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.
In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees post, Matt argued that sometimes the past haunting us isn’t a Native American burial site under the floorboards of our suburban home, but just the first version we saw when we were young, to the point where, for us, it’s the ‘correct’ version: such as Blade Runner with the voiceover that Harrison Form famously hated, or Poltergeist without the scene where a terrified parapsychologist pulls off his face with his bare hands.
Matt was also busy elsewhere: figuring out just what he thought of heist classic Rififi.
But there’s more to trailers than ’80s horror and ’50s French noir.
Mege: Petzold is one of the most interesting filmmakers at work. He is unflashy, so he still goes as a slow burner, but once you get to know his work, you won’t forget him.
Matt: Remember Soylent Green? Japan’s plan to rejuvenate an aging society in Plan 75 comes across as much more polite but no less dystopian, not least because it seems so very plausible. Offer the old a nice sum of money if they decide to take the government up on its free euthanasia services, especially when it’s entirely voluntary and applicants are assured that they are free to withdraw at any time? I suspect that whatever horrors the future may hold, many of them will be delivered with this kind of bureaucratic friendliness rather than with the overacting of Charlton Heston.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 