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.
For this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Mege wrote about The Umbrella Academy. What’s this: a Netflix series that is actually allowed to run until the end?
Talking of Netflix series: Matt found himself less than enamoured with the time-loop mystery box Bodies.
And what else do we have for our readers this week?
Mege: This movie is something between Magic Mountain, Dark and some long-lost early David Lynch movie. They don‘t make them like that anymore because it seems to disregard most rules of conventional filmmaking. I am intrigued.
Matt: I wasn’t a huge fan of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, a film that I found too muddled and lacking in focus. Do I want to see a version that’s almost an hour longer? Then again, sometimes films lose focus in being edited down to a more manageable length, and it wouldn’t be the first time that a Scott movie becomes much better in a director’s cut version.
Sam: I’m thrilled to hear that Paramount+ has dared to touch one of its most successful properties from the ’60s – and incidentally also one of my favourite, most atmospheric movies: Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Apartment 7A is its prequel, taking us deep into the untold story of Terry, a young dancer who seeks fame in New York, only to find herself penniless and picked up by a friendly elderly couple to live in that famous Dakota building. It’s only a matter of time before she comes to suspect the real reason for the Castavet’s benevolence…The trailer cleverly builds up the visual clues towards the original but also convinces with inspired casting: Julia Garner (from Ozark) plays Terry, later to be one of Rosemary’s neighbour, and Dianne Wiest takes over Ruth Gordon’s famous Oscar-winning role as cute, creepy Minnie Castavet. I’m too eager to find out how these two fare under Natalie Erika James’ direction! The prequel is due on 27 September.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 