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.
What are our portals to the past? It could be our parents’ attic, or our boxes of music and video tapes (for which we might not even have any devices to play them on any more), or any other collection or archive. To find out more about Sam’s portals to the past, check out his Six Damn Fine Degrees post. And, since Vertigo represents one of Sam’s most-used such portals, here’s the original trailer for Hitchcock’s classic.
Meanwhile, Matt finished his journey through the films of Federico Fellini courtesy of the Criterion box set (at least the official part – there may be an epilogue taking a side trip not planned for by the curators at Criterion) with Intervista – but since there’s no good trailer for the film to be found on YouTube, here’s perhaps the most magical scene from the film.
And what else do we have for you this week?
Matt: Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series is one of the biggest media behemoths in the world, and their announcement that GTA VI, the latest instalment in the long-running series, would be delayed to May 2026, made a big splash – to be followed by the bigger splash of the second trailer coming out. I’m sure to be getting the game eventually, when it comes out on a system I own, but for all of its graphical prowess, I found this trailer to be both pandering (jiggling arses, more jiggling arses, and how about a jiggling arse for the road?) and underwhelming. The way this one plays out feels… tired, maybe? There’s little buildup of tension, there’s not much sense of the characters beyond the broad archetypes they represent. Quite honestly? The trailer feels rushed, and I know Rockstar can do better. But then, if I’m pretty much certain to get the game anyway, perhaps this trailer doesn’t need to sell anything to me.
Matt: This trailer for The Long Walk, a Stephen King (or should that be Richard Bachmann?) adaptation long in the making, looks interesting – but somehow the fact that the movie is directed by Francis Lawrence has put a damper on it for me. See, Lawrence directed most of the Hunger Games films, and there’s a definite kinship here in this story of a totalitarian regime making a bunch of young men enter into an annual last-man-standing competition. To be honest, I’d rather see someone else do something different with this story.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 