Reservation Dogs
SimilarEcho, Son of the Morning Star,
StudioFX Productions,
Season Two of Reservation Dogs opens with the aftermath of last season. Elora (Devery Jacobs) left fellow Rez Dogs Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), and Cheese (Lane Factor) high and dry as she ran away to Cali with Jackie (Elva Guerra), one of their group's sworn enemies. They’re all trying to grow up and move on from their haunted pasts, and their friend Daniel’s (Dalton Cramer) death still lingers. Will a prayer and Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” be enough to lift the curse and bring the Rez Dogs back together? It’s a slow-burn season, balancing the drama and the comedy of the teens coming of age both on and off the reservation. Continue Reading →
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is both a quite good movie and a deeply frustrating one. At its best, it thrillingly delves into the art of investigation through the eyes of two well-crafted and well-performed protagonists. At its worst, it falls flat on its face and takes its sweet time to get up, dust itself off, and get back into a groove. Continue Reading →
The Social Network
When The Social Network premiered on October 1, 2010, Facebook had only existed for six years. It already had 400 million users. Its founder and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, was worth $4 billion. Continue Reading →
Dispatches from Elsewhere
Jason Segel gives us an energetic journey with compelling characters to balance a campy premise.
About halfway through the first episode of AMC’s Dispatches From Elsewhere, Simone (Eve Lindley), one of the main characters, exclaims: “I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s freaking fun!” This phrase just about sums up this new show, created by and starring Jason Segel. While Dispatches is scripted entertainment, it's based on the documentary The Institute, which explores the hybrid alternate reality game and performance art piece by Oakland based artist Jeff Hull.
From 2008 to 2011, Hull “inducted” thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay Area into the Jejune Institute. He created multiple “episodes” for inductees to participate in, giving them missions with instructions as silly as dancing at a phone box to things as grand as leading a parade. Segel moves the action from San Francisco to Philadelphia but retains the ridiculous and almost cult-like nature of its source material in depicting the on-screen Jejune Institute and its rival the Elsewhere Society.
In the first episode, we are introduced to Peter, an average joe working a dull job. Intrigued by flyers with nonsensical adverts for dolphin communication and human forcefield testing, he calls a number and is invited to an office building downtown. He’s soon roped into a world of intrigue just below the surface of our everyday world, where two entities, the corporate Jejune Institute and more radical Elsewhere Society, frantically search for Clara (Cecilia Balagot), a mysterious inventor whose talent promises to liberate humanity from societal shackles. Continue Reading →
The Manchurian Candidate
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.
Objectively, remaking The Manchurian Candidate seems a wild proposition. The 1962 version was met with strong critical praise and audience support upon its release. Furthermore, Angela Lansbury’s depiction of Eleanor Iselin has only grown to near-mythic standards of appreciation since. On top of it all, the movie was also a deeply faithful adaptation of the novel. How and why does someone re-adapt/remake something that was both universally praised and hewed so close to the source material as to make being less faithful the only option?
The most compelling answer lies in Jonathan Demme’s particular fixation on humanism. As has been well-established, the director has long been considered one of the most humane directors of the late 20th and early 21st Century. Through films like Something Wild, Rachel Getting Married, Beloved, and even Ricki and the Flash, the director has time and time again created empathetic portraits of people struggling through life. Continue Reading →