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, Sam wrote about the H.R. Giger Museum in Gruyère, an incongruous celebration of Giger’s sex-and-biomechanics aesthetic in a cosy mountain towns in Switzerland – and since everyone defaults to Alien when it comes to Giger, let’s for once feature two trailers to films that the Swiss artist contributed to that are perhaps a tad less celebrated.
Where people don’t talk much about Species or Poltergeist II these days, though, Still Walking by the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda very much deserves being talked about – as Matt did in this week’s entry to the ongoing Criterion Corner series.
And what else do we have for you this week?
Mege: This looks like a clash of memories, dreams, fears, nightmares and strange visions. Legion comes to mind with its excellent jumble of scenes where you don‘t know where it‘s going to lead you in the next five minutes. Natalie Portman is a bold choice to anchor that series if it is about black rights, but it looks like Moses Ingram‘s character is the driving force here.
Matt: I found Leos Carax’ Annette fascinating but also sort of obnoxious – and perhaps those two sides of the film cannot be separated from one another. The Carax film that I absolutely love is Holy Motors – and the upcoming It’s Not Me seems to have an energy that is not dissimilar. Then again, it’s probably a bad idea going into this expecting anything like Holy Motors, because that film’s appeal resulted in no small part from being entirely unlike what one might expect.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 