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.
Remember that time when most of us were excited for Game of Thrones? When we’d look at the new cast members for the upcoming season and get even more excited? Sam’s interest in Game of Thrones began and, sadly, peaked with him bumping Jonathan Pryce in Dubrovnik, where he (Pryce, that is, not Sam) was filming for season 5 for what was at one point the hottest series on TV. Check out Sam’s Six Damn Fine Degrees for more on this encounter!
Meanwhile, Matt’s been trying to grapple his thoughts on Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers – a film he liked so much he would’ve gladly put it on his list of 2024 favourites already… until the ending. Is there such a thing as being too open for interpretation?
And what else is there to look out for in the world of trailers?
Mege: Sing Sing, to me, is half a documentary. Some of the cast are formerly incarcerated men, so the vibe that the movie has is as true to real life as possible. I don‘t know if any of them really have to act – or not in the conventional sense of the term. Colman Domingo is a theatre actor who has the main part here, playing an innocent man in jail who joins the prison theatre group. Interesting on several levels, this one.
Matt: I don’t think that Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were good films, but there were interesting ideas in both of them – ideas that, arguably, Ridley Scott and his writers squandered. Still, looking at the teaser trailer for Alien: Romulus, I can’t shake the impression that while this may be a more coherent film that knows what it wants to be, what it wants to be is an Alien clone. Say what you want about the films up to and including Alien: Resurrection, but those four films – by Scott, Cameron, Fincher and Jeunet – are all unique interpretations of the material, not retreads of the same story told more or less the same way.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 