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, Matt returned to the Zone. No, not the Brothers Strugatsky’s Zone, nor Tarkovsky’s, and not even the Zone of the original Stalker trilogy of video games. No, this time it’s the Zone of Stalker 2 – and it’s an even more inhospitable place than it used to be… though it may just be the most beautiful take on this particular post-apocalypse.
Then, on Friday, Melanie introduced us to Epic: The Musical. Which, sadly, doesn’t come with an official trailer – but staying with the topic of Greek mythology in musical format, here’s the recent trailer for Hadestown, since Greek legends and music are obviously a good match.
Somewhat less legendary: Kenneth Branagh’s take on Hercule Poirot. Following from our recent podcast episodes on Agatha Christie and the Knives Out films, Sam and Alan took the opportunity of this month’s espresso podcast to dig into what exactly doesn’t work about the Branagh Poirots.
And what else do we have for you this week?
Matt: I’m by no means an Almodóvar superfan, but even I can see that Bitter Christmas is very obviously una pelicula de Almodóvar. It’s there in the colours, compositions and acting style – and obviously in the cheeky meta elements. A film about a filmmaker making a film about a filmmaker delving into autofiction? It’s Pedros all the way down.
Mege: Yes, I understand that a sex comedy is hard to pull off in the puritan US of A, and it‘s always, always a focus-group-reviewed compromise so much that its final product is lame and tame, or it does have an obligatory ironic distance to its main subject. I don‘t expect an in-depth exploration of S/M and seduction – it‘s a comedy, after all -, but it could have been made with more courage and more curiosity. This movie looks like The Devil Wears Prada half of the time, the other half is just some standard kinkfest.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 