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.
From Talia to Tessa: following Sam’s Six Damn Fine Degrees post on The Godfather‘s Connie’s Corleone and Rocky‘s Adrian, Matt followed up this week with Tessa Thompson, who played Bianca, the female lead in Creed, Ryan Coogler’s 2015 follow-up to the Rocky saga – and arguably one of the most charismatic stars of present-day Hollywood.
But, as always, there are also other trailers to celebrate this week, so let’s start with…
Sam: Yet another Lin-Manuel Miranda musical?! After his incredibly successful stage musical and Disney+ adaptation Hamilton and this year’s energetic In the Heights, there’s yet another musical film production with Tick, Tick, Boom! directed by Miranda and written by Jonathan Larson (Rent!): In it, a promising young composer (Andrew Garfield) is seeking inspiration for a new musical (sound autobiographical?) and is haunted by an increasingly intense ticking sound in the back of his head. Will it be a creative explosion or will it bomb? The likes of Garfield in the title role, Bradley Whitford (as Stephen Sondheim!) and Vanessa Hudgens could make for a thrill ride for musical fans – and there’s even Judith Light (of Who’s the Boss? fame) to draw in a nostalgic TV crowd. It’s a Netflix production, after all, so expect to be singing and dancing across your living room rather than marvel at it with large movie crowds. At least not yet!
Matt: And finally… I’m never quite sure these days where we stand on M. Night Shyamalan. There are few directors who rose to fame as quickly, and whose stars plummeted as completely, as Shyamalan’s. I left out most of his films after Signs, but after hearing good things about The Visit and Split I checked out the latter, and while it was pretty flawed and retrograde in its sensationalist depiction of mental illness, there were things to enjoy about the movie if you could accept it as genre shlock. Old looks like another high-concept horror movie by the director, and it may well falter like several of Shyamalan’s other films during the last ten, twenty years – but the trailer is moody and the cast is intriguing. Perhaps I’ll give this a miss at the cinema, but it may be just the thing for a Saturday evening, with a pizza and a cold Coke.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 