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.
Other than David Lynch himself, the person who perhaps left most of a fingerprint on Lynch’s work is the composer Angelo Badalamenti, who died a week ago. Matt shared his thoughts and memories of Badalamenti’s work, in particular on the various incarnations of Twin Peaks (which we’ve written and podcasted about, the latter more than once).
Meanwhile, Julie took our Six Damn Fine Degrees down memory lane, back to 1996’s BBC 2 miniseries Neverwhere, created by Neil Gaiman and Lenny Henry. Not a flawless series by any means – but an impeccably cast one, to highlight just one of the things it got exactly right.
And it feels like a long time since our previous espresso podcast, but yesterday we released our December episode, recorded live in London, by Alan and Matt in Alan’s kitchen after a visit to the Stanley Kubrick Archive to check out materials on 2001: A Space Odyssey and A.I.: a wonderful early Christmas gift for a pair of film geeks.
And at this point, let’s take a Star Gate straight to our regular trailers for the week.
Mege: What dark, twisted heresy is this? Looting Kubrick’s iconic images for such shallow material as Barbie? I admire the high-wire act director Greta Gerwig is attempting, but can a popcorn glitz flick really pull through? Where is this going? Is it happy for just existing?
Matt: I’m almost at the end of my long trip through Ingmar Bergman’s filmography. It’s not like I’ll be running out of material any time soon, seeing how I’ve got a bunch of other Criterion box sets awaiting my attention (from Jacques Tati via Agnès Varda to Federico Fellini, to name just a few), but the one I’m most hoping they’re working on making happen would be a big collection of remastered versions of the films of Akira Kurosawa. Obviously, for those of us living in London (and not only visiting there occasionally to visit archives, however amazing they may be), the BFI is doing the next-best thing. As Robert Browning once wrote: O, to be in England…
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 