Spinners
2015 · 10m · USA
Directed by Erik L. Barnes
Genres: crime, dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, tense
Two desert-town teens make rent twirling cheap-loan signs on a corner, treating it like a skateboard discipline. When they swing by a homeless mother's roadside arms sale, the pulp engine kicks on.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Pre-Dune Chalamet spinning a payday loan sign in the desert is already an artifact. Then a homeless mom pulls out a gun catalog and the movie quietly chooses chaos.
That sign-spinning poetry mutating into Jim Thompson pulp is the kind of formal swerve I live for, and a young Chalamet in the Baker-margin-of-America zone seals it.
Love how the sign-spinning opens like a skate doc before pulp logic hijacks it — that constant tonal shift is the whole engine. The jumpy structure mirrors the trick itself.
Reviews
a darkly entertaining pulp short