, who’s shocked and dazzled us in the past with masterpieces like Festen and Jagten has struck the perfect balance between laughs and tragedy. Four teachers in midlife crisis decide to test the popular claim that life is more successful with 0.5 per thousand of alcohol in your blood. What starts off in jolly fashion and with actually good results starts to border on the catastrophic pretty soon. Mads Mikkelsen leads a fabulous troop of actors into the abyss of (only Nordic?) society’s alcohol abuse on a massive scale, but it is the moments in which we recognise our own habits and weaknesses that make this amusing and terrifying at the same time.
Matt: We’ve had a trailer for David Lowery’s The Green Knight before, but we’re now closer to an actual release, so there’s a new – final? – trailer… and I have to say, this may be one of the films I’m most excited for this year. Yes, even more so than Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. The Green Knight looks archaic and modern, epic and intimate, and it looks so deliciously strange. Of course, I may have had my fill of talking foxes in films thanks to one Lars von Trier, Esq., but perhaps I shouldn’t let that particular talking fox ruin all future examples of vulpine loquaciousness at the cinema.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 