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.
Casting is a tricky business – and sometimes you get exactly the right person… a few decades too late, as Alan argued in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, using Christopher Lee’s Saruman and Jack Nicholson’s Joker as examples.
Meanwhile, Matt wrote about his recent revisits of two Paul Newman and Robert Redford classics: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting – and why he likes the latter but loves the former.
But let’s jump forward to 2026 and a couple of more modern trailers.
Mege: Could the poets and songwriters be wrong? Are we at our most vulnerable when it comes to sex, and not love? This movie seems to think so, and it explores that loophole with a no-holds-barred glee. I like movies that take risks, and this one is certainly unafraid of the genre. And it‘s got Gillian Anderson in it, everyone‘s favourite sex therapist, so what are you afraid of?
Matt: I remember when I first saw a Christopher Nolan film: Memento. A lot of the director’s later tricks were already in evidence, but the films were still small and intimate in a way that more recent Nolan movies haven’t been. Quite honestly: I miss small-scale Nolan. It’s not that I think his big recent films are bad, but they keep me at a distance. Having said that, though: I’m curious to see what Nolan and his collaborators make of this most epic of epics – and apparently at a running time shorter than his Oppenheimer! Which makes sense: after all, it only took Odysseus ten years to return home.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 