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 saw the start of a new series called One Best Picture After Another: Alan’s revisiting every single Best Picture Academy Award winner! Yes, you’ve read that right: over the coming months and even years, he will be watching, and writing about, each film that won the Oscar for Best Picture, and on Monday he started with the 1927 winner Wings. Sadly, this trailer isn’t the original – were there even trailers back then? -, but it’ll give a good idea of what Wings is all about.
We’re continuing with Alan, who finished his Six Damn Fine Degrees trilogy on the 1981 BBC Radio adaptation of The Lord of the Rings with a fittingly epic post. Again, sadly, we couldn’t find anything remotely trailerish on this classic radio drama, but Peter Jackson’s iconic movies don’t quite fit, so here’s a compromise: a trailer for the ’70s animated Rankin Bass Lord of the Rings.
This week also saw the release of the April espresso podcast episode: this month, Matt met up with Johanna Pirker, Professor for Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich and at Graz University of Technology, to talk about video games and about Johanna’s book The Game is On (published in 2025) and looking at the potential and impact of video games.
And, to finish with, are two trailers for coming attractions:
Matt: The original AMC series The Terror, adapted from Dan Simmons’ 2007 novel, was a pitch-perfect blend of historical fiction and horror, telling the story (with some supernatural embellishments) of the polar explorer HMS Terror, its crew and their chilling fate in search of the Northwest Passage. The series was a great one-off – or at least that was the idea. Instead, the series’ success prompted AMC to turn The Terror into an anthology series. The follow-up, set in a Japanese American community during the Second World War, didn’t fare nearly as well with critics and audiences – but now, seven years later, there’s a third season, based on Victor Lavalle’s The Devil in Silver. This new story, set largely in a mental institution, isn’t as much of a historical piece, which may help it escape direct comparison, and the cast, led by Dan Stevens, is promising. Fingers crossed that Devil in Silver will deliver scares that are worthy of the series’ title.
Mege: I am somewhat biased when it comes to the end of the world and its aftermath, having seen Danny Boyle‘s excellent 28 Years Later, and am now eagerly waiting to catch The Bone Temple. But Margaret Qualley got better and better during the excellently dystopian The Leftovers, so I may give this one a try.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 