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.
Vengeance is a dish best served over many episodes: in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Melanie writes about the rather dark familial goings-on in the Chinese historical drama The Glory.
Meanwhile, Matt checked out Knit’s Island, a documentary shot entirely inside a video game.
And what other trailers do we have waiting for you?
Matt: Staying with video games: the upcoming Militsioner has the player try to escape a town in Russia that’s watched by a giant policeman. With its first words, the trailer signals (perhaps a bit too bluntly?) the game’s affinity with the works of Franz Kafka, in particular The Trial. In a gaming landscape that often shies away from originality and creative experiments as much as Hollywood has for a long time, this nonetheless seems a breath of fresh air. Let’s just hope that the Russian developers of Militsioner won’t find themselves in a situation not unlike their game, seeing how they’ve already been criticised in their country’s media for making “Russophobic” art.
Matt: This couldn’t look much more like someone had created a hybrid of a modern British crime drama and classic folk horror along the lines of The Wicker Man – but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I do hope the makers of The Red King are striving to make each genre feel fresh rather than just ticking two boxes and then patting themselves on the shoulder for a job well done. If not, I’m sure we can find a fittingly sticky end for them as they’re being sacrificed to the nature gods of old.
Matt: Readers of this site will know that I have an ambivalent relationship with musicals. I’ve come to like a lot of them, but there is a certain brand of musical that still rubs me the wrong way – and, frankly, the trailer of the Bill Condon adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman looks more like that kind of musical to me. Condon is a skilled craftsman, but when he does musicals I find he strips the material of its teeth, going for an altogether more crowdpleasing approach that can feel pandering. Then again, never having either read the 1976 novel or the 1985 film (starring William Hurt and Raul Julia), I can’t really judge whether this could do justice to the material – and, after Andor, I am curious to see Diego Luna in more things.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 