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.
Let’s start the week with a bit of opera: on New Year’s Day in 1975, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute premiered on Swedish television. Almost 47 years later, Matt watched the film as part of his Swedish odyssey and wrote about it on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture. The Magic Flute‘s plot is strange, bordering on the nonsensical, but Bergman’s adaptation has a lot of charm.
Talking of charm, the last Six Damn Fine Degrees post before the holidays has Sam talking about his experience of watching Star Wars: Return of the Jedi with his niece. What could be better at getting you into the festive mood than enjoying some classic cinema with your family?
Which takes us to our regular weekly trailerage – starting with a visually sumptuous treat that, like Return of the Jedi, takes us to a long time ago, though in a galaxy very, very close.
Mege: You can say a lot of things about Terrence Malick – that he is too touchy-feely, that he is more interested in showing us good-looking people doing beautiful things in well-designed settings than in telling us a story, that he is more a philosopher who should stick to the written word than a filmmaker -, but there is an undeniable beauty to his movies. He gets the most intriguing images, up there with the best nature documentaries, and the choice is yours: try to puzzle together a story for yourself, or let the images wash over you for some high-end escapism. He certainly makes movies like no other, and I like that.
Matt: Okay, I have to admit that based on the trailer I’m not entirely sold on Everything Everywhere All At Once, the new film by writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the duo is also known just as Daniels, which I find inordinately endearing), whose big-screen debut Swiss Army Man was much liked by Mege. It may well be that the film is too frantic, too fast and loud and wacky in a way that becomes tiresome, like Michel Gondry on a sugar rush. I’m also a bit worried that the weirdness will all be explained by Evelyn, the main character played by Michelle Yeoh, having some condition and it’s all in her head – a trope that turns mental illness and neurological conditions into twee fantasy. But if the film doesn’t fall into this trap, and if it tempers its onslaught of zaniness with something else, the Daniels could be on to something. And Michelle Yeoh has proven repeatedly that she is nothing if not eminently watchable, so I am definitely willing to give this one a chance.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 