Good morning 🐣

This clownery has been going on for an entire year and I’m truly grateful that 99% of you have stuck around this long.

First some housekeeping: it’s still a little rough around the edges, but you can now browse past editions of the Cinescape newsletter on the Web, which is especially handy for all you newcomers. (I’m sure I’ll deeply regret putting all this nonsense on the permanent record that is the Internet.) And in my never-ending quest for legitimacy, I even bought a font, y’all. It’s getting fancy in here!

It’s also given me a chance to crawl up my own ass and look back at my greatest hits. Who can forget when I mistook Shark Week for that great green lovable lug, Shrek, the true poet of our times? Or when I discovered this obscure little gem from the ’60s called “Dr. No” — you’ll be happy to hear I finally tracked down further adventures of this long-forgotten “James Bond” character and I’ll be writing about them shortly.

In all seriousness though, it’s been a lot of fun mixing art and the profane, all while picking at the boundaries of cinema. And it’s been even greater receiving so much feedback and dialogue from everyone. As you know, feel free to email me anytime.

So whether it’s comparing two versions of the same story, separated by four decades, or the same story from competing viewpoints, or appreciating the magicians of cinema, Cinescape will be here every Wednesday with links to stuff I’ve found interesting followed by something I recommend you watch ASAP, just as I promised exactly one year ago.

That said, I’m taking next week off. Sue me.

Now watch this 👀

Now if someone watched something they thought was criminally under-seen, then started an entire newsletter just to scream at the world that you’re missing out, you’d think they’d probably make it the first thing they’d write about, right?

You would be wrong. So very wrong.

Here I am, just a boy, telling you, faithful friend and reader, that I have many flaws. But I’m here now, a year later, finally writing about a TV show that I deeply love. And I’d love for you to check it out as well if you haven’t already, especially seeing as its second season will be debuting later this month.

“Yellowjackets,” nominated for seven Emmy awards, tells the story of a New Jersey varsity girls’ soccer team in the ’90s flying to the west coast for a tournament but crash-landing in the Canadian wilderness. They must fend for themselves for 19 months and it’s heavily implied that they most likely resort to cannibalism at some point. Interspersed throughout this narrative are flashes to the present day, 25 years later, as the survivors contend with their past trauma. Meanwhile, some thing may or may not be out there in the woods calling to them.

It has a phenomenal cast led by Christina Ricci, Juliette Lewis, Melanie Lynskey (who won the Critics Choice Award for Best Drama Actress), and Tawny Cypress playing the adult versions of their teen counterparts, who are played by Sammi Hanratty, Sophie Thatcher, Sophie Nélisse, and Jasmin Savoy-Brown. It’s a true ’90s feast.

The show runners, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, a married couple, are on the record that they have an entire five-season arc planned out, so you know they’re not just flying by the seats of their pants. And the first episode is directed by Karyn Kusama, whose infamous film, “Jennifer’s Body,” states that “Hell is a teenage girl,” a fitting credo for this show as well. The creators all do a bang up job establishing the characters, the stakes, and upping the ante again and again.

It’s been described by others as “Lord of the Flies” meets “Lost,” which sounds about right. The show is a careful balancing act between survivalism, expert character work, good ol’ fashioned soapy drama, e.g., cheating spouses, blackmail, and teen pregnancy, as well as vague hints of the supernatural:

• a seance gone wrong (are there any that go right?),
• a shadowy figure with no eyes,
• premonitions of future calamities.

(But just vague enough to wonder if it’s all in their heads.) There’s also a creepy cabin in the woods with creepy symbols carved in the trees, the ominous howling of wolves in the distance, and someone/thing called the Antler Queen. It’s a load of fun. Just describing it makes me want to rewatch the whole thing again.

It’s funny, scary, and pulpy. And it’s got some killer ’90s music along with opening credits I could watch on repeat.

But above all it’s the characters you fall in love with. They’re all so compelling. And they’ll be joined in season two by Elijah Wood as a citizen detective, Lauren Ambrose, Simone Kessell, Jason Ritter, and more.

Some words the cast used to describe the upcoming season:

• brutal
• heartbreaking
• terrifying
• chaos
• cold
• hungry
• trauma

Real nice and cozy. Winter is coming, y’all.

Season two (watch the trailer) starts streaming on Showtime March 24 and airs on cable March 26, so you better get caught up now before it’s too late.

Until next time! 👋