The Call of the Wild
Disney continues to shuffle off Fox's remaining output with this limp, awkward adaptation of the Jack London novel.
Jack London started writing The Call of the Wild at the dawn of the 20th century after traveling through Yukon country during the height of the Gold Rush. It was in this period of blind human ambition and greed that he conceived of a story told through a dog’s eyes. The very good dog, Buck, starts as a civilized house pet before being stolen and sold as a sled dog in Alaska. There he gets passed from owner to owner, some much nicer than others, and along the way discovers that his destiny is not with humans but with the beasts of the wilderness, like his ancestors before him.
It’s a beautifully written and visceral adventure about the brutality of man, the overwhelming power of nature, and the freedom we’re capable of when we turn our back on society’s rules. On the other hand, the new film adaptation of The Call of the Wild has all the thematic weight of an Air Bud sequel.
Director Chris Sanders, who is very accomplished in the world of animated film with credits like How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch to his name, finds himself in no man’s land in the world of live-action. In order to really dig into the book’s themes and capture the harrowing journey Buck goes through, it’s necessary to make it a brutal animated movie like Watership Down. But that would be too much for any Disney-owned studio. Instead, we get a very saturated version of the novel that relies on a CGI dog that looks like a reject from Marmaduke. Continue Reading →
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. The greatest trick Sonic the Hedgehog ever pulled, on the other hand, was convincing the viewer it was harmlessly mediocre. But while the Devil is outright evil, the feature debut from Jeff Fowler is much more cynical: the kind of empty calories that fattens up the audience before leading them to the slaughter. Continue Reading →
Stop Making Sense
Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here.
The greatest concert film of all time begins with Talking Heads’ lead singer, David Byrne, sauntering onto an empty stage and putting down a boombox before mumbling, “Hi. I got a tape I want to play you.” It may be the most chill line to ever start a movie, but for Byrne, it’s his way of letting us know we’re about to go on an epic journey. It also lays the foundation for one of the most staggering on-screen performances of the 1980s. Stop Making Sense was filmed and edited together from four different concerts at Hollywood's Pantages Theater in December 1983, but, unless you study it closely, it just looks like one glorious night.
Byrne was in his early 30s, and his bandmates were already legends of the NYC art-rock scene following a string of Brian Eno-produced albums. The Stop Making Sense tour was a victory lap after achieving commercial success with their two-time platinum 1983 album, Speaking In Tongues. They were only seven years away from disbanding, but this was their moment. Continue Reading →