I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Stop and go

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.

Sometimes we like to mix and match our forms of culture, so in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees Julie talked about the works of William Shakespeare adapted to the screen. There’s so much great cinematic Shakespeare to choose from, so here’s a trailer for a film about staging Shakespeare instead: Kenneth Branagh’s In the Bleak Midwinter (or A Midwinter’s Tale, as the Americans know it, if they actually knew the film).

Continue reading

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Tools, weapons, and Nicholas Cage

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.

Continue reading

The Rear-View Mirror: Hayao Miyazaki (1941)

Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!

I have the writer Neil Gaiman to thank for my first experience with director Hayao Miyazaki and his fantastic worlds: at the time, Gaiman wrote the script for Princess Mononoke‘s English dub, which was probably the first dub of a Miyazaki movie that didn’t cast actors primarily known for their voice work in the main parts. Instead, we got names such as Claire Danes, Billy Bob Thornton and Gillian Anderson – and we also got a wider release than anime features (as opposed to, say, the latest Disney princess movie) usually got in my neck of the woods.

Continue reading