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.
1933 has arrived – at least in Alan’s series One Best Picture After Another, which is dedicated to all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture in chronological order. What did our time-traveller think of Cavalcade? (And if you want to form your own opinion: here, in the absence of a trailer, is the full movie.)
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.
One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.
Way back in 2007, the Ukrainian video game developer GSC Game World released Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, a game that some would describe as a diamond in the rough, while others called it masochistic Eurojank. The first Stalker game, based on the Strugatsky brothers’ classic sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic and influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky’s loose film adaptation Stalker, was soon followed by Stalker: Clear Sky and Stalker: Call of Pripyat. All three games were janky and brutal, offering not conventional power fantasies so much as gruelling expeditions into the Chernobyl exclusion zone surrounding the power plant at the centre of the 1986 disaster. They weren’t fun games – but they were unique, atmospheric, and different from pretty much all shooters at the time.
GSC Game World’s games weren’t for everyone, but they found a community of fans. A sequel was announced, then cancelled, until, in 2018, Stalker 2 resurfaced. The game was scheduled for release in 2022 – a schedule that proved impossible to uphold when Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022. In spite of setbacks, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl finally came out in November 2024. Two years later, I got around to returning to GSC’s new version of the Zone: from the Strugatskys’ region pockmarked by objects left behind by mysterious aliens, via Tarkovsky’s wet, verdant purgatory, to the surroundings of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a region populated by warring factions and mutant creatures, and strewn with reality-bending artefacts.
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.
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.
Two days ago, we learnt of the tragic death of Marjane Satrapi, French-Iranian writer and filmmaker, perhaps most famous for her graphic novel Persepolis and its later adaptation into a film, also by Satrapi. If you haven’t yet seen (or read) Persepolis, make sure to seek it out – it is a story that is timely not only because of its author’s untimely death.
Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!
I’ll freely admit to it: sometimes when I follow Julie in our ongoing associative chain, it can feel quite daunting – the reason being that Julie is just such a treasure house of knowledge when it comes to cinema. Not that I’m a slouch in this department, or at least that’s what our yearly results at the best local cinema quiz suggest – but it doesn’t compare to Julie. Because Julie reads so goddamn much about films, actors, directors, studios. And here I am, an avid reader who, nonetheless, barely ever reads any non-fiction books. I have some memoirs of directors and actors standing in my bookshelf, but if push comes to shove, I’ll grab a novel over anything that looks like it comes from the Land of Non-Fiction. So, if Julie goes before me in our Six Damn Fine Degrees series (which is soon approaching its 300th instalment! how crazy is that??), I know that I’m following our resident professor of filmology and filmography, the woman who knows why Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon is a pack of porkies. She’s the one who can write a post such as last week’s about screen icon Elizabeth Taylor and how her private life, her public persona and her work in cinema formed a very particular blend.
“Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”
Back when I went to school, it was clear that, at some point, we would be reading something by Franz Kafka – and, at the time at least, chances were it’d either be The Metamorphosis (published in 1915), in which a man wakes up to find himself changed into an enormous insect, or The Trial (published in 1925), that foundational work of paranoid fiction. If I remember correctly, we ended up reading both, though from the time I mostly remember the 1915 novella, perhaps also because of that memorable MTV short from the channel’s “Feed Your Head” series. But while The Metamorphosis still has that deliciously fantastic angle of a man turning into a bug (admittedly, at my current age I find that premise less fantastic than I did as a teen), arguably it’s The Trial that feels the most universal – and its footprints can be found across culture and cinema.
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.
One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.
What do you think of when you think of your teenage years? Do you think of hormones and crushes, of defying your parents and going to parties you shouldn’t have gone to? Do you think of crushing insecurity and emotions that could go from elation to depression within seconds, based on how someone did or didn’t look at you?
Quite honestly, when I think of my teenage years, the thing that perhaps comes to mind most is this: chunky square pixels.
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.
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 