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.
Alan’s series on the Academy Award Best Picture winners through the ages has arrived in 1938 with its eleventh episode: Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You.
On Friday, in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Melanie wrote about the ways in which the films and series we watch might contribute to changing things for the better. Not everything that we watch as kids and teenagers must be traumatic, y’know?
Meanwhile, Alan was also at the helm for our September podcast episode, the finale of our Summer of Genre, focusing on what he calls “tactile fantasy”: the films that use physical effects, miniatures and puppetry to create fantastic worlds that feel like you could reach out and touch them.
And what else do we have for you in this week’s trailer post, whether tactile or not?
Sam: Arguably, Hammer Studios‘ 1958 Dracula is the crown jewel in their frantic horror output between the ‘50s and ‘70s, making global stars out of Christopher Lee as the Count and Peter Cushing as his archenemy Van Helsing. It’s arguably also the most repressed-feeling adaptation of Stoker’s classic that, despite touches of gore, replaced the sexual connotations with dramatic eye-rolling and high-necked wrestling.
It’s lovely to see, though, how spectacular their latest 4K restoration looks, which even makes it to UK cinemas this fall and to home cinemas via Blu-ray. The colours are eye-popping, the details astounding, with a vibrant freshness in the air that might help to dissipate some of the dust one always felt lingering on this version. Clearly, some of the many sequels were bloodier, hipper and sexier, but this crimson reanimation of the original might now finally make contemporary audiences’ blood curl too!
Mege: My introduction to Florence Pugh was the magnificient Lady Macbeth (2016), in which Pugh played the title character, a woman who wants wealth and comfort and physical satisfaction altogether by any means necessary. Here, she seems to play a woman who will get what she wants at all costs. And since I like very long movies based on voluminous novels, this one is for me.
Matt: Patricia Highsmith, albeit a fictionalised version, is an unusual role for Helen Mirren to play: she usually comes across as stylish and poised, and she seems to pull this off effortlessly. Highsmith, by all accounts, was a misanthrope and not altogether pleasant to be with. Already for this, I am curious to see A Talent for Murder – but there’s more to make it an interesting proposition, not least its plot, based on the 2014 play Switzerland, in which a young man (played by Alden Ehrenreich) tries to persuade an aged Highsmith to write one final instalment in her series about the sociopath Tom Ripley (who has been the topic of several of our podcast episodes in the past). Will he succeed? Would that it were so simple!
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 