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.
This week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees (by our fabulous film historian Julie) looks at one of the iconic stars of the 1960s and 1970s especially: Faye Dunaway, seen through the lens of the HBO documentary Faye by Laurent Bouzereau.
We also released the last episode of our podcast series, the Lost Summer, in which Matt, Sam and Julie talked about the actors gone too soon, the ones taken by drugs, disease, accidents at an age when they were expected to have most of their careers before them, with a special focus on River Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rudolph Valentino. Make sure to check it out (possibly with a box of tissues nearby).
And what other trailer goodies have we got in store for you?
Matt: It’s been a while since I watched a new Jim Jarmusch film, namely the vampire hang-out movie Only Lovers Left Alive. His new film, Father Mother Sister Brother includes some familiar Jarmush faces – Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Cate Blanchett – and adds acting greats such as Charlotte Rampling and Vicky Krieps. I suspect we might not get this one at our local cinemas, or at least not for long, but I’ll definitely look out for it once it’s on streaming. There are worse people to hang out with than this cast, especially through the lens of Jarmusch.
Matt: I was only half won over by Promising Young Woman, and I’ve yet to watch Saltburn, which looked too much like a remake of The Talented Mr Ripley trying to be really edgy, but I’m always there for an interesting new take on the literary classics. Does Wuthering Heights fit the bill? We’ll see – but we definitely don’t need another overly literal adaptation that pulls the original’s teeth in the process of making it into something that it wasn’t supposed to be to begin with.
Matt: What a time to be Gen X: all the films we grew up with get a fancy, 4K re-release. Back to the Future is one of those that I’m honestly a bit hesitant to revisit: how well will it hold up? I suspect that not all of it will have aged very well. But since I’ve never seen it on a big screen, only on TV, I might look out for it. After all, how often do we get a Robert Zemeckis film these days that doesn’t make us wonder why we watched it in the first place?
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 