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 those perennial supporting actors? Those faces that you’d see in many, many films, and that would always make you take notice when they turned up? Sam certainly does! And, seeing how he mentions The Tamarind Seed, a film that many of our readers are unlikely to have heard of, here’s a trailer for this 1974 movie by Blake Edwards.
Meanwhile, Matt revisited La Haine, courtesy of another gorgeous 4K release by Criterion.
So far, so good – but what else does this week’s trailer post have in store for us?
Mege: I am way, way more excited about this movie than I expected, because Axel Foley is a name from my youth: saw both movies and bought the soundtrack LP. Looking forward to seeing hin again, with an obscene amount of popcorn.
Matt: Sure, the people involved in this have done very good work in the past: Jake Gyllenhaal, Ruth Negga, Bill Camp, to name just a few. Sure, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with remaking a 1990s thriller starring Harrison Ford, Raul Julia and Greta Scacchi (not to mention Bonnie “Holly Gennaro McClane” Bedelia). Sure, good stories can be told in a number of ways. But I still wonder: my impression from the 1991 adaptation by Alan J. Pakula was that Presumed Innocent is a well-crafted but fairly generic thriller. What can a new adaptation add to the material, other than simply having faces that are more recognisable to today’s audiences, and other than filling a streaming service’s roster with disposable fare? Will people still talk about this version of Presumed Innocent in 35 years – and have people talked much about the earlier version in the last ten, twenty years?
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 