A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

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.

Sam wouldn’t be Sam without his deep, abiding love for all things James Bond – so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his first Six Damn Fine Degrees entry of 2024 would focus on the special agent with a license to kill, and Roald Dahl’s connection to Bond.

Meanwhile, Matt took a long, gilded escalator to movie heaven AKA his Criterion collection, writing about the delightful, and surprisingly subversive, Powell and Pressburger classic A Matter of Life and Death.

And what else do we have in our weekly trailer round-up?

Mege: ` I know that a fish-out-of-water protagonist is our way into a foreign, unknown world or any subculture like the Tokyo criminal underworld. He can be as surprised and clueless as we, the audience, are. That doesn’t mean he can be without any qualities. Ansel Elgort is bland as toast, and by no means leading material. I can‘t see what his appeal is. He makes Chris Pratt look like an actor. And I sure as hell don‘t know what a supreme actress such as Rachel Keller does in a series that has him in it.

Matt: My favourite cinema has been playing the Animal Kingdom trailer recently, and I caught the trailer for the Norwegian horror/mystery drama Handling the Undead on YouTube just before Christmas. Both trailers look like the films they advertise tell similar stories about similar themes: what we do when our loved ones change and become unrecognisable to us. But for all the superlative critics’ quotes, The Animal Kingdom looks safe and, well, rather trite; it may be French, but it looks like it follows the well-trodden paths of Hollywood cinema, also in its visuals. Handling the Undead, meanwhile, looks less triumphant and more uncomfortable. And while both films have great actors (Passages‘ Adèle Exarchopolous in The Animal Kingdom, The Worst Person in the World‘s Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie in Handling the Undead), it is very much the Norwegian film that I’m excited to see at the cinema, while I’m happy to wait until the French fantasy is shown on TV.