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.
What better way to start the Sunday trailer post than with barbers and meat pies? I mean, everyone needs to look good and everyone needs to eat – and who’s more aware of this than one Benjamin Barker… though most people might know him better under his alias: on Friday, Julie took our Six Damn Fine Degrees feature to dark places to write about Sweeney Todd.
From lots of death and bloody revenge to… well, admittedly, more death and some revenge: on Saturday, the latest episode of our damn fine podcast went up, in which Julie, Alan and Sam talked about Daniel Craig’s final outing as a certain secret agent – though how he stays secret, no one knows, because wherever 007 goes, there’s always a mighty ruckus!
And we’re not quite done with darkness and death just yet: just a few hours ago, Matt posted a journal entry on the latest leg of his grand Ingmar Bergman trip, talking about The Magician, quite a jaded, pessimistic film even for Bergman, in spite of the surprise happy ending!
And that takes us to more spooky matters…
Sam: So, there it is: another go at the series that got me onto Netflix in the first place and that first enthralled (Season 1) then deserted (Season 2) and lost me (Season 3), so I was understandably sceptical going into this teaser trailer. What had been an amazing mixture between E.T. and The Goonies paired with a J.J. Abrams sensibility and the nostalgia of his Super 8 had turned into a tiresome 1980s pastiche with musical, filmic and cultural references galore and too many characters and side plots and an increasingly uneven mix between teenage comedy and horror schlockfest. Will Season 4 be a game changer? Very hard to say: there was a lot of happy California and High School Musical feeling for most of it with a dramatic dash reminiscent of Apocalypse Now at the end. I’m not exactly sure that will have me glued back to the small screen once 2022 comes around…
Matt: Olivia Colman and David Thewlis in an HBO miniseries. Do you need to know anything more than that? You do? Okay… how about this? Landscapers is a true crime miniseries – but the trailer makes it look like this, other than so many shows and films “based on true events”, has a look, a voice and a strangeness all of its own. Otherwise, it’d be a massive waste of its two stars, wouldn’t you say? In any case, the Landscapers trailer makes me think that getting a subscription for Sky (which carries all the HBO content over on this side of the Atlantic) will definitely have been worth it. I mean, this and Mare of Easttown and Succession, and the HBO back catalogue, and all of this seems pretty good value for money.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 