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.
Look, if you’ve had enough of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we understand – and you may want to skip this week’s trailer post, since Friday’s Six Damn Fine Degrees instalment had Mege talking about sharing the MCU with his daughter: she’s a Marvel fan, and he enjoys sharing movies with her. So, for her, here’s a vintage Marvel trailer.
The first podcast episode of 2022 also was centred on Marvel: after watching (and enjoying) Spider-Man: No Way Home, Alan and Matt talked about the state of the MCU. Well worth a listen, whether you’re a die-hard fan or more of a casual Marvel watcher! And to go with that look at where the MCU is at, where it’s been and where it is going, here’s the trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, coming in May 2022 (as long as the pandemic doesn’t throw us another curveball, that is).
And with this, let’s move on to some hopefully marvellous but non-Marvel trailers!
Sam: Remakes of one’s favourite movies are very tricky business, of course, and in the case of Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile, I am very sceptical. After all, his Murder on the Orient Express left me speechless in its strangely artificiality and criminal underuse of its stellar cast. Also, John Guillermin’s original Nile (1978) is a regular rewatch for me and I am particularly fond of its incredible cast (Peter Ustinov, Bette Davis, David Niven, Mia Farrow, Maggie Smith, Angela Lansbury, I mean: come on!), visual and musical splendor (a last hurrah from Nino Rota). So how will Branagh do this time around? The actors compiled are certainly ecclectic (Annette Bening, French and Saunders, Gal Gadot, Armie Hammer, Rusell Brand and newcomers Rose Leslie and Emma Mackey of Sex Education fame) but will the curse of the strange artificiality repeat itself? One unique special effect certainly already proves to be how well they edited Armie Hammer out of this trailer after his fall from grace last year. If the plot is as sharp as the edit, only someone like Hercule Poirot will be able to solve it!
Matt: And to finish this week’s post: as part of its Truffaut retrospective, the British Film Institute will be showing the director’s wonderful Jules et Jim, which is definitely my favourite film of his, and it may just be the film I love most. By turns goofy, romantic and melancholy, it is a story about a love triangle where you want to shake the characters until they see sense while you’re falling for them yourself – and with none more than with Jeanne Moreau’s mercurial Catherine, perhaps one of the most wondrous, infuriating, sad characters in film history. Have I mentioned that I love this film? (I do hope that some of these make it to cinemas near me.)
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 